Energize Weekly, April 11, 2018
In the early hours of March 31, the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) set a new wind penetration record with 62 percent of the load being served by wind generation.
Wind turbines accounted for 14.5 gigawatts (GW) of the 23.2 GW load for the regional transmission organization (RTO), which operates a market that stretches across all or parts of 14 states from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border with about 100-member utilities, energy traders and state power authorities.
When the wind was combined with other renewable energy sources, they accounted for nearly 65 percent of the load, the SPP said. The previous SPP wind record was 60.56 percent posted in the early morning of March 17, when wind was 14 GW out of a total load of 23 GW.
The March 31 peak occurred at 1:54 a.m. in the middle of one of the five-minute increments the RTO uses to track fuel mix.
For the full increment, wind was nearly 60 percent of load followed by coal-fired generation (23 percent), natural gas (11 percent), nuclear (3.3 percent) and hydro (2.2 percent). Diesel fuel and others source made up the remainder.
In the real-time market, the five-minute SPP North Hub real-time locational marginal prices (LMP) dropped to about $2.25/MWh at 1:55 am and SPP South Hub LMP dropped to negative $10/MWh.
SPP’s all-time high wind generation was set on Dec. 15, 2017 with 15,690 MW serving 51 percent of total load at that time.
In 2017, wind made up an average of 22.7 percent of all the energy produced on the SPP grid, up from 17.1 percent in 2016 and 13.5 percent in 2015.
On the morning of April 6, for example, wind’s portion of the load varied between 30 percent and 42 percent of the total, according to the SPP’s real-time market tracker.
There are more than 50 GW of wind projects in the SPP generator interconnection queue. “The generators [are] currently under study by our engineering planners,” Derek Wingfield, an SPP spokesman, said in an email. “Not everything in queue winds up being built, so it’s an inexact measurement.”
“It’s safe to say that, yes, there are plans for more wind in the SPP region,” Wingfield said.
SPP’s generating capacity is still heavily fossil fuels-based with 31 percent coal, 41 percent natural gas and 2 percent fuel oil. Wind accounts for 19 percent of capacity, followed by hydro at 4 percent and nuclear at 2 percent. Solar, biomass and other sources made up the remainder.
