A soon to be released wind energy integration study from the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) reveals that increasing wind penetration in North America to upwards of 35% will have little negative impact on the reliability of the  electricity grid.

Tom Levy, a senior wind energy engineer with Natural Resources Canada (he was with CanWEA when the study was started) told CanWEA’s Spring Forum on Tuesday that overall “everything will be fine.” There’s sufficient transmission, reserves and reliabiity that increasing wind penetration substantially won’t affect the North American grid.

The wind integration study, which has yet to be finalized, studied four scenarios of wind penetration testing various levels against a number of different variables. The penetration levels studies were 5%, 20% (two different scenarios) and 35%. It’s the first time a study on wind integration in an interconnected North American electricity grid has been done.

Not only will the North American grid remain reliable with much higher penetrations of wind energy, but the benefits will be broadly felt on both sides of the border. Both Canada and the United States will see lower emission from higher wind capacity, but Canada also gains additional opportunities to sell more clean electricity into the United States.

The study also revealed that many parts of Canada have excellent wind resources with some regions have capacity factors in the 30% range. There are others with a wind resource factor that tops 40%.

Levy also addressed arguments that because wind energy is inherently intermittent in nature that a considerable amount of backup or reserve power needs to be built along side. The study concludes the opposite, debunking the myth that wind needs a lot of backup power. Wind-based power generation, in fact, requires very little. It indicates that approximately 3% reserve power is needed.

He explained that generally this means 1 GW of wind energy would only need 30 MW of reserve capacity to deal with intermittency issues. And some regions will actually require much less than that 3%. For example, 1 GW of wind energy in British Columbia only needs 9 MW of reserve capacity, Levy said during his presentation to the CanWEA event.

The study also indicates that the costs for wind energy is very competitive with conventional sources. It indicates that a 20% wind penetration will see cost of approximately $45/MWh. Increasing that penetration to 35% improves the price even more, decreasing it to about $41/MWh.

Canadian Green Tech will have a number of articles from CanWEA’s Spring Forum in the coming days.