Hydroelectric Power and the Columbia River -- Nothing To Do With The Bakken

One of the best in-depth articles on technology in a business magazine. I am very, very impressed. I have visited the Columbia River and the Bonneville Dam numerous times; the article brings back wonderful memories.

Enjoy.

Sent in by "Red."

The writer calls the Columbia the "west's greatest river."  I would argue that the Missouri-Mississippi is the west's greatest river, except perhaps based on location, the MM is the nation's greatest river. Yeah, I'll go with that: the MM is the nation's greatest river. Actually North America's greatest river.

From the article:

The dams were built to be flexible in balancing out demand. Now, they’re increasingly balancing out supply as well. The installation of 3,500 megawatts of wind capacity—expected to rise to 6,000 megawatts by 2013—in Bonneville’s territory has made load balancing more complex. Most of the wind capacity in the Northwest is concentrated in just a few locations along the Columbia River. When the wind blows there, they generate close to capacity; when the wind stops blowing, they generate close to nothing. And they can go from nothing to full output in as little as a couple of hours.

Renewable energy has reinvigorated the market for ‘flexible dispatch’ electricity that can be produced at a moment’s notice, and hydropower is the biggest source of flexible dispatch available—and is much cheaper to run than the natural-gas turbines that serve that market in other parts of the country. “Hydro is the silver bullet, and we didn’t even know it,” says Julien Dumoulin-Smith, an electric utilities analyst at UBS.