A dose of reality from this article at Oregon Public Broadcasting:
Paying Wind Generators Not To Produce Power
Chances are your utility bill has gone up this year if you live in the Northwest. One small part of the reason may be that you’re paying for electricity that was never generated.
The Bonneville Power Administration operates the federal hydropower dams in the Columbia Basin. In springtime, during snow melt, there can be so much water in the river that – combined with the output of the dozens of wind farms that have cropped up in Oregon and Washington – there’s more electricity in the system than anyone can use.
Dam operators could dump the extra water over the spillways. But as the BPA’s Doug Johnson explains, that causes problems for salmon and other fish.
“When there’s a lot of water coming down, what happens is you get a lot of dissolved gas in the water,” he said. “This can be harmful to those fish.”
To avoid that, the excess water gets run through the turbines. This leaves BPA with lots of electricity and nowhere to put it. So, Johnson says, there’s really only one solution.
“What’s left is our ability in an orderly fashion to take wind off the system and serve the load with hydro,” he said.
But, shutting down the wind generators has a cost. When the BPA takes them off line, it compensates the wind farms for the costs of not generating electricity when the wind is blowing.
Under the policy known as the Oversupply Management Protocol, so-called “oversupply events” mean the wind generators are entitled to compensation — not only for the value of the power they didn’t get to sell, but also for the tax credits and other income they would have received had they been allowed to make power. For the dozen oversupply events that happened in 2012, that compensation comes to about $2.7 million.
We pay subsidies from our tax dollars to put them up and now, we are paying money out of our utility bills to keep them from generating. If the person who devised this scam worked in the private sector, they would be out of work and in jail for fraud.
Government? That's a promotion!
Leave a comment