Professor Kempton's work provides some of the justification for the Atlantic Offshore wind connection. Kempton's work work was cited by both Robert Mitchell, CEO of Trans-Elect, and Marc Spitzer, FERC Commissioner in a recent (January 20) Energy Central webinar.
From: Roger Faulkner
To: Willett Kempton
Sent: Sun, April 18, 2010 8:03:55 AM
Subject: April 12 NY Times "Obsevatory" article
It is certainly true that tying together wind resources from geographically distinct areas improves aggregate reliability. One advantage of your scheme is that it is geographically and resource base limited, in that only the eastern seaboard states would make the investments & gain advantages, and by its very nature this sort of transmission scheme cannot be used for "coal-by-wire," nor would the scheme result in exporting wind farm jobs from the seaboard to the Midwest. Such unintended consequences of land-based transmission schemes are often cited as reasons to oppose them if you are an Eastern Governor, for example.
However, cables of any find are limited by the need to wrap these cables on a reelfor delivery to the site; for land-based HVDC cables (which must be delivered by truck), this limits cable capacity to about 1.1 GW, and even sea-based cables can only about double this, so in fact your scheme would require multiple parallel cables, which becomes quite expensive; the $1B figure cited in the NYT article is far too small.
This is a problem I've been working to address for a long time; I am attaching a recent magazine article I would like to bring to your attention about a land-based HVDC transmission option we have been developing. My main purpose in writing to you is to bring this to your attention, though I'm also willing to discuss it further in a phone call if you wish.
Roger Faulkner, President
Electric Pipeline Corporation
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