Oregon Public Broadcasting

The recent rough weather wreaked havoc in the Northwest, closing roads and bridges, as well as schools and businesses. And most of those carried a hit to Oregon’s bottom line.

But as Rob Manning reports, there’s another aspect of the weather that could  have a big effect on your pocketbook that you might not have thought about. 

TV meteorologists weren’t the only ones warning of a big snowstorm in December.

Justin Sharp: “On the Wednesday before the snow, which started on the Saturday, we had a really powerful system, that looked like it was going to activate the Columbia Gorge and draw the cold air, and get that perfect combination of moisture and cold, which is almost impossible to get in Portland.”

That is not a TV weather man.

Justin Sharp: “My name is Justin Sharp, and I’m the manager of wind asset management meteorology at Iberdrola Renewables.”

Iberdrola Renewables is a big wind operator in the Northwest. Justin Sharp's job is to tell the company  when -- and how hard --  the wind’ll blow.

Elliot Mainzer with the Bonneville Power Administration says if  wind power is ever going to reach its potential, it's people like Sharp that are going to make it happen.

Elliot Mainzer: “You are going to have get a lot better about wind forecasting.”

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council wants to double the Northwest's wind capacy to 6000 megawatts - or enough wind to power 1.5 million homes.  Mainzer says the transmission grid will need some upgrades to meet that goal.

Elliot Mainzer: “Yes, we do think that it’s physically possible to integrate that wind, but we’re going to have to do some things to be able to make it happen in a way that’s cost-effective for consumers.” 

One of those cost-effective ways is to pay better attention to predicting the wind. That's good news for folks in that business, like Justin Sharp, and wind forecasting companies, like one in Seattle, called 3 Tier.

Pascal Stork: “We don’t just provide our clients a forecast of how windy it’s going to be, we actually provide them a forecast of the energy output of the entire project.”

Pascal Stork is 3 Tier's president. His company runs computer models that predict details down to how individual turbines behave. 3 Tier's forecasts average better than 80 percent accuracy.

They help energy companies know when wind is available to buy or sell, and they help system operators plan for it. And that Stork says, saves money.

Pascal Stork: “Anything that reduces the cost of the system operator, generally is passed on to the ratepayers, of anywhere from a 5000 megawatt installation of wind, the savings of proper wind energy forecasting system, can be on the order of $100 million on an annual basis.”

3-Tier has 8000 megawatts worth of wind clients - worldwide. One of those clients is wind operator Iberdrola Renewables, the company that also employees meteorologist, Justin Sharp. So why does  Iberdrola need both?

Justin Sharp: “Most of the model generated forecasts tend to lag behind the up ramps and down ramps in energy. And we’ve found that since we’ve had people engaged in that full-time, we’ve been able to capture that, and those are really important events.”

Sharp says Iberdrola is hiring people during the recession to help watch the wind, 24 hours a day. But Sharp says predictions will never be as accurate as he’d like, until the data from the National Weather Service improves. Right now, for instance, he says there are no hourly readings east of The Dalles.

Wind advocates would like to see one other big change, system-wide. The Northwest currently plans its energy distribution on an hourly basis. But since wind can change within minutes, some want to plan energy more quickly - maybe every ten minutes.

That kind of operational change  wouldn’t be cheap or easy.

And some members of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, like Jim Yost, are skeptical.

Jim Yost: “I think wind power today is like a beanie baby fad that we’re going to experience for a while. It’s interesting, but sometimes, wind is about as useful as a beanie baby, as well.”

Yost is talking about how intermittent wind can be. That's made integrating wind with the region's hydroelectric system a challenge.  Some suggest using natural gas to balance out wind, but that brings other problems.

Iberdrola’s Justin Sharp has his own solution: build more wind. 

Justin Sharp: "The wind is blowing at some place at some time, and as you develop more and more wind farms, particularly if they're well-connected with good transmission, then you do start to have a resource that's available all the time - or, much of the time."

Especially he says,  if you're good at forecasting....