The origin of the state name "Oregon" is a bit of a mystery. One theory is that it stems from the French word for "hurricane."
I know something about Oregon winds, having had to brace myself against them earlier in my life, when they tried to sweep me from the side of Mount Hood during an otherwise triumphant ascent.
My wife and i regularly return to the state to visit family and friends. Usually, it is by air. This summer, we took a more languid approach, coming in from a Sun Valley writer's conference by car from the east. I was stunned -utterly stunned - by the sheer volume of wind turbines that now march like sentinels along the summit of the wind-swept Columbia River gorge, east to west, and arrayed along the plateaus surrounding the gorge,
Thousands of wind turbines. I took dozens of shots of them on my cell phone - from the passenger seat. Visually striking was a cluster on the hillsides bracketing the powerful Depression era hydroelectric dams sitting astride the Columbia.
I was recalling that car trip today as I read news of GE's securing a $1.4 billion contract to provide even more wind turbines to an otherwise desolate patch of north and central Oregon. That princely sum will be buying 338 turbines that will pepper 30 square miles. It will be one of the world's largest wind farms. The units are real giants - 2.5 megawatts a piece. Combined output will be 845 megawatts - rivaling the output of a coal-fired generating plant or almost the size of many nuclear power plants.
I have already heard some interesting anecdotal information about what this tidal wave of wind power is doing to the power system of the Pacific Northwest. It is a big, interesting story. And to tell it most effectively, I am proud to announce, we have just received word that Bonneville Power Administration administrator Steve Wright will be speaking at our EnergyBiz Leadership Forum in Washington, March 1-2. He is also penning a piece for our March-April issue of EnergyBiz.
So if your time and budget allows, you may want to pop over to Oregon and take a ride out the gorge, and then come to Washington in early March to hear the implications of what is increasingly evident in Oregon. Wind power has arrived.
Regarding the Northwest as a location, it only works with the government subsidies. The normal power prices in the region are too low due to "cheap" hydropower. Most of the energy seems to be going to serve California where the prices are much higher. More transmissions lines are needed, and BPA is building some.
The hydro systems do provide quite a bit of balancing to accomodate the erratic nature of the wind. Apparently, the system cannot accomodate many more of these wind projects, so a few entities are investigating pumped storage.