The SPP power grid supplies a broad corridor that stretches almost 550,000 square miles from the Canadian border in Montana and North Dakota in the north to parts of New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana in the south.
In a statement released on Monday, Little Rock, Arkansas-based SPP said the company set a “wind-penetration record of 52.1 percent at 4:30 a.m., Feb. 12, becoming the first regional transmission organization (RTO) in North America to serve more than 50 percent of its load at a given time with wind energy. ”
Wind-penetration or wind energy penetration is the fraction of energy produced by the wind compared with the total generation. While it usually is expressed as an annual percentage, it can also be expressed in increments of months, days, or hours. As an example, wind power penetration in global electric power generation in 2015 was 3.5 percent.
With more and more turbines being installed across the country, SPP has become the first North American grid operator to get the majority of its electricity generation from wind power, reports Bloomberg. This recent record beats the grid’s previous record of 49.2 percent and the 48 percent set by a Texas grid operator reached in March, Derek Wingfield, a spokesman, said in an e-mail.
In the statement, Bruce Row, Southwest Power Pool’s vice president of operations, said, “Ten years ago we thought hitting even a 25 percent wind penetration level would be extremely challenging, and any more than that would pose serious threats to reliability. Now we have the ability to reliably manage greater than 50 percent. It’s not even our ceiling.”
Patch.com is reporting that according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2015, 11 states generated at least 10 percent of their electricity from wind power. And going back only a few years, to 2010, there were just three states that had a 10 percent share of wind power, so it looks like wind generation has really taken off.
