USFWS Pacific Southwest Region

This California condor, flying near the coast, is one of about 200 condors living in the wild.

Wind is a growing industry in the Tehachapi Mountains in Southern California. Kern County welcomes new wind projects, and Google has gotten in on the action. But some environmentalists say that developers and officials are ignoring the elephant — or, in this case, the enormous bird — in the room.

California condors are beginning to return to the Tehachapis after nearly going extinct in the 1980′s, and birds and wind turbines don’t mix. No California condors have yet had a run-in with a turbine. But they are still endangered — it’s illegal to kill them — and three environmental groups say that Kern County and the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are not properly considering the risks. The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the BLM today, regarding one wind development in particular. (They have previously sued Kern County over the same project).

An article in Forbes explains.

In the suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the environmental groups asked a judge to issue an injunction to stop construction of North Sky River. They argue that the BLM had violated the federal Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws by failing to adequately consider the impact of the wind farm.

Forbes environment editor Todd Woody has written before about the condor/wind farm controversy. His article from January lays out all the issues.

This isn’t the only case of renewable energy boosters and endangered species clashing. Climate Watch has previously looked at how solar installations affect desert tortoises and risks to the San Joaquin kit fox, also from solar.

By Thibault Worth

Alison Taggart-Barone/National Park Service

Frank Dean, General Superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, speaks in front of one of the new wind turbines at Crissy Field.

The Crissy Field Center, an environmental education center operated by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Park Service and the Presidio Trust, erected three out of an eventual five wind turbines Wednesday. The event highlighted the expanding mission of the National Park Service to use more renewable energy in powering park facilities.

While the Center’s turbines will be used for mostly educational purposes, the ceremony took place on the same day that the National Park Service reached an interconnection agreement with Southern California Edison to bring 20 dormant renewable energy projects in California online.

Many of these projects have remained offline for up to two and a half years due to stalled negotiations with the electric utility.

“This is great news. It’s a win-win all around. It will mean lower costs for taxpayers and clean energy benefits to the environment,” Senator Barbara Boxer wrote in a letter to Southern California Edison.

Alison Taggart-Barone/National Park Service

Students from Galileo Academy of Science and Technology assist in raising a wind turbine.

The National Park Service has solar and geothermal energy projects in Death Valley National Park, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Channel Islands National Park, Mojave National Preserve and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.

At Crissy Field Center, the focus is on education, but the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute are conducting a 5-year study looking into the turbines’ overall effectiveness at generating usable power. They’ll also be viewable to the public.

“Crissy Field is one of our more popular destinations in the park. And it’s a great chance to learn about energy independence and different types of technology as we bring them online here,” explained Frank Dean, General Superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Students at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology will monitor data collected from the turbines to evaluate their efficiency in their environmental science class.

Craig Miller

California’s three big utilities have another two years to reach their mandated target of having 20% of their electricity generated from renewable sources, and today PG&E announced two new deals that could inch the company closer to that goal:

• Wind:  An agreement with NextEra Energy Resources, for 25 years of wind power from the company’s 163 megawatt North Sky River project in Tehachapi, CA.  PG&E says the energy from this project could meet the needs of about 90,000 typical homes.

• Solar:  A 25-year contract with Sempra Generation for 150 megawatts of solar power from an expansion of the Copper Mountain Solar complex near Boulder City, NV.  Just under 2/3 of that power is expected online in 2013, with the remainder available by 2015. Ultimately, the company says, this project could power 45,000 homes.

PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said that together, these two contracts will push PG&E one percent closer to the 20% goal.

As of last week, PG&E was at 15.9% of electricity generated from renewables, according to latest numbers out from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).  Southern California Edison is a 19.3%, and San Diego Gas & Electric is at 11.9%.

The official Renewable Portfiolio Standard (RPS) is 20% by 2010, but the CPUC has implemented flexibility allowing the utilities until 2013 to meet the requirement.   Ultimately, the legally-mandated RPS requirement is 33% by 2020.

For more on California’s quest for renewable energy, check out our multimedia series 33×20: California’s Clean Power Countdown.

Wind turbines clustered on hilltops near Tehachapi. (Photo: Sasha Khokha)

This time it’s Terra-Gen’s multi-phase wind project in Kern County, known as the Alta Wind Energy Center.

Google’s clean-tech investment arm will reportedly invest $55 million in the project, being built near Tehachapi.

Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy “czar,” told me in an interview last year that the company would support clean energy technologies with two main attributes; global scalability and the potential to become cost-competitive with coal power. In a 2010 interview with the New York Times, Weihl said he thought Google’s “culture of innovation” made it a good fit with renewable energy development.

Google has now made substantial investments in wind, solar and geothermal projects, in and around California, as well as bankrolling an ambitious scheme to build a connective spine connecting offshore wind projects along the Atlantic coast.

Flocks of birds near wind turbines in Solano County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

It’s hard to find people who are just flat out against wind energy. As with real estate, attitudes seem to come down to location, location, location. That’s why three of the thorniest issues with wind are project siting, transmission (lines for the power produced), and the industry’s turbulent history with birds and bats. Some of those challenges are highlighted in this slide show, designed to accompany my two-part radio series.

Last fall, even the National Audubon Society, one of the nation’s most stalwart protectors of winged creatures, published a position statement generally favorable toward wind power, calling it a “good news, bad news” proposition. The statement calls California’s Altamont Pass “notorious for killing many raptors, including golden eagles.” A 2003 study by the National Renewable Energy Lab calculated that on average, each turbine in the pass was claiming a bird about once every five years (0.19 birds/turbine/year) — but there are thousands of turbines in the pass, many older models that are more of a danger to birds.

Developers are in the process of “repowering” the pass with newer, larger turbines, less lethal to birds. That may seem counterintuitive but the older, smaller models caused more problems. Since they had lower output, more of them were required. The blades were positioned lower, spun faster, and supported by lattice towers that provided inviting nesting spots, unlike the smooth tubular towers of new turbines.

Altamont is the oldest of California’s four biggest wind energy zones, highlighted on this interactive map.

View Major Wind Energy Pockets in California in a larger map

The Audubon statement concedes that newer turbine designs are becoming more bird-friendly, and finds climate change a bigger threat to avian critters in the long run. The Society went on to call for an extension of the federal Production Tax Credit for wind development, fearing its expiration next year encourages wind developers to rush projects along and “cut corners” on siting.

Meanwhile industry and wildlife groups have joined forces to address the bat mortality issue.

Hear my two-part radio series on challenges facing wind energy development in California on The California Report. Those and all other stories in our series, “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown,” are archived at our special series page.

Recently erected wind turbines at the Solano County Wind Resource Area. (Photo: Craig Miller)

For all that, utilities did not quite make the state-imposed requirement that they get 20% of their electrical generation from renewables by last year. That requirement was affirmed by the legislature. In September of last year, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger moved the goalposts to 33% by 2020. But that mandate is backed by an executive order, not by state law.

According to the CPUC quarterly report, last year’s progress puts the state’s total potential renewable power production over 1,700 megawatts. Almost half of the 2010 gains were achieved by a single big wind farm in Kern County coming online. In addition to wind and photovoltaic solar, some of the new generation last year came from biomass and small-scale hydro. The state does not recognize power from large hydroelectric dams as countable toward its renewable energy goals.

Major utilities will update numbers for their individual energy mix in March. At the end of 2008, Southern California Edison led big utilities in the green power derby with more than 17% renewables in its mix. PG&E provides more than 14% and San Diego Gas & Electric more than 10%.

The CPUC says there are already enough megawatts “under contract” to meet that 33% goal in 2020 — but glitches in financing, siting and permitting could all get in the way of some of that power actually being delivered. The total share of electricity provided by renewables such as wind and solar energy moved to more than 15% in 2009, from about 13% in 2008.

None of the renewable energy gains last year were from large solar-thermal projects, though several of those were permitted and broke ground toward year-end, as developers raced against a deadline to get federal stimulus funding.

Wind turbines in Solano County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

A new ranking of clean energy development in the US has California well out in front, with Oregon running a distant second.

Clean Edge, which describes itself as “the world’s first research and advisory firm devoted to the clean-tech sector,” has released its “first annual U.S. Clean Energy Leadership Index.” Massachusetts, Washington, and Colorado round out the top five. The firm, which has offices in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, says it used 80 indicators and 4,000 individual data points to calculate the rankings, including numbers of alternative-fuel vehicles and the flow of clean-tech venture capital, as well as the states’ portion of electricity generated from carbon-free sources.

As Todd Woody points out in his post for Reuters, the rankings may furrow brows in a couple of Midwestern states that have been showing some leadership in specific areas. Iowa, for example, is ahead of California in the wind energy race.

Also this week, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources said it had reached a settlement with regulators and environmental groups to replace more than 2,000 older wind turbines in California’s Altamont Pass, to reduce the number of bird fatalities. The new turbines, while much larger, spin at slower speeds and provide fewer places for birds to nest.

When Google announced that it was taking a nearly 40% stake in a $5 billion underwater transmission line to serve offshore wind farms that haven’t been built, nobody even seemed to flinch. Such is the effect of having the Google imprimatur on renewable energy projects.

The Nysted wind farm, off the coast of Denmark. The US presently has no offshore wind generation.

According to reports, the cable would run for 350 miles, about 20 miles off the Atlantic coast, connecting yet-to-be-built wind energy turbines to the mainland and to each other. It would not connect the only offshore wind farm to so far win approval from the federal Department of the Interior, the long-contested Cape Wind project off Massachusetts.

While confidence apparently runs high for wind development along the East Coast, hopes for similar offshore projects in California are more tempered. In an interview for an upcoming story for KQED’s 33 x 20 series, Ryan Wiser, who studies wind energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, described the prospects for offshore development along California’s coast as “low.”

“We have deep, deep water out there,” said Riser, who co-authored a recent report on wind development across the US, points to the engineering challenges off the Pacific coast and the relative costs involved. “An offshore wind project costs roughly twice as much as an onshore project,” said Wiser. “So if you have available onshore resources, it’s not clear to me why anyone would go offshore, as long as the onshore resource is extractable from a siting, permitting and transmission perspective.”

A cluster of wind turbines in Tehachapi Pass marks California's early commitment to wind energy. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Wind power generators added nearly 40% to their total capacity in the US last year, as several states blew past California, according to a new report from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. According to the tally, four states now generate more than 10% of their total electricity (excluding exports) from wind.

Texas is the undisputed leader in the wind race, installing nearly 2,300 megawatts of capacity last year alone. Other Midwestern states such as Indiana, Iowa, the Dakotas and Minnesota have also been aggressive installers of wind farms.

California ranks third in total wind capacity (2,798 MW) but only 12th in the

Turbines on the Maple Ridge wind farm in upstate New York. (Photo: Craig Miller)

volume added last year. Even states like Oregon and New York, where expansion of wind farms has been controversial, added more capacity last year. California also ranks relatively low in the percentage of total electricity from wind, at just 3.4%, though the state is poised to make a major move with the recent groundbreaking for Terra-Gen’s Alta Wind Energy Center in Kern County.

One of the report’s co-authors, Mark Bolinger, explained in an email that transmission constraints and California’s exhaustive (some say exhausting) site permitting process are factors in the state’s wind slowdown, “In addition, California’s wind resource tends to be concentrated in a handful of  ‘wind passes’ (e.g., Altamont Pass, San Gorgonio Pass, Tehachapi, etc.), all of which already contain lots of wind turbines built since the 1980s.” Bolinger adds that ideally, many of those older projects should be “repowered” with newer turbines.

The report also notes that while the US still has the most total capacity installed, China has leapfrogged the US in the pace of its build-out. Also, the US currently has no offshore wind generation, a mainstay in places such as Scotland and Denmark. Though several projects are in the works (the report makes note of “accelerated activity”), little of that is happening on the west coast. Plans for major wind installations in Lake Ontario have encountered public resistance from residents in upstate New York, and the prolonged battle over the Cape Wind project off Massachusetts is now the stuff of legend.

Despite the glacieresque pace of offshore projects, the reports says that for two years running, wind has outpaced all other new generation, except for natural gas.

The entire 88-page wind report, a shorter summary and PowerPoint presentation are all available as PDF downloads at the Lab’s website.

Also today: Oakland-based BrightSource Energy announced that a siting committee at the California Energy Commission has recommended moving forward with the company’s Ivanpah solar plant. Brightsource describes the project as the “largest solar energy project in the world” and claims that if approved by the full commission, it will nearly double the nation’s total output from solar-thermal arrays.

Follow the KQED News multimedia series: “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown,” with radio reports, blog posts and interactive features.

A 2 MW battery at the AES Huntington Beach power plant. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

Energy storage is something we’ve come to take for granted in everyday life. Our cell phones, iPods, cars and computers all depend on batteries. But storing large amounts of energy for the electric grid is another matter entirely. It’s a technical challenge that has yet to be met–but will need to be for the coming age of renewable energy.

California’s grid is designed to deliver electricity on a real-time basis. Every four seconds, the grid operators at the California Independent System Operator (ISO) have to ensure that the energy supply meets the demand in the state, something that’s known as “balancing” the grid (you can see today’s electricity forecast on the ISO site). As a result, they coordinate the one piece of the system that they have control over: the power plants.

Traditional “baseload” generators like gas and nuclear plants produce a steady stream of electrons. But California is adding increasing amounts of solar and wind power to the grid each year. Since the output of a solar or wind farm depends on the sun or wind, the power they produce is intermittent (here’s a time-of-day profile of renewable energy on the grid today). That causes problems for the grid operators on a number of levels. Wind farms produce most of their power at night, but that’s when demand for power is lowest. Energy from solar farms using photovoltaics can drop off substantially when the sun disappears behind clouds. And large solar-thermal arrays ramp up extremely fast when first hit by the sun in the morning.

Energy storage is one of the ways that utilities and grid operators can address this intermittency. By having some extra electricity on hand, they can smooth out the bumps caused by these renewables. Here’s a review of some tried and new technologies for grid storage:

Batteries

There are a number of different kinds of batteries that can be used in grid-scale installations. I visited a two-megawatt battery in Huntington Beach that uses lithium-ion cells, much like a hybrid car or newer power tools. Southern California Edison is working on an 8 MW battery project near the Tehachapi wind farms. But lithium-ion technology has plenty of competitors, many of which have been awarded federal stimulus funding. The primary barrier for batteries is the cost.

A Beacon Power flywheel.

Flywheels

This technology uses rotational energy to store power. Flywheels have an internal rotor that uses electricity to spin at high speeds. When energy is needed, the rotor slows down and generates electricity through a motor. This is used for what’s known as “frequency regulation” on the grid. Since they can charge and discharge power on a second-to-second basis, flywheels smooth out the short-term fluctuations on the grid. Beacon Power has installed flywheels in Tehachapi, California as part of a demonstration project there.

Compressed Air

Using energy produced at non-peak times (at night), compressed air storage projects pump air into large underground caverns. When demand for energy is high, it’s released to run power turbines. PG&E is now planning a 300 MW compressed air facility in Kern County.

Of course, for all these technologies, cost is a major issue, not to mention the siting and planning considerations. To see how they stack up, check out these technology comparison charts from the Energy Storage Association.

Pumped Hydro

In the energy storage world, this is as old-school as it gets. Hydro-power uses water and gravity to generate electricity. Storage is added by pumping that water back uphill to the reservoir, so it can generate power again. Of course, it takes electricity to run the pumps, so the uphill run generally happens at night, when there is cheaper or excess power on the grid. California’s largest pumped hydro facility is PG&E’s Helms Pumped Storage Project outside of Fresno, which has a 1.2-gigawatt capacity (more about that in this Powerpoint presentation). PG&E is reportedly considering two gigawatts of new pumped storage at two other sites in California.

For more, listen to my radio story online and check out the rest of our stories in our ongoing series: 33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown.