What a difference 10 years makes, said utilities deploying windpower at a press conference today in Los Angeles.

Speaking after a panel session at the WINDPOWER 2007 industry event, six power companies celebrated growth in wind energy, while they identified and marked challenges ahead.

U.S. wind power capacity increased by 27 percent in 2006 and the country had the fastest growing wind power capacity in the world in 2005 and 2006, according to Energy Department's first Annual Report on U.S. Wind Power Installation, Cost, and Performance Trends, released last Friday.

Paul Bonavia, president of the utilities group at Xcel Energy [1], an investor-owned utility which develops wind power in several states in the U.S., said his company was on track to double its wind developments this year from its holdings in December of last year.

And more utilities than ever are now apparently interested in wind.

"There were 42 utilities at this conference, the highest we've ever had," noted Pat Wood, chairman of the advisory board for Airtricity [2], and self-professed "godfather" of the Texas renewable portfolio standard.

Pat Wood on stage at WINDPOWER 2007, practicing his Corleone sneer (photo) >> [3]

"We're wanting to make wind as comfortable a part of a utility's resource portfolio as nuclear, coal, natural gas and hydro have been the last 80 years."

"We're here. We're finally at that great moment," he said.

Today, equipment vendors are selling turbines at record pace (see two big announcements yesterday in the Cleantech Group's Largest wind event underway [4].) But things weren't always so genial between wind industry and the utilities.

"A decade ago it was primarily an adversarial relationship," said Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), of the relationship of the wind energy and the utility industry. "Today, value is being found [for wind power] on both sides for the electrical utility customer."

Swisher said the two key strategic bottlenecks governing growth of the wind industry were distribution, and integrating large amounts of variable wind energy into the transmission system.

"Whether it's making better use of the existing grid (as Bonneville is pursuing), surgical transmission upgrades (such as with Cal ISO at Tehachapi [5]) or a national backbone transmission system (such as American Electric Power [6] has developed), these are all examples of the agenda that we need to work on and partner with the utility industry in the decades to come," said Swisher.

To better absorb wind's variability, Swisher pointed to consolidation of control areas, as well as efforts by the California Independent Systems Operator (Cal ISO) and a "virtual regional market" for electricity being developed by Bonneville in the American Northwest, as ways that windpower is being better integrated into the grid.

Jan Schori, general manager of Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), which provides power for more than one million residents in California's capital area, said his organization is pursuing "pump storage hydro" as a way to make wind more easily dispatchable, i.e. available upon demand.

"The concept of pump storage is that you pump water up the hill at night, when the loads are low, and bring it back down the hill during the day to meet peak load. Our maximum wind production is from 11 p.m. to midnight, so we may have a very good match."

SMUD has a proposal in front of federal regulators to add a 400 MW storage project to its existing hydro facilities.

Among those working to make wind dispatchable is a startup called General Compression (see the Cleantech Group's General Compression aims to double wind farm profits [7].)

Challenges aside, speakers were optimistic that today's hurdles would be overcome.

"Wind is an intermittent resource. But we've dealt with intermittent resources before," said Wood of Airtricity.

"We regard the problems as managable," said Bonavia of Xcel, saying his company had put wind as the centerpiece of its renewable strategy because the market had clearly spoken—suggesting that where there was a will, there would be a way.

"That's where it always has to start in business. Do people want this? Do people put a value on it? In our territories, from our customers, we're hearing resoundingly that they do want it."