Wind energy briefly supplied more than half of all electricity demand for a group of 14 states in North America on Sunday February 12, a first for any US power grid.
Reuters reports that the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) said on Monday that wind power briefly reached 52.1 per cent of total power generation at 4:30am local time on Sunday, beating the previous penetration milestone of 49.2 per cent.
For SPP, which manages the flow of electricity on the high voltage power lines from Montana and North Dakota to New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana, wind power is the network’s third biggest source of generation, supplying about 15 per cent of power, behind natural gas and coal.
This comes from the more than 16,000MW of wind power capacity installed in the region, up from less than 400MW in the early 2000s .