WINDPOWER RESOURCE SCREENING FOR THE WESTERN US REGION

摘要

This paper describes a comprehensive screening study performed in 2007 to identify wind energy resources in the 14-state Western Electric Coordinating Council (WECC). WECC comprises the entire Western Interconnection. With a footprint of 1.8 million square miles within the US. Two Canadian provinces, and Baja Norte, Mexico, WECC offers significant but widely dispersed potential for farming wind resources. The methodology described in this paper is novel but tested in application. Using resource maps of greatest wind potential, electric generation is incrementally increased to reach a regional 25% penetration target. This approach allows overloaded transmission corridors to be identified that will require investment to reliably ship power to the areas of greatest demand growth. In this study, resolution is based on 1 km cells. Explicit consideration is given to reserve transmission capacity to estimate WECC's ability to move power from remote sites. Wind resource assumptions are based on NREL wind maps, Class 3 or higher (mean annual wind speeds = 6.9 m/s at 80 m). The wind resource is converted on the basis of generating clusters of 77m diameter, 1.5 Mwe turbines with a capacity factor of 48%. Limits are placed on distance to load centers to avoid transmission congestion and to implicitly acknowledge an economic breakeven towards lower speeds and closer distance.