We’ll Get To That Wind Farm Application - Eventually
Keith_Indy on Feb 11 2008 at 12:14 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Economics, Environment, Keith's Page, Technology, energy, regulation
And by eventually, they mean decades down the road.
This is a perfect example of government getting in the way of the innovation we need to dig ourselves out of our fossil fuel dependency.
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1362/1/
Sphere: Related ContentIf you want to build a wind farm in Minnesota right now, you’re in for a nasty surprise. A 612-year nasty surprise in fact.
The Midwest Independent Transmission System (MISO), the organization in charge of the power lines, has to approve every new project that will connect to existing power lines. And MISO is only used to dealing with coal-plant-sized projects. Thus, the current regulations say that they must dedicate 2 years of their time to every project that will connect to the grid.
Not only that, but they’re only allowed to process one application at a time.
This worked fine back when they were approving coal plants. Two years was plenty of time, and there weren’t enough giant fossil fuel plants to fill their docket.
But a system that worked fine for fossil fuel has completely broken down in the face of distributed wind energy. People filing an application with MISO to build a medium- to large-scale wind project (of which there are currently over three hundred) have a heck of a wait in front of them.
