In October 2016, NextEra Energy, a power company out of Florida, built two solar panel farms on 1,100 acres in Chaves County, New Mexico near Roswell.
600,000 panel produce 140 megawatts of energy, which was bought by Xcel Energy in a Power Purchase Agreement.
“That much power is actually for over 40,000 homes,” Site Manager Steve Kowalick said.
Xcel Energy provides power for 41 cities on the South Plains.
“We have a unified regional power grid,” Xcel spokesperson Wes Reeves said. “So everything that we generate goes into that grid and that would go not only to Xcel Energy customers, but also to our wholesale customers which would include the City of Lubbock and other municipal utilities in the South Plains.”
The panels are efficient but also provide clean, renewable energy without letting off any emissions. The farms were built with the latest technology, using trackers to follow the sun from East to West.
“We get a lot more efficiency out of having these panels out here than a fixed array,” Kowalick said.
A few years ago, Reeves said state mandates required power companies to add a certain amount of renewable energy into their power grid. Reeves said Xcel quickly met those requirements and kept going.
“Every megawatt of renewable energy we generate is actually replacing a megawatt of fossil fuel generation,” Reeves said.
The mandates coincided with some major growth on the South Plains.
“We’ve seen demand on our system grow quite a bit over the last decade,” Reeves said. “A lot of that had to do with the resurgence of the oil and gas industry. The way we fill that demand is we import more power. But then all of a sudden this economical, renewable energy has opened up a whole new avenue for us to bring in more power for this region and it is really going to help us.”
Reeves said where there is an environmental benefit, there is a cost benefit.
“It actually helps lower fuel costs,” Reeves said. “Because on your monthly bill roughly about one third of what you are paying, if you are an Xcel Energy customer, is actually fuel costs for coal and natural gas. Well you can see the fuel out here is free so we are taking advantage of that and we are passing those savings along to customers.”
Dr. Tim Dallas, an Associate Dean at Texas Tech University, said the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering does a lot of research on solar energy.
He said our position in the country makes us a prime candidate for solar farms.
“We are in a pretty good area to collect solar energy many hours out of the day and of course many days out of the year,” Dr. Dallas said.
When it comes to renewable energy, Dr. Dallas said wind is still less expensive than solar.
“One of the big concepts in solar is what they call ‘grid parody,'” Dr. Dallas said. “Meaning the cost of the power produced by the solar facility is comparable and then hopefully cheaper than from traditional fossil fuels or other renewables. Now in Lubbock we are very fortunate that the cost of electricity is very low compared to basically anywhere else in the world, so that actually works against this ‘grid parody’ because you know the cost of solar has to go down even further for it to really be a benefit to us.”
