VT Governor Pete Shumlin gets schooled on wind power variability

[kristopher]

7. There is a history to this

The regional system operator was calling on all standby generation - every coal plant, every natural gas plant and even every oil plant was put into service, yet they curtailed the wind project. There were repeated requests made by various groups to explain the decision, but the system operator steadily refused to provide an explanation. Finally they said that even though the regional demand was extremely high, the wind farm was designed to service only local demand and therefore they curtailed the output.

Critics of the decision noted that local demand was extremely high and several unused oil generators owned by the wind farm operator were put into service.

The backstory is that when the wind farm was going through the approval process the system operator identified a need for a $10M grid upgrade in the area. Apparently the evidence that this upgrade was needed solely on the basis of a 63MW wind farm was pretty thin and the regulator allowed the wind farm to be built without making them pay for the $10M upgrade that the people earning money off the transmission system wanted.

If they were putting all of that generation online, the power that the wind farm wasn't allowed to sell was probably worth a small fortune. This stinks of an anti-renewable inspired effort to extort the wind farm into making an upgrade to the ISO's system.