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GVEA requests tariff filing stay for wind farm and cogeneration
Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Fairbanks electricity utility Golden Valley Electric Association has asked the Regulatory Commission of Alaska to order a stay on GVEA’s need to respond to a tariff request from Eco Green Generation LLC for a proposed new system for the generation of electricity and heat in the Fairbanks area.
Eco Green, in collaboration with Alaska Environmental Power, proposes building a wind farm at Delta Junction and a series of propane-fueled cogeneration units that would generate electricity, along with heat for the heating of buildings. The idea is that a control system would interlink the wind farm with the propane generators, so that the propane generators would counterbalance the fluctuating wind output, thus enabling the delivery of a firm and constant supply of electricity into GVEA’s electricity grid. The propane systems would be colocated with buildings that would use the generated heat.
Cheap propane would come from Canada by barge and rail, Eco Green has said.
Qualifying facility Eco Green claims that its proposed system would constitute a qualifying facility under the federal Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA. As a qualifying facility the planned system would be entitled to a documented tariff from GVEA. And, so, Eco Green has applied to GVEA for a tariff while also applying to FERC for confirmation of qualifying facility status for the planned system.
GVEA is questioning whether the proposed system would, in fact, be a qualifying facility and wants to wait until FERC rules on the matter, before expending time and money on developing a tariff. The utility said that Eco Green has filed for tariffs for two different proposals in less than two months. GVEA had stopped work on preparing a tariff for the first proposal when it discovered that Eco Green had not applied to FERC for certification. Bill Rhodes, manager of Eco Green, has told Petroleum News that his company had applied for certification, but that the application had run aground, because the FERC application process could not technically handle two different types of power generation.
Eco Green has now applied to FERC in relation to its second project proposal using application procedures that the company understands will now work.
Larger scale proposal In its RCA filing GVEA said that Eco Green’s second proposal is for a much larger scale of system than the first. There would be 21 project components spread over 170 miles. The nameplate capacity of 147.8 megawatts would roughly equate to GVEA’s average load, and the ability to deliver 100 megawatts of firm power would have a dramatic and disruptive impact on the utility’s operations. The preparation of a tariff would entail considerable work, GVEA told the commission.
Rhodes has told Petroleum News that the upscaling of the project came in response to requests from civic leaders for heat for schools and government facilities. And an upscaling of the cogeneration system enables more wind power to be counterbalanced and hence firmed up, he added.
GVEA questions certification GVEA questions from several perspectives the certification of the proposed system as a qualifying facility. In particular, the system could be viewed as a series of generating facilities rather than a single facility, the utility told the RCA. The FERC certification criteria for wind farms and cogeneration systems are different. Moreover, to be a qualifying facility, output from the system must be for industrial, commercial, residential or institutional purposes, rather than simply for sale to an electric utility, GVEA argued. GVEA also questioned Eco Green’s capability to build and operate a system of the envisaged scale.
Rhodes told Petroleum News that the specifications for the wind farm and the propane cogeneration units fit within the FERC parameters for a qualifying facility and that PURPA places no upper limit on the amount of cogeneration power that can be offered to GVEA. Thus each generation site, including the wind farm, would qualify under PURPA, as would the combined system, Rhodes said.
In terms of the credibility of the project, Rhodes commented that a power purchase agreement based on GVEA’s avoided costs would be viable and that Alaska Environmental Power already has 10 years of experience of operating a wind farm, presumably referencing the company’s existing smaller wind farm at Delta Junction.
- ALAN BAILEY
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