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Aztec weighs multi‑million‑dollar options to reduce outages as transmission rules change
Summary
City staff laid out options — keep Guzman as supplier, build a $10M transmission line, island with local generators, or invest in solar and batteries — and warned SPP transmission and resource adequacy changes mean decisions must be made quickly; staff also flagged rate and operational risks.
John Wheeler, the city’s electric director, told the City of Aztec commission at a March 24 workshop that the city faces a choice among several costly strategies to reduce the recent string of total‑community outages.
“We have funds in the electric repair and replacement fund of about 5,300,000,” Wheeler said, noting that using those reserves carries a lost‑opportunity cost for city investments. He outlined four broad options: continue current contracts with Guzman Electric; build a new transmission line from Bloomfield (which he estimated at roughly $10,000,000 in capital and about $793,000 a year in 5% debt service); install local generation and island from the regional grid; or build 2 MW of solar with 4 MWh of batteries (Wheeler gave a rough cost of $11.6 million for that option).
Wheeler said Guzman’s contract has kept Aztec’s historical supply costs low compared with earlier PNM pricing and that Guzman’s price is fixed through December of the contract…
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