Public Power - January/February 2008 - (Page 25) in 1990 to just above $1,500 per kilowatt in 1998.” The experiences of wind generators in the Midwest Independent System Operator region provide further evidence that RTOs are not cultivating a growth in renewables. Last November, the governors of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin told Midwest ISO President & CEO T. Graham Edwards that wind developers in their states face a crisis “as a result of the current Midwest ISO policies governing the interconnection of wind resources to the transmission grid.” Edwards told the governors the Midwest ISO is managing a queue with requests to interconnect 68,000 megawatts of new generation from 282 projects. “Of this amount, approximately 51,000 megawatts are from 224 wind projects,” he said. “At the current pace, we will see a 64 percent increase in requests over last year. To put this into perspective, the entirety of the state mandates for wind-generated energy in the Midwest ISO footprint amounts to approximately 12,600 megawatts. By the end of the year, the Midwest ISO anticipates that 2,233 megawatts of wind will be online and available.” Edwards said Midwest ISO has interconnection agreements for another 2,370 megawatts of wind, but developers opted to suspend the interconnection process. The Carnegie Mellon researchers performed a “feasible generalized least squares” analysis of possible causal factors behind development of wind energy resources. “The relationship between wind and RTOs was negative and statistically significant,” said Spees and Lave. “For solar and geothermal, too few states have developed these resources to allow a confident statement about the relationship between development of these renewables and membership in an RTO,” they said. “For wood waste and biomass waste, the models did not fit the data well. Membership in an RTO was negatively correlated with the development of these resources under the [feasible generalized least squares analysis], although the relationships are so weak that they do not pass significance tests.” The study was funded by APPA’s Electric Market Reform Initiative. ❚ www.APPAnet.org JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2008 25 http://www.csweek.org http://www.phase-a-matic.com http://www.APPAnet.org
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