Taking care of business while protecting the environment
An interview with Paul Manson, president and director of the Sea Breeze Power Corporation with headquarters in Vancouver

interview by Joseph Roberts

Power-generating wind turbines could supply BC with more electricity than anywhere else in the world.

Joseph Roberts: What is the relationship between climate change and our power choice?
Paul Manson: It’s not just that climate change will affect our power base in terms of bringing drought and decreasing the reliability of large dam hydro, it can be looked at as well, that it’s actually our power base that is changing the climate.
The largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions is production of electricity through coal combustion. Most people think of transportation and diesel trucks and so on as big CO2 producers, but it’s actually electricity from coal. It’s the release of all of this carbon dioxide which science is gradually beginning to believe firms up the theory of climate change, which itself may be very, very rapid.
Q: What can be done?
A: If we envision our job is to live harmoniously we have let things get far, far out of balance. It’s having an effect and we’re just beginning to deal with that.
So, the various strategies we can pursue are sequestration to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. One of the technologies we have at hand, which can be implemented very quickly on an extremely broad scale, right off the shelf at a competitive cost with other means of electrical generation, is wind.
Q: What kind of wind resource do we have in BC?
A: Well, one of the leading banks in the world, the Fortis Bank of Belgium and leading bank in terms of financing renewable energy, did a survey several years ago along with the World Energy Council and the Petroleum Economist. It was a survey of all types of energy around the world and it determined that BC came out number one in terms of wind resources.
Q: In the whole world?
A: Yes. Actually their phrasing was north of Vancouver, British Columbia. In coastal BC the prevailing winds come from the west. Any strip of land with a western shoreline, right up and down the Americas, has a very good chance of being a source of wind for power generation. The higher you go up from the ground the less turbulence there is, the less interference and typically the stronger the winds are. In terms of tower heights, this means there’s a constant struggle to raise the height of the turbines because the power that can be extracted increases, the higher you go.
There’s also a very interesting relationship between the amount of power that can be extracted from the wind and the wind speed. The power is a cube of the wind speed.
Q: Can you give us an example?
A: Roughly speaking, the power that can be extracted from a wind speed of nine metres per second is 50 percent more than that of a wind of seven and a half metres per second. Sort of like the Richter scale. A wind of 35 mph delivers twice the energy of a wind of 25 mph.
Q: What happens when the wind gets up to 60 mph.
A: With the equipment these days, large turbines begin to lock down. Either the blades feather or brake systems kick in. When the winds get really extreme, the machine stops altogether. It protects itself. It’s very sophisticated equipment. Modern turbine blades are as aerodynamic as jet wings. It’s the same principle. These blades aren’t being blown around; they’re being pulled around aerodynamically.
Q: If we continue on the path we’re presently on without adopting wind, what direction will we go in BC? After they can’t build any more dams what are the options?
A: Well, potentially there are many types of renewable energy. Wind just happens to be the most advanced economically right now and they’ve reached a point with its technology where it’s competitive with other types of power generation. With increasing research and funds for research there will be breakthroughs in solar energy, tidal energy, wave energy and biomass. There’s a great deal more interest in geothermal than there was a couple of years ago.
So, wind is not the only option but it is off the shelf and has proven itself increasingly to be competitive with all other types of generation be that nuclear, coal, or natural gas.
Q: People tend to be creatures of habit. If we’ve been using a particular way of generating energy we’ll keep doing it until we can’t do it any more or something better comes up.
A: I think part of the answer here in British Columbia lies in a current call for tenders for power to be generated on Vancouver Island. The call started out with about 40-some applications from a variety of sources. It’s been narrowed down to 21 proposals involving natural gas, one involving biomass and one for a small hydro dam.
One of the reasons for this I think is that the present mindset in BC is fearful of the intermittent quality of wind. They perceive it as an energy source that is only available when the wind is blowing. Actually there are countries like Denmark where upwards of 30 percent of all of the electrical energy in the country now is generated from wind. Denmark has succeeded with this by marrying wind to Scandinavian hydro sources, notably in Norway and Sweden.
Simplistically speaking when the wind is blowing they use the wind generation. When it’s not, they use electricity generated out of the storage dams.
Q: So, the water reservoirs can be used to their maximum capacity.
A: That’s right. And in a situation such as we have on the west coast of North America, where we have had a drought for a number of years, adding a large component of wind to the mix would allow the storage dams to fill up with more water over time. BC, Manitoba and Quebec are the main provinces in Canada with a large stored hydro capability.
Quebec, which has recognized this opportunity, recently put out a call for 1,000 megawatts of wind energy. It had a response to that of 4,400 megawatts in proposals and in July put out a call for another thousand megawatts of wind energy. To put this into perspective, in Canada we have only about 300 megawatts of wind energy installed right now.
Q: So they’re tripling it. What is a megawatt and what does that look like in terms of supplying energy to homes?
A: If you had a piece of equipment generating a megawatt, a thousand kilowatts, it would be providing enough energy at any given moment for about 1,000 homes.
Q: A kilowatt per home.
A: That’s right, per hour. So if you have a light bulb which is 60 watts it would be like there are 15 light bulbs going on in the house all the time. However, when you have a piece of wind equipment it’s not going to be producing its full output at that level all the time.
Typically around the world what’s called the capacity factor measures the percentage of time that the equipment would be running the equivalent of full output. With wind machines it’s around 35 percent, so an average wind farm in the industry around the world would have a capacity factor of 30-35 percent. The best farms in the world typically are at 40 percent. Occasionally, very rarely, you’ll have one up in the high 40s.
The turbines used right now have been increasing in size enormously. Five years ago the average size being installed was around 2/3 of a megawatt, 660 kilowatts. The largest commercial size right now is three megawatts and the largest size deployed on a research basis is 4 1/2 megawatts.
Q: How tall are they?
A: The tallest building in Vancouver, the 35 storey Wall Centre, is significantly shorter than the latest generation of machines measured to the top of the blades.
Q: We could put a wind turbine on the top of the Wall Centre.
A: Actually in different parts of the world municipal bylaws are changing to allow installation of smaller wind turbines around the city. Amsterdam is the leader and it’s rumored that San Francisco will be the first North American city for that.
Net metering is another interesting concept, just brought in, I understand, to BC. It’s a policy which allows home or farm generators of renewable energy to sell their power into the grid. So, any home piece of equipment will now have the right to feed into the grid and take power out of the grid as well. That’s a very progressive step.
Q: So a person not only is a user of electricity, but also can be a producer of electricity?
A: Exactly.
Q: That was a long time coming. When did BC Hydro get on board?
A: Just in the last couple of months. A number of US states have had it for years and it’s worked out well.
Q: There’s been talk about both the federal and provincial governments lining up cabinet ministers to promote offshore oil drilling. A lot of people I know who love the coastline see that as a potential pollution hazard. How do offshore wind farms compare to offshore oil?
A: They aren’t necessarily exclusive. Both represent different sources of energy. One obviously is cleaner than the other. My own personal view is that fossil substances should not be used as fuels, that there are much higher purposes for the natural gas, petroleum and coal reserves that we have. Someday perhaps we may be separating them into hydrogen for the hydrogen economy and use the carbon leftovers for carbon fibre.
Q: In terms of the history of actually getting wind power integrated into the grid, who’s ahead of the game? Who started it?
A: Well, actually it got started in California on a utility scale. Wind has been used for millennia as a source of power for grinding grain and so on. In the 1980s the wind industry got started in California, but it was supported by tax credits, which got repealed, so it died off in the US.
Around the same time Denmark had started to research wind energy and presently an extremely small country has three of the world’s five largest wind manufacturers which employ over 40,000 people.
Q: What do manufacturing industries build? What does it take to produce wind equipment that’s effective?
A: The components are fairly simple in terms of industrial understanding. You have a good strong foundation and a tower, which these days can be as high as 250 feet or 80 metres. Then atop the tower you have a generating unit, which has a shaft, and on the end of the shaft is typically a three-bladed propeller. The propellers are very sophisticated in terms of aerodynamic design and it’s the design of the blades more than anything, which has really brought windpower into the modern age of electrical generation.
Q: Who’s creating solutions here in BC?
A: There are around half a dozen wind developers, that is to say companies that have identified potential sites for erecting and building wind turbines.
There is discussion to attract turbine manufacturers to BC, but the discussions are at an indeterminate stage. However, this is a technology which is very easily transferred from other parts of the world. Once an analysis is done and it’s determined there is an economical wind resource, there would be no difficulty obtaining the technology. There are on the order of 100,000 wind turbines around the world right now. There’s an installed base of around 50,000 megawatts.
Just to put this into perspective, BC has a hydro generating capacity of around 11,000 megawatts. Germany alone has more wind installed power than BC has total hydroelectric capacity.
Q: Can you expand on that?
A: Germany, Spain and Denmark are the three leaders in Europe in terms of being most active with the industry. England is coming right along; it has committed around $15 billion to the industry. In fact the European Wind Energy Association has set a projection by 2020 of an installed base of 180,000 megawatts. That’s roughly enough power to serve the needs of around 200 million people, within the next 15 years. That’s 40 percent of the total European population.
Q: That’s just huge. You said earlier there are all these tenders for selling power on Vancouver Island. What is the electricity to be used for, people or industry?
A: Presently there’s a constraint on the Island as to how much power can be drawn off the grid over there because the transmission lines which go over to Vancouver Island are limited. You can’t just pump endless amounts through them.
There are two lines, which are scheduled to be withdrawn from service in 2007, which would put further constraints on the system.
Q: And maybe that power can be sold for higher prices to California during crises and they don’t really want to send it to Vancouver Island. Has anyone done a study of supply of electricity vs. happiness? I think Vancouver Island - you call it a constraint on growth, but maybe that’s slowed down the pace of life and improved the quality.
A: It’s an interesting philosophical question, but the reality is that when too much power gets drawn out of the system you get brownouts and blackouts and certain industries, like pulp mills, which typically use lots of power, have to shut down on very short notice. It can be very expensive, on the order of several million dollars.
Q: Which means they’d cut fewer trees, which means climate change wouldn’t happen as quickly?
A: These are all cogent arguments for living a more simple life.
Q: Power for what purpose - for more money or to increase our quality of happiness.
A: Well, either way, if we’re going to be consuming power in any quantities it’s better for it to be coming from a renewable source rather than coal.
Q: How does this all relate to health?
A: Wind energy does not emit harmful pollutants or carbon dioxide, other than what gets emitted in the construction of the equipment. Once the equipment is up and running the wind is a constant and reliable resource. You may not know whether it’s going to be going in the next hour, but the predictability of wind has become a fine science. Over the period of a year you’re going to have a very good idea of how much a particular wind site is going to put out.
This means that, cleverly handled, wind is becoming increasingly capable of supplanting other, more damaging, types of power generation, notably coal. There was a call by Toronto’s main officer of health in the last couple of weeks for more renewables because of skyrocketing asthma rates.
Q: The burning of coal in Wales, Scotland and England created huge amounts of lung disease, not to mention what it did to miners.
A: So, you have the two elements. On the immediate day-to-day scale you have the health hazards which come with ordinary electricity consumption and on the larger scale you have the climate change which is happening as we release more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Most economists these days do not really yet take into account what are very gently called the externalities such as health aspects of the consequences of the way we generate electricity.
In terms of electricity prices wind adds stability. You have enormous volatility in natural gas prices these days and you have real commodity risk. You have supply questions. You have very uncertain future prices. In fact, most gas companies these days won’t sell contracts for more than five years out. So, you have large investments being made with a great deal of uncertainty and risk as to what the fuel component will cost over a period the life of the investment.
With wind it’s a different story. You can measure how much wind there will be on a given site, you know it’s not going to be varying that much from year to year. A generator of wind generated electricity can confidently write a contract going on 20 or 30 years so it adds a great deal of stability to the whole industry.
At least on Vancouver Island a very careful analysis of the costs of producing electricity from wind as opposed to natural gas indicated a production price for wind generated electricity of 7 1/2 cents per kilowatt hour, whereas new gas generation is expected to come in at 9 cents per kilowatt hour. So, wind is much more competitive than natural gas on the Island.
Q: The cost of wind isn’t going up.
A: That’s right. It brings stability.
Q: Are there lobby groups that are rallying to try to get their source of power to win? The average citizen probably doesn’t have a clue as to the wars that go on between different businesses to basically win the market. The market could be served by many different kinds of power service, probably best by a mix.
A: Quite right. Some of these, like natural gas, are rapidly pricing themselves out of the market, whereas perhaps five years ago gas was the choice and wind was not. Now the tide has turned. I think we’ve entered the age of renewables with competitively priced wind. It’s broken the price barrier.
The issues of health and environment and climate change may very well be significant and increasingly powerful drivers in the future, but the main driver is economic and it’s the competitive element, the characteristic of wind and the fact that its price is continues to drop year after year and is expected to keep dropping.
Q: That sounds like the antithesis of all the other sources, including atomic energy, which requires a huge babysitting period of hundreds of thousands of years for nuclear waste.
A: Plus the cost of cleaning up nuclear leaks isn’t taken into account.
Q: There won’t be any wind spills to deal with. What about offshore oil drilling? Most of the rigs are built in Taiwan or Korea and are just barged across the ocean, so that industry doesn’t create all the jobs it’s supposed to.
A: I think economics is really going to be the acid test for what type of power generation becomes dominant over the next 15 to 25 years. Wind is the fastest growing segment of the energy industry worldwide right now.
One of the reasons why offshore wind is attracting such interest is the wind coming across the ocean is clean wind. There are no trees, no houses, nothing to create turbulence. Of course, when you have this huge equipment spinning in the wind, even though it’s moving relatively slowly - 20 rpm perhaps the typical speed of the blades - gusts of wind or turbulence create enormous pressure on this equipment. So, the less turbulence you have the more efficient and the less wear and tear and maintenance your machine will require.
Also, I guess, there’s the visual element. Some people love watching windmills. They’re a beautiful marriage of form and function. Other people don’t like to see them. One of the advantages of offshore wind farms is out of sight, out of mind. This is enormous equipment they’re building now. Towers go up about 300 to 400 feet with the blades. There’s one proposal for 75 miles off the coast of Scotland with cables running to shore. So, of course, they have to have a situation where it’s shallow and where there’s good foundation rock.
Q: How can we get more information?
PM There are numerous interesting links posted on our website.
seabreezepower.com



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