Comments on: What is a megawatt anyway?

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By: A Perspective

A Perspective — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:48:05 +0000

The above comment is correct. Another way to look at it. If a 30 megawatt plant, ignoring capacity and load factors, could generate 30 megawatts, then 30 megawatts * 8760 (hours in a year [24 * 365] could produce 262,800 megawatt hours of electricity annually. If an Oregon home uses 12 megawatts annually - then the number of homes a 30 megawatt plant could serve is 262,800/12, that is 21,900 homes annually. The attempt to equate the watt generation to watt consumption only illustrates the difficulty. As in the UtiliPoint article what a plant is capable of producing and its consumption are different. The capacity factor of the particular plant must be considered. In the article 75% is used for coal and 30% is used for wind turbine as examples. Thus, as in the article, a rated 1000 megawatt coal plant is only capable of producing 750 megawatts; and it follows that a wind turbine plant produces 300 megawatts. So arguably, the number of homes served has to be reduced by the capacity factor. Of course there is more to it, but it virtually impossible to come close to determining the usage from the rated wattage of a plant without knowing how efficient the plant is and where the consumption base is located. Generation and consumption costs are something else again. A great resource: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ask/electricity_faqs.asp

By: Paul Birkeland

Paul Birkeland — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:16:50 +0000

Ms. Weinstein:

Your logic is good, up to a point, and it does reflect the impact that the energy from the wind farm would have on the existing grid. But there is more to consider. The energy use is one thing, but the MW capacity has to be enough to support the combined peak load that all those houses would add to the grid, and the calculation you used only looked at the average peak demand which is the 12,000 kW divided by 8756 hours which works out to 1.36 kW. The peak demand is what the combination of thousands of homes would draw during a cold winter day or a hot summer day when the load is much higher than average, and in the industy that number is on the order of 2 or 3 times the average, or somewhere between 3 and 4 kW. If the wind turbine resource is added to a fully loaded grid, then (assuming the wind is blowing during the peak load) the 30 MW wind farm can only support about 7300 new homes. Which is a flawed analysis for wind resources, as the wind never blows when you need it to.

Anyway, your math in the article has a rounding error, the average MW is not .001, it is .001369, so instead of the windfarm supplying enough energy for 30,000 homes it can only supply about 22,000 homes.