Denton municipal electric asks council to allow study of buying or building dispatchable generation; council seeks public input

Denton Municipal Electric (DME) on Tuesday asked the City Council for direction to research acquiring or building a dispatchable electric generation facility to shore up the city’s long‑term generation capacity.

Tony Fuentes, general manager for the municipal utility, said DME is short of dispatchable capacity and faces increasing peak demand. “Based on peak load, what we have today is 408 megawatts of peak load and 225 megawatts of dispatchable power,” Fuentes said. He told council staff estimates show the city could be roughly 183 MW short in the near term and as much as several hundred megawatts short over the next decade if native load and growth materialize as expected.

Fuentes said DME’s operating experience — including Winter Storm Uri and the extreme prices in summer 2023 — shows that on certain scarcity days dispatchable thermal generation produced crucial margin and revenue. He told council sales and market dynamics have shifted and that a purchase or build of dispatchable generation should be studied as one component of a diversified…