Public paid for idled wind farms
Xcel lacks the capacity to transmit all the wind power, so it pays for some machines to remain idle, and passes the cost to customers.
Tom Meersman, Star Tribune
Last update: June 01, 2006 – 11:12 PM
Xcel Energy electricity customers have paid millions of dollars for wind energy that was never produced, according to documents filed with state regulators.
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Xcel paid wind developers about $10.4 million -- called "curtailment payments" -- for wind-generated electricity that it could not accept from February 2004 through May 2005, according to a report by the Minnesota Department of Commerce.
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Xcel officials said curtailment payments are a legal and effective tool to develop wind power. The payments are unavoidable, they said, because it takes only a few months to build a large wind farm but it requires several years to construct the transmission lines to move the power the farm produces.
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/468717.htmlWhat the hell? This last paragraph doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the management of Xcel spend millions on a wind farm when they don't have the capacity to transmit the power? Something is screwy here.