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ML&P won’t quantify Fire Island impacts Says wind farm has negative impacts but that it is not cost effective to quantify those impacts and claim compensation for them Alan Bailey Petroleum News
In a report filed with the Regulatory Commission of Alaska on Sept. 26, Chugach Electric Association told the commission that, although electric utility Municipal Light & Power has reported impacts on its systems from the wind farm on Fire Island near Anchorage, ML&P does not think that the monitoring necessary to quantify these impacts would be cost effective. Consequently, at present ML&P does not propose billing Chugach Electric for the negative impacts of the wind farm, Chugach Electric told the commission.
The wind farm, owned and operated by Cook Inlet Region Inc., went into operation in September 2012, supplying power to Chugach Electric, the farm’s sole customer. Commissioning of the facility followed a lengthy and heated debate over the potential impact of the farm’s intermittent power output on the stability and cost of power generation in the Alaska Railbelt power grid. The intermittent output needs to be counterbalanced by a varying power supply from elsewhere, with Chugach Electric primarily using the hydropower facility at Bradley Lake on the Kenai Peninsula as that variable, compensating power source.
Chugach Electric is in the process of installing a flywheel and battery system, to evaluate this technology as an alternative means of smoothing out the wind farm’s constantly varying output, the utility told the commission.
Compensation agreement When the wind farm went into operation Chugach Electric undertook to compensate other utilities using the Railbelt grid for any costs incurred as a consequence of the integration of the wind farm into the grid.
In a letter dated Sept. 18 to Chugach Electric ML&P said that its power generation system had experienced increased frequency variability since the wind farm had been connected to the grid, and that variations in the ML&P power output appeared to correlate with variations in the wind farm output. As a consequence, ML&P has concluded that the wind farm has had negative impacts on ML&P’s power output, despite the fact that ML&P is not a purchaser of Fire Island power, the utility wrote.
But the cost of additional new metering that would be necessary to quantify those impacts, to enable ML&P to bill for the impacts, would cost more than the compensation that ML&P would likely be entitled to receive, the letter said. Given the limited level of intermittent power generation on the grid and Chugach Electric’s planned evaluation of a flywheel and battery system, for the time being ML&P does not plan to claim compensation for the wind farm impacts, the letter said.
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