See: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/breaking-out-of-a-wind-ghetto
QUOTE: Breaking Out of the Wind Ghetto By MATTHEW L. WALD Saturated with too much energy from wind and water, the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency based in the Pacific Northwest, has been forced to look for outside help. For the moment its problems represent an extreme, but experts predict that other systems will find themselves in the same pickle as utilities build more wind machines in an effort to reach state-mandated quotas for renewable energy. Bonneville, which issued a report this month on its rough patch, went through a period in June where it literally had to give energy away and induce neighboring utilities to shut down their fossil-fuel powered plants. The problem was that its own territory was struck by unexpected storms that filled its dams with water. Other systems might have released the water and bypassed the wind turbines, but for Bonneville that causes environmental damage. . . . The same storms also brought wind. Bonneville has added 5,000 megawatts of wind power in the last few years, and it is mostly concentrated in the Columbia River Gorge in what is known as the “wind ghetto.” As a result, at any given moment, almost all of the wind machines in Bonneville’s territory are either running or not running. In June, they were running. Normally hydro and wind are a good pairing because hydro plants can adjust their output almost instantly to compensate for a variation in winds. But if all the water has to go through the turbines, as was the case in June, the hydro operator loses the ability to cut back when there is a sudden surge in wind. The system got so crowded that Bonneville took the highly unusual step of telling a nuclear power plant in its territory to cut output to 18 percent. Nuclear power plants are designed to run at 100 percent. . . . - Jed
