If you are interested in
renewable energy, something extremely remarkable happened in Georgetown last
year. Our fair city, with no fanfare
whatsoever, approved and signed a contract with a wind farm that could provide
over 85% of our electricity when it comes on line in 2015. That much wind power in our portfolio will
definitely put us on the top shelf of cities committed to renewable energy.
Georgetown has entered a 20
year agreement with EDF Renewable Energy for half the power produced by Spinning
Spur 3, a 194 megawatt wind farm under construction in Oldham County Texas, 50
miles west of Amarillo. Garland Texas is
taking the other half. (Spinning Spur 1
is partially owned by Google, which has a long-term goal of 100% renewable
energy.) Jim Briggs, general manager of
utilities, can’t disclose the exact price we will be paying when the wind farm
is completed, but it is very competitive with electricity generated from
natural gas. So competitive in fact,
that Mr. Briggs expects he will eventually be able to decrease customer rates
for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, lowering our utility bills.
West Texas wind power has recently
been selling for historic low prices, as low as $28 per megawatt-hour (2.8
cents per kilowatt-hour) and Georgetown’s cost for wind energy is now locked in
for the next 20 years at today’s low price. In contrast, the price of electricity from
natural gas fluctuates every fifteen minutes.
It is cheap when demand is low, but when the weather turns bad and
demand skyrockets, like it did during the recent Polar Vortex or like it
routinely does on August afternoons, wholesale electricity prices frequently
shoot up to $500/megawatt-hour, and in a real pinch can go as high as
$5000/megawatt-hour. It doesn’t take too
many hours of the high prices to burn through anything you saved with cheap gas
during off hours.
Georgetown will be
contracting for so much wind power that during the early morning and late night
hours we won’t be able to use it all, and excess power will be sold to ERCOT at
a profit. During the mid afternoon, the
wind won’t quite cover all our demand, so that is when we will fulfill our
other old contracts for fossil fuel energy.
Of course mid afternoon is a wonderful time for solar generation. As some of those old energy contracts expire,
Mr. Briggs is looking for some competitively priced commercial solar projects
to cover that expensive midday gap when cities and businesses scramble for
enough electricity to keep the air conditioning on.
Besides not emitting
greenhouse gases and not being dependent on a global fuel commodity, wind
energy has another great advantage for a hot, dry state. It does not require water. Coal fired power plants use hundreds of
thousands of acre-feet of water every year for cooling. Fracking for natural gas also requires large
amounts of water to be injected into the wells.
Ironically, Texas may run out of water before we run out of natural gas.
One might well ask how
Georgetown became a green energy city so suddenly and without the usual civic
angst that might accompany a convention center or a drive-through hamburger
stand. A number of stars aligned to
create this “windfall.” First, Texas has
installed a lot of wind turbines, leading the nation in wind energy. Since wind farms do not have big batteries,
when the electricity is generated it has to be sold. Second, competitive renewable energy zone
(CREZ) transmission lines were recently completed and allow electricity from
west Texas wind farms to be brought to the population centers such as Dallas,
Houston, and Austin. Third, and most
fortuitous for us, the federal production tax credits (PTC) for wind energy
were set to expire on December 31, 2013.
To be eligible for the PTC, EDF Renewable Energy had to have contracts for
Spinning Spur 3 in place by the end of the year. In other words, a little breeze blew
Georgetown Utilities through a very narrow window of opportunity to purchase
clean energy for less than dirty energy would cost. Thank you, Mr. Briggs and the Georgetown City
Council, for not closing the window.
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