Wind Producers Getting Paid to not Produce

[malakai2]

7. Unless the local ratepayers are forced to cover the RTC

Which is exactly what FERC decided in overruling Bonneville Power Administration and all the interested parties save Iberdrola and three or four other wind companies who were curtailed. When this hits people who already have the misfortune of living in the Dakotas and they are suddenly stuck paying wind companies' "rightful" RTC profits out of their own pockets, they will be personally subsidizing power generators under federal policy. If the RTC must be paid because the wind companies are somehow entitled to electricity they are not generating, it needs to come out of the general treasury and not local ratepayers' pockets.

For the record, the situation here is that Bonneville is responsible under federal mandate for maintaining grid reliability and low price for consumers, local electric coops and the like, which then go on to sell power on the retail market. The dams from which Bonneville draws part of its supply needed to release water to alleviate reservoir flooding, which oversupplied the grid. Bonneville's response under the existing plan was to curtail first the coal generators tied into the grid, then the wind generators, to meet their legal obligation to protect the dams/rivers and to protect the grid. The curtailed coal and wind generators were supplied with electricity from the hydro generation to cover their supply obligations. The wind producers were unhappy with this because they felt Bonneville also owed them for the Production Tax Credit dollars they would have earned if they hadn't been curtailed (as the wind was blowing that day). Bonneville refused to pay the RTC, arguing all the generators had been made whole by the electricity that had been supplied. FERC sided with the wind companies. Now local ratepayers will be paying wind companies PTC money whenever they are curtailed.

At some point, I wonder if there will be enough wind generation in regions on windy days that all wind generators will be curtailed to some extent, and then at that point whether or not ratepayers would still be expected to pay PTC money to wind generators for electricity not produced.