“Your revenue stream is less and your return on investment is lower.” At a time when wind is locked in an urgent fight with natural gas for market share, curtailment could be the make-or-break issue. That’s twenty percent of your output.” It is a serious hit. “You’re moving from 40 percent capacity factor down to 32. In Texas, where transmission congestion is a significant problem because wind development has been big and fast, “It’s not unheard of for wind to be curtailed between ten and twenty percent,” Moland said. “All the financial models looking at rate of return on investment assume a certain level of wind availability.”
“All the cost of a wind plant is upfront,” Moland explained. “If you’re losing - curtailing - two percent of that generation,” Moland said, “it really has a big impact.” Capacity factor is reduced to 38 percent, perhaps five percent of a wind farm’s production. The best wind sites have about a 40 percent capacity factor, meaning they produce an average of 40 megawatts per 100 megawatts of nameplate capacity over “all the hours of a year.” “With wind, it is dictated by however much wind is blowing.” With most forms of generation, you would operate at whatever capacity factor is economic,” Moland said.
#TIMBERBORN WINDMILL NOT WORKING GENERATOR#
“Capacity factor measures the power output from a generator as a percentage of its maximum capability. “For most generation facilities,” Moland said, “if you stop putting power out, you also stop consuming the fuel so the consequences of being curtailed are sort of offset.” If, however, “you are not able to take advantage of the wind blowing, that wind is gone.” Moland went on, saying this practice “has a bigger impact on the economics of the plant.” “Curtailment,” Gary Moland, Director of Market Analysis with GL Garrard Hassan, explained, “is reducing generation at a facility below what it could be capable of producing.” At a rule-of-thumb 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, that makes the rough cost for one system’s 2010 generation capacity losses $37,240,000 more (at $57,680,000) than losses in 2009 ($20,440,000).Įven in energy generation, those are big numbers - but the rate at which they have increased is even more intimidating to a wind industry struggling to keep costs competitive. Some 292,000 megawatt-hours of wind power were curtailed by the Midwest transmission system operator in 2009 in 2010, that figure jumped to about 824,000 megawatt-hours.
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