news story / By Heidi Walters

Too much power?

Transmission bottleneck could stall green energy

(May 17, 2007)  It is a situation that must send shivers of anticipatory (even smug?) delight down the spines of all the peak-oil prophets who’ve been warning us we’d better figure out how to hunker down and self-sustain. We’re talking about the boom in renewable energy exploration here in Humboldt County — the “new gold rush,” as David Boyd, executive director of the Redwood Coast Energy Authority, calls it.

You’ve got DG Energy Solutions, which operates the Fairhaven biomass power plant on Samoa Peninsula, proposing to add wind turbines and wave-energy-capturing buoys to its site. You’ve got PG&E catching that wave energy bug, as well — in February the utility applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to stake out 136 square miles of ocean off the Humboldt coast, two to three miles offshore, to study the wave-harnessing potential. And you’ve got Shell WindEnergy proposing to put wind turbines up on Bear River Ridge, between Petrolia and Ferndale.

GALLERY >

If one casts purely an optimistic eye upon all the latest projects brewing out there and the prospects for even more projects, in addition to the existing renewables already produced here — hydro, biomass — it isn’t all that crazy to imagine a future Humboldt County powered without fossils. (We’re not talking, here, about our gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles — that’s another, very big, story; half our energy consumption is in transportation fuels, according to the RCEA). Someday, when we whir the blender, turn up the furnace, flip on the lights, fire up the computer — green, green, green.

In fact, the renewable energy potential in Humboldt County is so high there could be a surplus of renewable energy far beyond the demands of our snail-crawl population growth. According to the “energy element” section of Humboldt County’s draft General Plan, prepared by Schatz Energy Research Center, the wind potential for Humboldt County is 400 megawatts and the wave potential is 500-1,000 megawatts. Some estimates reach even higher. In the winter time, our peak energy usage period, Humboldt County consumes only 150-160 megawatts. Wind and wave offer the largest renewable potential, followed by biomass, hydro, solar and others.

Much of that renewable development is speculative at this point, particularly on the wave front. But to those who want to find a way to boost our local economy, the prospects are tantalizing: We could sell this extra green power to the less geographically fortunate, those California towns and cities still struggling to do their part to help the state meet its Renewable Portfolio Standard — a mandate that the state’s renewable generation must equal 20 percent of power sales by 2010. And the green boom could draw an influx of entrepreneurs to set up shop in Humboldt County.

But for the would-be profiteers from the green-power goodness, there’s the little problem of our area’s electrical transmission capacity. It’s small. Four lines connect Humboldt County to the outer world, and Pacific Gas & Electric’s main grid system: two lines between here and PG&E’s interconnect station at Cottonwood (near Redding), a line from Bridgeville-Garberville and a line from Trinity County.

“The sum total of the instantaneous power that can be imported or exported, on demand, is 70 megawatts,” says Boyd.

And so already the county must produce at least 80 megawatts locally. A small portion of local energy is from biomass and hydro, but most local power is produced by PG&E’s natural-gas-fired power plant at Humboldt Bay (and most of the gas is imported); upgrades to the plant will improve its efficiency to where it’ll be able to produce the entire current demand, if need be. But, the new plant is being designed to operate on 10 engines — instead of one big one — any number of which can be turned off at any time to accommodate the addition to the local system of renewable energy generated by intermittent sources such as wind and waves, or by the more steady biomass.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE