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Curtailment is never a bad investment. If anything it’s fantastic for wind investors. Someone is paying you twice for not using your assets.

You get all the revenue, and have zero wear and tear on your equipment. In an extreme scenario you could even be paid for not turning on non-functional equipment. What a fantastic deal.

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Generally outages, deratings, and unavailable equipment have to be reported to the system operator. Not doing so and then claiming for lost revenue from broken equipment due to curtailment would be fraud.

Already happens unfortunately. Usually because the fines for failure to produce when you’re actually called upon and much smaller than profits from pretending to have production capacity.

With regards to fraud, doing this deliberately would be fraud (but good luck proving it). Building the equipment and then failing to maintain it, and failing to test it, that’s just bad management…

Is it fantastic for energy consumers? Somebody has to pay for it.

What’s energy consumers got to do with it? As a (theoretical) investor in energy I don’t give two shits what the cost to the consumer is gonna be, as long as I get paid. Hence curtailment is always a great investment (for me).

Obviously it’s a shitty deal for consumers. But they’re not investors.

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