The PUD held a public hearing at Monday's board meeting about a change to Schedule 1D customers, cryptocurrency miners and low-tier data centers, or those with simpler infrastructure in comparison to large scale centers.
Schedule 1D customers are considered "large" users with "a lot of power involved", said Gary Ivory, PUD general manager.
"For a small district like Douglas PUD, our average (total from all customers) loads are 150 megawatts and so crypto and low-tier data is about 25-40 megawatts of that load at any given time. What we're seeing with a lot of our (Schedule) 1D customers, we're seeing really dramatic changes in their load profile," Ivory said. "For our three largest grocery stores in town, they use about between a megawatt and a half and 2 megawatts. It shows a pretty consistent figure. For a utility on a planning basis, these are the kind of loads we're used to."
According to Ivory, Schedule 1D customers were tracked to bounce from 2 megawatts to 4 megawatts and drop to almost zero megawatts over the course of a year. The inconsistency of demand increases risk and cost for the utility, Ivory said. Power sales contracts are largely based on the PUD predicting loads by using the average of the utility's loads over a period of time.
"It's having a pretty significant, severe impact on the district. Our plans are made for average consumption, so all these variations make a dramatic impact to the utility. From a utility planning perspective, we're trying to anticipate what our loads are going to be a year in advance and we're doing that over from average load calculations. We're not anticipating these big jumps and these loads bottoming out," Ivory said. "It impacts the district because we're predicting to have lower power from our share of the Wells Project. When we don't get enough power, we end up purchasing power on the market, which is what the district is subject to right now."
Since the beginning of the year, the PUD has purchased $1 million worth of power on the open market, Ivory said. Market prices range from $60-$80 per megawatt and can tick up to $150 per megawatt. The PUD didn't immediately respond to requests for more information on how much open market power it previously purchased.
The current demand charge for Schedule 1D customers is $3.54 per kilowatt of demand in excess of 50 kilowatts, according to Douglas County PUD documents. Ivory added demand is about 10% of these customers' bills. The new demand charge would be a company's peak demand from the year prior, or not a uniform rate.
"We just finished going through this process, a very similar process with Grant PUD for basically the same reason. Primarily revolving around high density in crypto and data processing loads cycling on and off and then the utility being on the hook for purchasing power or what to do with excess power that isn't being consumed," said Malachi Salcido, founder/CEO of cryptocurrency mining company, Salcido Enterprises. "The notable difference (with Grant County PUD fee change) is instead of taking the highest measured demand from the prior year, the Grant County utility agreed to 75% of the highest measured demand for the prior year."
Salcido has also been involved in the rate process for Chelan County PUD, according to Wenatchee World archives, wenatcheeworld.com.
Ivory agreed to research Grant County PUD's new fixed rate. The public hearing will remain open during the following board meetings until commissioners approve a fee.
"We're not finalizing anything right now. We want to hear from you guys," said commissioner Aaron Viebrock.
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