Statewide Air Emissions Calculations from Wind and Other Renewables, Summary Report

Abstract

The 79th Legislature, through Senate Bill 20, House Bill 2481 and House Bill 2129, amended Senate Bill 5 to enhance its effectiveness by adding 5,880 MW of generating capacity from renewable energy technologies by 2015, and 500 MW from non-wind renewables. This legislation also requires PUC to establish a target of 10,000 megawatts of installed renewable capacity by 2025, and requires TCEQ to develop methodology for computing emissions reductions from renewable energy initiatives and the associated credits. In this Legislation the Laboratory is to assist TCEQ in quantifying emissions reductions credits from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, through a contract with the Texas Environmental Research Consortium (TERC) to develop and annually calculate creditable emissions reductions from wind and other renewable energy resources for the state’s SIP. The Energy Systems Laboratory, in fulfillment of its responsibilities under this Legislation, submits its second annual report, “Statewide Air Emissions Calculations from Wind and Other Renewables,” to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The report is organized in several deliverables: • A Summary Report, which details the key areas of work; • Supporting Documentation; • Supporting data files, including weather data, and wind production data, which have been assembled as part of the first year’s effort. This executive summary provides summaries of the key areas of accomplishment this year, including: • continuation of stakeholder’s meetings; • review of electricity savings reported by ERCOT; • analysis of wind farms using 2005 data; • preliminary reporting of NOx emissions savings in the 2006 Integrated Savings report to TCEQ; • prediction of on-site wind speeds using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN); • improvements to the daily modeling using ANN-derived wind speeds; • development of a degradation analysis; • development of a curtailment analysis; • analysis of other renewables, including: PV, solar thermal, hydroelectric, geothermal and landfill gas; • estimation of hourly solar radiation from limited data sets;