Integrating Wind Energy into the Grid

The speaker was Craig Quist of PacifiCorp and had approximately 55 attendees.

There is a goal of 20% wind integration. The speaker said, “To get to 20% wind integration, it will take much more than waving a magic wand”. Currently, the Western Interconnection has 0.6% of wind generation, with a 3.3% nameplate.

So in order to achieve 20%, industry must jointly develop a “road map”. This map includes the following:

• Integration issues
• New transmission products
• Solutions to increase capacity
• Morph individual utilities to respond like RTO/ISO
• Enable higher penetration levels

This was very detailed talk and the speaker spoke in detail on the above topics and those can be found on his presentation available on the conference webpage. You can tell that PacifiCorp have done a lot of research and work in wind energy and has a lot of experience in this area.