Some interesting nuggets on the Texas wind industry in this Reuters report. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the amount of electricity produced from wind by Texas wind farms on the evening of Feb. 9 reached 9,481MW, up 814MW from the previous record of 8,667MW set in late January.
Kent Saathoff, ERCOT's vice president of grid operations and system planning, said in the press release that as new wind farms and transmission lines are added to ERCOT’s grid, new records are being set in Texas, which leads the nation in wind turbine capacity at 10,400MW. One megawatt can supply about 200 Texas homes during hot summer days and about 500 homes during other weather periods.
The release said most of the wind farms are being built in west Texas, where the wind generally blows the strongest during the evening hours and in the spring and fall months when power demand is low. Wind accounted for 9.2% of the power consumed in Texas in 2012, up from 8.5% in 2011, ERCOT said.
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.