Over the next 10 years, the Omaha Public Power District plans to increase — from a little more than 1 percent now to 10 percent — the amount of energy it provides its customers from wind-driven generators and, perhaps, solar cells.
Its biggest step so far in reaching that goal will come no later than the end of next year, when it will begin buying electricity from 40 wind turbines in southeast Nebraska — a part of the state not generally recognized as a prime location for giant wind farms.
OPPD has contracted to buy wind-produced power for the next 20 years from Flat Water Wind Farm LLC, which is to build a 60-megawatt complex near Humboldt in Richardson County. None of the 40 planned windmills has been erected yet, but they should be producing 60 megawatts of capacity by the second half of next year.
Once on line, Flat Water Wind Farm will nearly triple OPPD’s use of wind-produced electric power. The utility now buys 25 megawatts from a wind farm near Bloomfield, Neb., and 10 from another at Ainsworth, Neb. It also has a windmill at Valley, built in 2001, that produces less than 1 megawatt.
While it might look now as though the other 305 megawatts needed to reach 10 percent of OPPD’s expected electric power load in 2020 also would come from wind, that’s not a certainty.
If the efficiency of solar energy technology improves markedly in the next few years, OPPD could turn in that direction, utility spokesman Jeff Hanson said.
“We’re not ruling anything out,” Hanson said. “There are some benefits to us from solar.”
One is that the season, summer, when OPPD hits its peak demand — for air conditioning — is when the sun is best able to help out.
“The days that our customers use a lot of electricity are days when the sun is shining brightly and warmly on their homes and businesses. That would also be the time when we can get more energy out of solar,” Hanson said.
That’s also a time of year — the windless, sultry dog days of August — when wind power is least available, he said.
The peak seasons for wind-produced power are spring and fall, the very times when power demand is generally the lowest. Then, however, the wind-generated electricity can relieve some of the demand on coal-fired plants, OPPD’s biggest generating source.
Cost-efficient solar cells could reduce the summertime use of natural gas-fired and fuel oil-fired peaking plants — the most expensive way to generate electricity, Hanson said. Peaking power plants generally run only when there is high demand.
If solar energy comes down in price, it starts to make more sense than wind does.
“Which is one of the reasons we say ‘Yes, we need 400 megawatts (of renewable-source power), but we’re not ready to commit to all of that being wind,” Hanson said.
For now, though, OPPD continues to look at wind as the likely source of more renewable energy. Hanson said the utility is talking about the possibility of more windmills with developers who responded to its request for wind-farm proposals.
OPPD prefers to get wind power from its own service territory so that the benefits of development, such as land leases, can be realized by OPPD customers, Hanson said. Also, it helps ease the integration of wind-generated power into the OPPD system, including the use of OPPD transmission lines.
The 13-county OPPD territory — generally, from the Omaha area south — is not considered to have great wind power sites. Most existing and proposed Nebraska wind farms are in the north and far west.
Ralf Krueger, CEO of Juwi Wind USA, said his company spotted the ridge where it will build Flat Water Wind Farm while researching a site just to the south in Kansas. Krueger said Juwi Wind is interested in developing more wind farms in Nebraska, but the Richardson County site has little room for expansion.
“It’s relatively limited. That area has less to do with acreage and more to do with the capacity remaining in existing transmission lines,” he said.
Flat Water will be the first U.S. wind-generating site for Juwi Group, a German company that has installed 350 wind turbines and has operations in Eastern and Western Europe. Its first Western Hemisphere wind farm was built in Costa Rica.
Midwest Wind Energy, which built the Bloomfield wind farm, has sites in Cass and Otoe Counties in OPPD territory. It is interested in filling any future OPPD wind-generation needs — if that’s what the utility opts for.
“Right now, solar is much more expensive than wind,” Hanson said. “It’s 10 years between now and 2020, so if they make some of the breakthroughs and solar comes down . . .”
Juwi Group will be watching. It also has a U.S. solar-power subsidiary.
Contact the writer:
444-1081, virgil.larson@owh.com
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