Comment on Oklahoma grid operator says wind provided more than 60 percent of the power Friday

Oklahoma grid operator says wind provided more than 60 percent of the power Friday

By Jack Money Business Writer jmoney@oklahoman.comYou probably slept through it. But if you were awake at 3:45 a.m., there was a better than six in 10 chance your light, television, phone charger or whatever electrical device you were using at that moment was using power generated by a wind farm. The Southwest Power Pool, the regional transmission organization that manages the Great Plains' electric grid, announced Friday it had set a wind-penetration record of 60.56 percent. During that minute, wind supplied 13,928.94 megawatts of the 22,998.71 megawatts needed to provide power to customers of all of the utilities and other power distributors that operate within the pool's 14-state coverage area. A spokesman for the organization said Friday's record is just one in a string of nearly a dozen that have been set just in recent months. Undoubtedly, those records show the amount of wind-generated dispatchable power that's fed into the grid continues to climb. But other factors also played a role in setting Friday morning's record, including powerful wind flows across generating stations throughout much of the region, plus a lower overall demand for electricity at the time because of unusually mild temperatures. "This is the sixth or seventh record we have set just in the past 90 days or so," said Derek Wingfield, with the Southwest Power Pool's corporate communications division. "Wind has grown very substantially over the last decade," he said, noting that wind generation available for dispatch on the grid in 2008 was just more than 500 megawatts. The amount of wind generated power available for dispatch now, he continued, is more than 17,000 megawatts.Read more on NewsOK.com

 

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