The City of Kimberley has released the fourth quarter update on SunMine production, and findings say that November and December were far below expected.
At a regular City Council meeting on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, Council discussed the findings.
“Really focusing on the last three months of SunMine production, November was terrible, 53.8 per cent of what we expected,” said City CAO, Scott Sommerville. “December wasn’t much better at 56 per cent. We’re looking into it right now, it could just be that it’s not that sunny in November and December. Although, in 2016 November and December were not great either. [We] didn’t end the year on a great note production wise. We came in at 90 per cent of anticipated revenue for 2017. That’s based on achieving 92 per cent of our calculated, projected production.”
October 2017’s revenue was $15,210 from 127.9 MWh, November 2017’s revenue was $5,959 from 49.6 MWh and December 2017’s revenue was $4,686 from 36.7 MWh. The total revenue from January to December 2017, was $189,091 from 1771.1 MWh. The anticipated revenue for the year was $210,015, an anticipated production of 1924.3 MWh.
“November and December, we had a lot of clouds,” said Mayor Don McCormick. “In discussions earlier with Scott, the nice thing now is we’re moving into our third year of data. We can now start to have actual comparisons year over year, as opposed to the original plan [and] projections which were not based on anything in particular other than supply data and historical data on how much sun shine we usually get. Moving forward, the projections based on historical data are going to be a whole lot more accurate than what we started with.”
Councillor Kent Goodwin asked Sommerville if he knew what the current annual interest payment is, to which Sommerville replied saying that he does not have the exact figures at this time, however he is working on a more in-depth report that will outline revenues and expenditures along with the last two and a half years of historical data.
Councillor Albert Hoglund pointed out that the expenditures were also below what was forecast.
The total for expenditures for 2017 were $64,839.56. Those expenditures include insurance, electrician and maintenance wages, snow removal wages, and communications/security.
