Wind Power’s New Current

STANDING on top of a hill in central Massachusetts, Jonathan Fitch is surrounded by a grove of eight tall white windmills. He regards them like someone eager to trade in an old car.

By SCOTT KIRSNER NY Times

The windmills were installed in 1984 so that the town of Princeton would receive at least a small fraction of its power from a nonpolluting source. But now three of the windmills are broken, a result of direct hits by lightning, and their manufacturer has gone out of business.

Mr. Fitch, general manager of the Princeton Municipal Light Department, is planning to upgrade his wind farm. The town-owned utility is overseeing a $4 million project to replace the eight older windmills with two gargantuan modern ones. The current system generates enough electricity for about 1 percent of the town’s 1,450 households; the new one, expected to be in place next year, is to satisfy roughly 40 percent of the town’s appetite for power.

The windmill replacement project in Princeton is being undertaken in part because of major advances in technology over the last 20 years. Today’s windmills – often called wind turbines – are quieter and more reliable, and they generate more power at a lower cost. Unlike the older windmills in Princeton, they are outfitted with dozens of sensors and connected to a network that allows them to be monitored remotely, from a PC or laptop.

"The efficiency of the turbines has gone up about 5 percent every year," said Philipp Andres, a vice president for business development at Vestas American Wind Technology, a subsidiary of the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Referring to the rule of thumb for the steady doubling of the power of microchips, he added, "That’s not quite as dramatic an increase as Moore’s Law, but it is certainly significant."

Perhaps most important, the new generation of wind turbines are bigger, a fact provoking controversy almost everywhere utilities have proposed to put them up – most notably off Cape Cod, where a developer called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm, using turbines that will rise 426 feet from the water.

Utilities and independent developers are nonetheless moving ahead with plans to increase the generating capacity of older installations and establish new wind farms. Michael O’Sullivan, a senior vice president at FPL Energy, the biggest domestic operator of wind farms, said that 2003 "will probably be the second-biggest year in the industry’s history, in terms of adding capacity," exceeded only by 2001.

As the country’s electrical demand continues to rise, adding capacity is of keen interest. And the power derived from wind is power that a town like Princeton does not need to buy from sources that rely on coal-burning generators or nuclear plants.

But the independence afforded by wind power is only partial. "You can’t rely on it every day," Mr. Fitch said. "You have to have some backup contract in place." Moreover, in avoiding large-scale blackouts like the one two weeks ago, wind power is not necessarily a solution, because the windmills themselves generally need a voltage supply to operate. While Mr. Fitch expects the more modern turbines to provide the town with modest savings in energy costs – perhaps $90,000 a year compared with other sources – the environmental considerations are the main attraction.

The power generated by Princeton’s aging wind turbines has actually cost more than electricity from other sources, Mr. Fitch said, but the new technology changes that equation. Unlike the old-fashioned rural windmills used to pump water, which whipped back and forth with every gust, today’s wind turbines rely on an electronic nervous system that allows them to predict the force and direction of the wind up to 24 hours in advance, and adjust the orientation of the rotor and even the pitch of each individual blade in order to wring the maximum energy out of a passing breeze.

Electricity is generated at the top of the windmills, in a boxlike structure called the nacelle, to which the rotors are attached. "The rotors can be as large as the wingspan of a 747," said Jim Lyons, the advanced-technology leader for GE Wind Energy, the biggest domestic maker of turbines. At the bottom of the tower that supports the nacelle and rotor is a cylindrical space housing the computers that collect data from throughout the turbine. The collection of computers is known as a Scada system, for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.

The Scada system can supply 200 or more pieces of data related to the turbine’s operation, Mr. Lyons said. Information about higher-than-normal vibration levels or oil temperature can alert a wind farm’s staff to problems before they happen. Typically, the wind turbines are connected by fiber-optic cable to a control center. Many problems can be solved remotely, but staff members must climb up through the tower to the nacelle on occasion.

Problems are increasingly rare, however. At FPL Energy, a spokesperson said that the company’s turbines were operating 96 percent of the time in 2002. And the Scada systems built into the new generation of turbines achieve a near-autonomous level of intelligence. In Hull, Mass., where the municipal light department installed a single 660-kilowatt turbine on the edge of Boston Harbor in 2001, the operations manager, John McLeod, said, "The only time I go out there is to give tours."

One day last winter, the tiny cups on an anemometer that measures wind speed on the turbine began gathering ice. The ice caused the anemometer to spin abnormally slowly. The computer that governs the windmill’s operation was confused by the "slow" wind speed; it seemed as if the windmill was generating too much power for such a calm day. "So the turbine shut itself down," said Mr. MacLeod, who runs the Hull Municipal Light Plant. "But the anemometer is heated, and eventually the ice melted," and the turbine started again. He added, "It diagnosed the problem itself and sent me a fax letting me know what had happened."

The wind turbine in Hull, just beyond the end zone of the town’s high school football field, replaced an older model that had been operating since 1985. (Windmills in Hull go back even further, to the 1830’s, when they were used to power a salt works on the peninsula.) The old turbine was capable of generating 40 kilowatts of electricity and was perched on an 80-foot tower; the new turbine, made by Vestas, can generate up to 660 kilowatts of power, and reaches 241 feet at the tip of its blades. It supplies power for the town’s traffic signals and streetlights, in addition to meeting the electrical demands of as many as 250 homes, depending on the day’s wind speed.

Mr. MacLeod said he was planning a second wind turbine, possibly an offshore model that would produce up to 3.6 megawatts.

To gauge where to erect wind turbines, developers put up meteorological towers to measure the average wind speed and assess whether it is high enough for electrical generation. In Princeton, two towers have been collecting data since 2000. The information is sent to a meteorological consultant under contract to the town, using the same network cellular phones use.

As part of the plans for a wind farm off Cape Cod, a 197-foot meteorological tower in Nantucket Sound takes readings of wind speed and direction every six minutes for the developer, Cape Wind Associates. Every 30 minutes, it captures information about wave height and water currents. The data is sent to an office on the mainland, where it is posted on a Web site (capewind.whgrp .com).

"It’s on the Web to provide a service to the maritime community – fishermen and recreational boaters," as well as ferry operators, said Leonard Fagan, vice president of engineering for Cape Wind Associates. The Web site also tries to influence the public, by estimating how much "clean, local, renewable energy" the prospective wind farm would be producing at any given moment.

The Cape Wind project has prompted some of the fiercest resistance that any wind developer has encountered recently, although projects in other parts of the country have been halted by community opposition.

Even in Princeton, which has been home to eight wind turbines since 1984, some residents oppose the installation of the two larger machines. "The ones they’re proposing to put up there are massive," said John Bomba, who since 1988 has owned a restaurant and banquet center that are within sight of the existing windmills. "It’s going to impact my business, which is mostly high-end weddings. It will change the atmosphere."

Mr. Bomba, like the opponents of the Cape Wind Project, emphasized that he was "for renewable energy, but we think there are appropriate locations and sites for it." The Princeton windmill farm is situated just outside a state nature reserve.

Despite the controversy, Mr. Fitch soon intends to dismantle and sell his old windmills and erect two new ones. "We realize that not everybody will like the look of it, but it’s better than the alternative, which is pollution," he said. He jokes that he is competing with Mr. MacLeod to see whose town can generate more power from the wind. (Currently, Mr. MacLeod has the lead, but Mr. Fitch hopes to seize it next year when the two new turbines will be capable of generating three megawatts of power.)

Better technology has prompted utilities and developers to consider wind turbines, but another incentive is a federal tax credit for operators of wind farms. For every kilowatt hour of electricity generated, a wind farm operator can take 1.8 cents off its federal tax bill. In addition, 13 states have established a requirement called a renewable portfolio standard. It mandates that utilities generate a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources like wind.

In New Jersey, the standard requires that 6.5 percent of the state’s power come from renewable sources by 2012.

When wind projects were discussed 20 years ago, "you could safely say that they were science projects," said Steve Zwolinski, president of GE Wind Energy. "They’ve come of age now, and they’re really a viable technology."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company