Duke Energy has announced a 300MW wind power project near Searchlight, Nevada. What I’m trying to figure out is why they would build such a facility in a marginal wind power area (class 3 on a scale from 1-7).
While I generally applaud wind power (its probably closer to grid parity than solar is right now), this one seems a little odd. Yes, the wind farm will be not too distant from the Hoover Dam and its high capacity power transmission lines (40 miles as the crow flies) when compared to building wind power elsewhere in Nevada (east-central area, near Ely). But there are a few other questions the use of wind brings up.
Most of the land around Searchlight is shown to be a class 3 site per the DOE, and the American Wind Energy Association states, “sites with a Wind Power Class rating of 4 or higher are now preferred for large scale wind plants.” This would indicate that the class 3 site they’re trying to use is marginal. There are some small pockets of class 4 and 5 areas near Laughlin, Nevada, and some small class 4 areas in the area near Searchlight.
Why not solar? Nevada has extremely abundant solar power resources. Nevada Solar One out near Boulder City in the Eldoado Valley, and building a similar facility (though hopefully air cooled and not water cooled) would be a more efficient use of resources – using mediocre wind resources vs abundant solar resources. Ausra is a local, Las Vegas based company that makes parts for solar thermal plants, and they could be worked into the equation to start making the necessary parts for another 100MW of solar thermal facilities.
However 300MW of wind power is a lot of steel and fiberglass for the hardware. More importantly for the struggling southern Nevada economy is jobs. While the O&M jobs will be fewer, the construction jobs will be a boost.
2 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Where are the class 4 and 5 Laughlin sites located?
They appear as a few specs on this PDF map.