Estimating the value of additional wind and transmission capacity in the rocky mountain west

The expansion of wind-generation in the United States poses significant challenges to policy-makers, particularly because wind's intermittency and unpredictability can exacerbate problems of congestion on a transmission-constrained grid. Understanding these issues is necessary if optimal development of wind energy and transmission is to occur. This paper applies a model that integrates the special concerns of electricity generation to empirically consider the challenges of developing wind resources in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. Given the lack the high frequency data needed to address the special problems of intermittency and congestion, our solution is to create a dispatch model of the region and to use simulations to generate the necessary data, then use this data to understand patterns that have occurred as wind resources have been developed.