In February 2001, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) launched an ambitious effort to add largeamounts of cost-effective wind generation to its predominately hydropower resource base. By fall 2001,BPA had 12 wind projects totaling over 1200 megawatts (MW) of capacity in permitting or contractnegotiations. A daunting array of obstacles stood in the way of adding this much wind power to the BPAsystem. These obstacles included (1) lack of experience integrating windpower; (2) a volatile power marketthat undermined our budget assumptions; (3) transmission policies unfavorable to wind; (4) uncertaintyabout the impact of large amounts of windpower on the existing power system; (5) expensive and timeconsumingpermitting processes; and (6) unpredictable revenue from the developing green power market. Incooperation with our customers, the wind industry, renewable resource advocates, and others, BPA isworking to overcome these obstacles.
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