Wind and Natural Gas: Best Friends, Worst Enemies

DENVER—Managing wind power makes flying a kite look easy.

Wind usually blows the most between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. when people need electricity the least. But every now and then, the weather gets surprisingly windy at other times. That's when a handful of people on the 10th floor of a downtown Denver office building suddenly get very busy.

"They're really scrambling during that time frame," said Mike Boughner, Xcel Energy's manager of generation control and dispatch, while giving a recent tour of the company's "trading floor," where traders buy and sell electricity and other employees manage the power of the company's entire electric-grid operations throughout the Western and Central U.S., 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "They're calling all the plants, both natural gas and coal, and telling them to back down as fast as they can."

This happened one recent Tuesday—which just happened to be Election Day—because it got much windier during the daytime than both the pair of meteorologists and advanced forecasting systems employed by Xcel Energy had predicted.

READ MORE:  http://www.nationaljournal.com/new-energy-paradigm/wind-and-natural-gas-best-friends-worst-enemies-20131124