Wind power is booming on the open plains of eastern Colorado. Travel seven miles north of the town of Limon on Highway 71 and then head east on County Road 3p, a swath of dusty gravel running alongside new power lines: within minutes you’ll be surrounded by towering wind turbines in rows stretching for miles. Three large wind farms have been built in the area since 2011. A new one is going up this year.



Every few seconds, almost every one of the hundreds of turbines records the wind speed and its own power output. Every five minutes they dispatch data to high-performance computers 100 miles away at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. There artificial-intelligence-based software crunches the numbers, along with data from weather satellites, weather stations, and other wind farms in the state. The result: wind power forecasts of unprecedented accuracy that are making it possible for Colorado to use far more renewable energy, at lower cost, than utilities ever thought possible.



… ‘No one is more aware of the challenges of integrating wind power into the grid than Dayton Jones, a power plant dispatcher for Xcel Energy. From his perch on the 10th floor of the Xcel building in downtown Denver, he’s responsible for keeping the lights on in Colorado. Doing so requires matching power production to electricity demand by turning power plants on and off and controlling their output. Generating too much or too little power can damage electrical appliances or even plunge the grid into a blackout. Wind power, with its sharp fluctuations, makes his job harder.’...

 

Article in full: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/526541/smart-wind-and-solar-power/