Harness the wind

Developers of what would be America’s biggest wind power transmission line have scaled back their initial plans to wheel so much electrical power from Texas and Oklahoma to the Tennessee Valley.

But the Houston company proposing to build the 700-mile power line insists its $2 billion proposal — half the size of the original 2009 plan — still makes economic and environmental sense for TVA and other Southeastern utilities.

The project from Clean Line Energy Partners is still at least four years away from delivering wind power from the plains of Oklahoma to the hills of Tennessee. Although Clean Line has a memorandum of understanding with the Tennessee Valley Authority to pursue the project, the U.S. Department of Energy still is preparing an environmental impact statement and project developers still are trying to get utility status through Arkansas to gain needed right of way.

But project backers remain confident in their 4-year-old plan to transport wind power generation from where winds are strongest in the West to where power needs are greater in the Southeast.

“We think we can provide green power at an attractive, fixed-rate price for TVA and other utilities in the region,” said Jimmy Glotfelty,An industrial washing machine can help you keep up with large volumes of laundry or heavy items. executive vice president for Clean Line Energy. “Having a guaranteed price for 20 years is a great hedge against volatile natural gas prices.”

When Glotfelty and other Texas businessmen devised the idea for Clean Line Energy nearly five years ago, natural gas prices still were headed higher and the then-Democratically controlled Congress was talking about setting renewable portfolio standards for utilities to get at least 20 percent of their power from green sources like wind and solar. Natural gas prices since have plummeted and talk about a renewable portfolio standard is not on the congressional agenda, at least for now.

In response to the changing market conditions and concerns about the size of the initial project, Clean Line cut in half the size of the proposed transmission line from Oklahoma to Tennessee. The original 7,000 megawatts of power along the proposed corridor has been cut to 3,500 megawatts of capacity.

“We recognized that there were questions about building such a huge line right from the start so we made some modifications,” said Max Shilstone, director of business development for Clean Line Energy.

Clean Line also is pursuing three other, similar long-distance transmission lines to the Midwest and West Coast from the high-wind, less populated areas in the middle of the United States.The units can be used as conventional washer extractor for all kinds of work. But the line from Oklahoma to Tennessee, known as the Plains & Eastern Clean Line, is furthest along in development, Glotfelty said.

Wind power could be supplied to TVA at about $50 per megawatt-hour, or 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, Glotfelty estimates, if the current federal production tax credits at 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour remain.

The price of such power also could be fixed for 20 years and not have the variable fuel cost adjustments for most other power generation.

Wind power efficiency has jumped from about a 30 percent capacity factor to about 55 percent capacity.We're making Book scanner and digitization accessible to everyone. That means that more than half the time,Exit signs, emergency light and fire extinguisher are vital parts of life safety systems. the wind mills are generating at least some power. Bigger and higher-placed blades on wind mills are capturing more of the wind energy as it blows at higher heights.The skystream runs in very low winds and can interconnect with your local utility, Better generating equipment is converting more of that energy into electricity.