Hawaii/USA - Wind farm starts generating electricity on Maui

Kaheawa Wind Power’s wind farm began feeding electricity into Maui Electric Co.’s grid Thursday night. The wind was light and the flow was small – about a megawatt, but it worked. Actually, one tower was hooked up to the grid earlier Thursday, but there was not enough wind to move the vanes and nothing happened. It takes a wind of at least 8 miles an hour to move the massive vanes on the 20 towers. Long-term monitoring showed that Kaheawa Pastures is windiest at night anyway. Sure enough, in the night the wind rose.

Two towers were in operation Friday morning. Gresham said the remaining 18 would be fed into the grid at the rate of two or three a day. Over the course of a full year’s operation, Kaheawa Wind Power is expected to make unnecessary the importation of 244,000 barrels of petroleum. It also should help hold down consumer bills. Last year, when the world price of crude oil was about $43, MECO calculated that it cost about 13 cents per kilowatt hour to generate electricity, while it had agreed to pay Kaheawa 8 cents for about 70 percent of its output. (The formula is complex, depending on time of day, and includes escalators.) Now that oil is at nearly $70, the economic advantage of wind looks even better. And Kaheawa’s income should rise, because the other 30 percent will be sold to MECO at “avoided cost.” As fuel prices rise, MECO’s costs rise with them, and the wind watts become more valuable.

It is, however, “as available” and not “firm” power. As happened Thursday, when the wind doesn’t blow, the wind farm doesn’t generate. Its success did, however, generate offspring. In April, the UPC/Makana Nui partnership bid for and won a chance to build a 10.5 MW to 15 MW wind farm for Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. The site for the Kauai farm is still under study. The Maui farm has a maximum output of 30 MW, with massive 1.5 MW generators atop 20 180-foot towers. The scale of Kaheawa was massive for Maui. Kahului Harbor was barely able to squeeze the 117-foot-long vanes through, and the base sections of the towers weighed 115,000 pounds each.

A road had to be constructed up grades as steep as 17.5 degrees to reach the state-owned land 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the sea, and ordinary trucks couldn’t manage such loads. Retired Army tank transporters were used. The $70 million project came in somewhat over budget, which Gresham blamed mostly on shipping costs. Enormous pieces of the project came from three continents, with lead times of up to a year, and “it was difficult to get firm quotes” from shippers.

The project was delayed by high winds, which made it too dangerous to work atop the towers. Its biggest public challenge came last year, when a storm caused excessive runoff from the road construction. That and some excessive dumping of fill got the project a $17,000 fine from the Board of Land and Natural Resources. Wind energy is projected to supply as much as nine percent of Maui’s electricity, enough to supply approximately 11,000 households. Along with 12 MW of firm power from burning bagasse at Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co.’s mill, MECO expects to get around 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.