Robert Zavadil on "The Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study"

How much will increasing wind penetration in the United States grid cost? Is increasing wind penetration really the low cost route to post-carbon electricity? Yesterday, I read with interest, Joe Romm's post titled, NREL study shows 20 percent wind possible by 2024 - Half a million jobs, 25% drop in utility carbon pollution for just 2 cents a day per household. The post was ostensibly a review of a DoE study, Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study(EWITS). Joe began his post with an account of a previous DoE report on the cost and consequences of a large scale wind buildup. 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply.” Joe had uncritically accepted the conclusions of the earlier study, but I had some some questions about that earlier study, because it had not focused enough attention on the future inflation of wind construction costs. Plans to dramatically increase energy related construction should assume that their implementation can and probably would exert inflationary pressures on construction costs.

There is a policy issue here. Wind electrical generation receives significant subsidies from the tax payers, and these subsidies are justified by the claim that wind is an economically desirable post carbon electrical source. Wind supporters refer to the high capital costs of of nuclear power, but are the capital costs of wind really lower? The EWITS report did not really address that issue, but I noticed that the report had actually been prepared by EnerNex Corporation of Knoxville, Tennessee, which meant that I could speak to one of the reports authors with a local phone call, so i put on my intrepid reporter cap, and called Robert Zavadil of EnerNex, and asked him about comparisons of wind and nuclear costs. Robert dodged my question by answering that future nuclear costs are something of a mystery, but this is equally the case with the future cost of wind generation.

Thus we are not going to reach anything like a firm conclusion about he relative costs of wind and nuclear, but the EWITS report does contain a lot of hints. For example, the EWITS states,

The EWITS LOLE studies show that when the geographic diversity of the Eastern Interconnection is considered, the capacity credit could increase to 25%.

The lowest cost of the 4 wind scenarios which the EWITS considers envisions the construction of 225 billion watts of wind generation capacity for the Eastern Interconnect. This means that 225 billion watts of wind generation capacity can be expected to typically produce about 56 GWs of electrical output during periods of peak energy demand. About 61 GWs of nuclear capacity would produce the equivalent capacity credit. Thus to start to understand the relative costs of wind an nuclear we could begin by comparing the costs of 225 GWs of wind with the costs of 61 GWs of nuclear generation capacity.

Robert Zavadil acknowledged that the EWITS estimates of nuclear, on shore wind and offshore wind and offshore wind were all to low, although the nuclear estimate was probably about 70% lower than was actually the case, while the wind estimates were off by a far smaller margin. Even given this disparity, the cost of the equivalent wind capacity credit would still be 50% higher than the cost of that of nuclear. And in addition a stable wind entails an enlarged transmission system and

With approximately 22,697 miles of new EHV transmission lines, the transmission overlay for Scenario 1 has the highest estimated total cost at $93 billion (US$2009).

You can buy quite a few reactors for $93 billion, but of course you might also want to spend some of that on transmission system upgrades. Thus while we cannot get exact estimates of the relative costs of large scale future wind and nuclear grid penetration, the analysis presented by the EWITS is consistent with an additional 20% nuclear Eastern Interconnect penetration, rather than the equivalent wind penetration, having a lower costs.

Update: The Capacity Factor blog has posted a separate assessment of the EWITS report and mistakes in its media coverage.