Mark Henwood

Mesa Power Orders 1,000 MW of Wind Turbines

1000 MW, not bad, equivalent to a CC or two. I'm sure the PTC will enhance the project return so of course it's "necessary". The reality is there are limited choices for new generation at scale and each has issues.

Nuclear - cost, public opposition, siting, waste disposal, incredibly long lead times.

Coal - lots of emissions, siting problems, transmission

Gas fired CC - great technology, cost tied to gas and hence oil, still cranks out CO2

Gas peakers - no big problems since they don't run much, good thing with intermittent stuff like wind and solar


Coal gas - uses coal, costs are huge, still kinda R&D

Wind (grid level) - works, not very costly, needs some transmission but this is getting done in some places like CA. Like utilities can rate base the transmission so why wouldn't they be all for it.

Solar (grid level) - cost and technology still being worked on, siting shouldn't be too bad, some transmission will need to be built, has potential

Solar (inside the meter) - costly but no siting issues so its getting a lot of play, still small quantity-wise in the big scheme. But easy enough to do that SCE is piling on the bandwagon to rate-base a couple of hundred MWs of rooftop solar at some huge cost......smart for their investors.

Biomass - resource constrained, but will get built where there are resources (if not already built)

Hydro - resource constrained and too painful environmentally.

Geothermal - the good stuff is resource constrained, will get build if not already built.

So wind looks good, PTC or not since something has to get built.

And the storage thing, that can be address progressively and later. The US has installed close to 1,000,000 MW (100,000 MW in WECC, 80,000 or so in ERCOT, and the rest in the EI) of capacity, plenty to dispatch around a little wind and solar for a long time.