“Deregulated means the power monopolies were broken up”
Wow! Thanks for the informative reply. A complicated situation but it makes sense.
” The only concession solar and wind get is if there is an oversupply in the market at any given epoch they are the last to be forced to curtail generation.”
That must mean you solar producers never have to curtail.
Sounds like you have a good deal assuming you can produce power for less than 3 cents per kwh. Guess you can if they pay for the maintenance of your equipment.
They payed for the whole system, and the maintenance and replacements if needed. They are selling power from my rooftop to the grid at peak rates of well over $80_120 a megawatt hour during peak times. In exchange for leasing them my real estate I have access to power at a fixed negotiated rate of 3c per kWh as much as I want to use at any point 24/7/365. It’s a business deal a contract between a land owner and a leasee for real estate, but in this case the monetary pay out is a power concession. It’s win win for both parties. They installed such a large system that it always produces high value power to be sold at peak rates. The amount I use is irrelevant to them as their retail provider is in contract to provide me power at 3c 24/7/365 with no peak rates so they likely just contracted a fixed rate from another producer to provide my concession. It makes perfect sense they sell power to the pool at 8c to 12c and contract a long term steady customer at 3c in exchange for 3500 sqft of prime southern real estate and most importantly twin 200 amp 240V grid tied with that real estate giving them access to ERCOTs power bid pool.
And no solar almost never curtials and never first by law passed by the people of Texas via our duly elected officials. NGas curtails first, then coal, then wind, then nuclear. Solar only curtails to save the grid from overload same with wind. There have been times in Texas where on a windy night the grid was 100% wind power plus the base load of nukes which can’t be turned off and on very easily due to the xenon fission products. At that time the ERCOT power bid went negative as in ERCOT was paying large consumers with dispatchable demand to take power from the grid temporarily to prevent over voltage. For half an hour or so until the wind turbines could be feathered that’s two bidding periods the minimum it takes to negative bid out producer’s and spin down generation. Only wind and gas can spin down in minutes coal,nukes and biomass have to shunt steam to the condensers at full pressure until the boilers ramp down or the core in a nuke plant. The xenon in a nuke core means that if you throttle down you cannot throttle back up for hours and hours until the now excess xenon decays to the lower equilibrium level. It’s a neutron poison. Some reactors like French PWRs have either enriched booster rods or since they reprocess nuke wastes they have MOX with PU239 in half the core which has a Kef well above 1 that can over come the xenon poison effect. French PWRs can and do load follow. The plants at Comanche peak have booster rods and can ramp from 100% down to 40% and back up in over a few HOURS the South Texas NPP do not have booster rods and they do not ramp they have to shunt steam at full power to the cooling lagoon it’s very expensive to do that from an O&M on the condenser strain dumping 6 gigawatts thermal into the condensers at full pressure is almost always a last resort.
In case people didn’t realise already I’m in the energy industry. I do a variety of consulting with my various LLCs