More Trouble for Georgetown Electric

The co-editor of the Wilco Sun penned an insightful editorial in the June 25th edition of the paper describing how close Texas is to demand exceeding capacity and how the renewables are not meeting their potential capability when the wind doesn't blow.

He also notes that the solar facility is not producing electricity much of the time. It is time to ask the City why the solar farm is not meeting their contractual requirements.

One has to wonder if the terms of the contract changed when the solar farm was purchased out of SunEdison's bankruptcy by NRG Energy.

Here is the editorial:

Sun Editorial by Clark Thurmond 6-26-2019
Late Sunday afternoon I took a break from lying around the house to check ERCOT’s electricity spot price web page — a color- coded Texas map filled with dots. Roll your cursor across one and a pop-up appears with the spot price for that location. The state is usually a mix of greens and blues, indicating a price range of $15-$25 per megawatt hour. On Sunday afternoon Texas was red. The spot price was almost $800 everywhere. 

A download of the afternoon’s pricing data told an interesting story. Around 2:15 p.m. the average megawatt/hour spot price for wholesale electricity was $26. Texas was heating up and our air-conditioners were running harder. A little after 3 p.m., the average price had risen to $799. 

By 4:50 p.m. the average spot price had reached $997. Suddenly, only a minute later, it leapt to $6,000! 

Did additional generating units spin up to take advantage of the price spike? Perhaps so, because almost immediately the price started down and by 6 p.m. it was back to a normal $21. 

Sunday afternoon was a dramatic demonstration of what can happen when Texas’s high summer usage gets close to the generating capacity on the grid that day. 

At 4:34 p.m. the state-wide generating capacity was 63,827 megawatts. Demand was 62,808 megawatts — only 1.6 percent below capacity. 

Our city folk have said previously that our peak usage in the summer is around 150 megawatts per hour. If we were able to sell our surplus wind energy during those peaking hours, that would give us one of the promised benefits — making money by selling our surplus power. 

But Sunday afternoon, the wind was a no-show. Using ERCOT hourly wind production data for the Panhandle, I estimate that our wind farm produced only 5-7 megawatt hours of electricity during the 4 o’clock hour. If Georgetown was using 150 megawatts per hour at that time, where was the missing power coming from? Were we buying $6,000 electricity? 

And our bedeviled solar farm? It appears from the ERCOT hourly pricing data that it went live at around 3 p.m, perhaps to take advantage of the high prices paid for power. After 5 p.m., with spot prices back to normal, it appears that the solar farm shut down. Other solar farms stayed active another two hours.