The Hudson Valley Center for Innovation is trying to spur investment in wind power in the Hudson Valley in a partnership with community colleges: a new cog in the regional bid to spur the Hudson Valley economy via a cluster of renewable energy businesses.
“What we are looking to do is invite small and medium wind development companies from all over the world to come to the Hudson Valley to have their systems analyzed and eventually certified for sale in North America,” said Les Neumann, managing director of the HVCFI.
Called the Wind Power Initiative, the program will focus on late-stage technology development, research, testing, data acquisition and analysis. The program includes wind-turbine training, testing and analysis at selected community colleges throughout the Hudson Valley, including Ulster, Orange and Sullivan counties, along with its primary academic partner, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
“Its a wonderful forward-thinking vision,” said Sullivan Community College President Mamie Howard-Golladay. She said the HVCFI already has a satellite office on the campus and said the new program “absolutely” dovetails with the college”™s efforts to create a strong curriculum and job training center for so-called “green collar” jobs.
She said the new HVCFI Initiative is a further step in a steadily evolving bid to bring energy business to this area. She noted a wind turbine is already being constructed on her college campus as part of a test by a company that hopes to manufacture wind energy products. She said the structure is scheduled to supply data, and power, in June.
The Initiative will establish other testing facilities throughout the region to assist developers in meeting new Small Wind Certification protocols that will be announced shortly by the American Wind Energy Association, Neumann said.
Wind is a growing section of New York”™s power supply, but still a tiny segment, totaling less than 5 percent of the power. The New York Independent System Operator (ISO), the entity that runs the state electrical grid, said the amount of wind power generation in the state grew by 300 percent in the past 12 months. By the end of March, the installed generation capacity of windmills reached 1,274 mega-watts, up from 424 megawatts in March 2008.
For comparison, Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan produces 2,000 megawatts at full power. A megawatt is a thousand kilowatts, or enough to power about 1,000 homes. Many typical fossil-fueled power plants produce about 500 megawatts.
Would-be wind magnates have filed application for another 8,017 megawatts of wind project proposals with the ISO agency for study. ISO reviews all proposals for connecting any generator to the grid. Their data show New York’s wind turbines recently hit a peak for generation at a single moment, reaching a total of 1,000 megawatts Feb. 19. That was about 5 percent of the 21,000 megawatts of total system demand then.
Those totals, however, are certain to grow. Last September, Iberdrola Wind Energy took over Energy East, a company with almost 2 million customers in New York. As part of its approval for that deal the New York state Public Service Commission required Iberdrola invest $2 billion in wind energy in New York
“Wind is the fastest-growing source of power generation in New York state and wind farms are the single-largest segment of future power projects on the horizon,” said Stephen Whitley, president and CEO of the ISO.
But Neumann said the scale of wind power is not necessarily the huge wind turbines often pictured, but small- and medium-sized turbines designed for the urban environment.
“Here in the Northeast, we live in a place where light wind is predominant so this is a natural evolution for wind power,” said Neumann, saying the area can use a distributed generation approach by putting wind turbines on apartment buildings, bridges and rooftops. “Cities have the highest concentration of potential users and so we invite companies to come near where the greatest potential market is,” to develop their products and get them certified.
He said the Initiative is a non profit organization and said it was in some ways modeled on The Solar Energy Consortium. “This is not a competing technology. It”™s a complementary technology with solar power,” said Neumann.
Howard-Golladay agrees the two power sources work best as partners. “I believe just as the solar power is taking off in the Hudson Valley this wind initiative will be crucial especially in the Sullivan County area. It is a Hudson Valley initiative but we have already taken the lead in wind power on our campus.
“We are well positioned to start immediately adding workers to design wind turbines, install them, asses them service them. The scale fits very well with the people we are educating and training,” said Howard-Golladay, adding, “Certainly we believe it will attract jobs and companies to the area.”
