JEA Reduces Carbon Emissions With Closure Of Plant Scherer Coal-Fired Unit
January 18, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 18, 2022
Florida public power utility JEA kicked off 2022 with a reduced emissions footprint as a result of the closure of Plant Scherer’s Unit 4, in Juliette, Ga.
JEA has replaced coal-fired electric power from Plant Scherer with natural gas through a power purchase agreement with investor-owned Florida Power & Light (FPL). JEA and FPL have jointly owned Plant Scherer, Unit 4, since 1991. Unit 4, operated by Georgia Power, ceased operations on Dec. 31, 2021.
Plant Scherer is the largest coal-fired power facility in the U.S. with four power generating units. The plant’s 900-megawatt class generating units burned Powder River Basin Coal. JEA owns 23.64% of Unit 4, and FPL controls the remaining 76.36%
By replacing power from Plant Scherer with natural gas, JEA has lowered operating costs, reduced operating risks and reduced CO2 emissions by approximately 1.3 million tons per year, it noted, adding that it continues to diversify its electric generation portfolio with the addition of renewable energy resources, including natural gas, solar and biogas.
JEA has reduced its carbon emissions by 53 percent since 2007 with the closing of St. Johns River Power Park coal-fired plant and the decommissioning of Plant Scherer.
JEA this year is launching its integrated resource plan, which will lay out its future electric generation mix plans and strategic direction for the next two decades.
Fitch Cites Silicon Valley Power’s Strong Financial Performance In Affirming Rating On Bonds
January 18, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 18, 2022
Fitch Ratings recently affirmed the “AA-“ rating on bonds issued by Silicon Valley Power (SVP), which is the operating public power utility for the City of Santa Clara, Calif.
The rating was affirmed for $48.975 million refunding revenue bonds, series 2013A and 2018A and the rating outlook is stable, Fitch noted.
“The affirmation of the ‘AA-‘ ratings reflects SVP’s strong financial performance over the past three years, resulting in lower net leverage,” Fitch said.
SVP’s financial profile “exhibits some variability in operating income as a result of hydroelectric availability, but is supported by robust liquidity levels,” the rating agency said.
It also said that the rating reflects the utility’s low operating cost burden associated with a primarily natural gas, hydroelectric and renewable generation portfolio.
SVP is an enterprise fund of the city of Santa Clara, providing service to approximately 59,200 customer accounts within the city’s boundaries.
The city of Santa Clara “is the heart of Silicon Valley and includes an affluent service territory with a considerable concentration of high-tech industries and strong load growth,” Fitch pointed out.
SVP continues to experience strong customer and load growth, with much of the growth resulting from increased data center activity at technology companies, it said.
“Rating concerns related to customer and industry concentration are partially offset by the diversity of business activities represented by the customer base and the demonstrated stability in demand over the past decade,” Fitch said.
The retail electric utility is fully integrated with direct and joint ownership of generation, transmission and distribution facilities. Power supply is provided primarily by SVP’s locally owned natural gas-fired generation plant and purchased power allocations from the Northern California Power Agency and Western Area Power Administration that include natural-gas, hydroelectric and geothermal resources. SVP supplements these resources with increasing renewable purchases.
Fitch considers the electric system to be a related entity of the City of Santa Clara (not rated by Fitch) for rating purposes, given the city’s oversight of the system, including the authority to establish rates and budget of the electric system.
The rating on the electric system bonds is not currently constrained by the credit quality of the City of Santa Clara, the rating agency said.
New Mexico Utility Regulators Consider Petition On Public Power Study At Meeting
January 13, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 13, 2022
New Mexico utility regulators at a Jan. 12 meeting considered a petition that asked them to launch a study that would evaluate shifting the state’s electric sector to public power.
At the New Mexico Public Regulatory Commission (PRC), the commissioners heard from State Sen. Carrie Hamblen and Mariel Nanasi, Executive Director of the New Mexico New Energy Economy as part of their discussion about the petition, which was filed by a group of New Mexico lawmakers.
The lawmakers said in their petition that they “believe that it is probable that public ownership of the electrical utilities that serve New Mexico would benefit New Mexico’s ratepayers, New Mexico’s businesses, and New Mexico’s state, local and tribal governments.”
At the PRC meeting, Sen. Hamblen said that the value of the study would be to “determine the costs, benefits and pathways to public power and to evaluate whether implementation of public power will protect the public interest, reduce and stabilize electricity rates, create revenue generation for the state and result in the deployment of 100 percent renewables plus storage, as well as enhance local economic benefits.”
Hamblen said that “if we are to thoroughly understand the alternatives to the current structure of our energy systems and service providers, we need the advice of technical experts. We also need to feel comfortable in seeing what other options there are and, really, whether or not they’re good for our state.”
She noted that the American Public Power Association has determined that public power customers pay on average 11 percent less than investor-owned utility customers. Further, public power customers “receive more reliable service and are more likely to benefit from renewable power sources,” Hamblen went on to say.
“Most importantly for New Mexico, it also keeps our money in our communities,” she said. “Publicly owned utilities can reinvest profits from energy sales into local jobs, lower energy costs for low-income customers and invest in local community projects and causes.”
Hamblen noted that the petition “points to two possible models that can be studied – a state-owned and operated electric power authority with municipal and tribal local control over generation or a community choice system where investor-owned utilities maintain transmission and distribution, with the option for municipal and tribal control over the generation.”
Hamblen said that her colleagues in the New Mexico House and Senate “feel that the PRC is not only the appropriate agency to house the study, but also has the most expertise when it comes to providing data on our various utilities.” The PRC “would be the custodian of the study and we are not asking you to take a position on the study findings. You have the technical expertise and if there are questions to be asked, you can either provide the answers or get that information from the utilities,” she said.
“We know that you will not be implementing public power. We recognize that that is the purview of the legislature,” she said. “We recognize that there are many factors to be explored” including the impact on workers, the costs of a publicly owned utility, how municipalities and tribal entities will be affected “and much more and that’s why, as legislators, there’s already been exploration about who is going to do the study and who is going to pay for it. We don’t expect the PRC to pay for it.”
Hamblen said that “the joint petitioners and legislators will be seeking that private money to be housed at the Santa Fe Community Foundation.” Moreover, the PRC would not be responsible for determining the best consultants and agencies to perform the study.
Nanasi said that “we’re hoping that this study will be done” in 2022.
PRC Commissioner Stephen Fischmann said he thinks such a study is worth doing. He noted that a lot of public power utilities are “doing some of the most innovative work,” mentioning specifically the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and its work on hydrogen, Texas public power utility Austin Energy, which “embraced solar very early” and Texas public power utility CPS Energy.
And, within New Mexico, the community of Farmington “loves its municipal public electric utility. It has very low rates.”
The Commissioners ultimately decided not to take action on the petition at the meeting.
APPA Seeks Nominations For 2022-2023 Board of Directors
January 13, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 13, 2022
The American Public Power Association (APPA) is seeking nominations for APPA’s 2022-2023 Board of Directors.
The nomination form can be found here to nominate individuals and nominations are due no later than February 12, 2022.The call for nominations covers Regions 5, 7, 9, and 10.
The APPA Nominating Committee will meet virtually on Tuesday, February 22, 2022, to consider nominations for new Board members. The Committee’s recommendations for new Board members will be presented to APPA’s membership at the annual business meeting held in June during APPA’s National Conference.
Directors are normally elected for three-year terms and are eligible to serve two consecutive terms. Any director who has served five or more years consecutively is not eligible for re-election until a period of one year has elapsed.
Contact Cartina Parks-Williams at CParks-Williams@publicpower.org for assistance or additional information.
Kansas Power Pool’s Mark Chesney To Retire This Month
January 13, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 13, 2022
Kansas Power Pool (KPP) CEO and General Manager Mark Chesney, who began his work at KPP more than nine years ago, is set to retire at the end of January. He will be succeeded by Colin Hansen, current Executive Director of Kansas Municipal Utilities and American Public Power Association (APPA) Board Chairman.
He started his career in public power with the Grand River Dam Authority in his native Oklahoma. Working 10 years at GRDA, his first duties were economic development where he was a member of, and led, three commissions devoted to development in northeast Oklahoma.
Later, he led GRDA staff in industrial key account management, purchase power contract negotiation/administration as well as media services management. Eventually, as Assistant General Manager of Energy Marketing and Development, he managed market and transmission operations personnel at GRDA’s energy control center.
In the year 2000 Mark joined the staff at the Utah Municipal Power Agency as their Operations Manager. His tenure there included supervising personnel in the scheduling, trading and dispatching of energy. Among his other duties were new power supply screening, the management of the agency’s transmission-dependent relationship with PacifiCorp and the hydro allocation entitlements from the Colorado River Storage Projects of the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA).
Returning to Oklahoma in 2010, Chesney served just over two years as the General Manager of the Tahlequah Public Works Authority.
Since late 2012, he has served in his current position with KPP, a joint action agency comprised of 24 electric utilities in Kansas. His tenure has been marked by increases in the KPP resource portfolio, improved cash reserves and liquidity and an upgrade in the KPP bond rating. Achieving member city contract uniformity was also a notable KPP milestone.
As the end of his professional career began to approach, Mark was elected in 2018 to the Board of Directors of APPA. Last summer, at APPA’s national conference, he received the James D. Donovan Individual Achievement Award.
Biden Administration To Hold Its First Offshore Wind Lease Sale Next Month
January 12, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 12, 2022
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland on Jan. 12 announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold a wind energy auction in February for more than 480,000 acres offshore New York and New Jersey, in the area known as the New York Bight.
This will be the first offshore wind lease sale under the Biden-Harris administration.
The Feb. 23 auction will allow offshore wind developers to bid on six lease areas — the most areas ever offered in a single auction — as described in BOEM’s Final Sale Notice. Leases offered in this sale could result in 5.6 to 7 gigawatts of offshore wind energy.
The White House’s goal to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 is complemented by state offshore wind policies and actions throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Interior noted in a news release.
Collectively, New York and New Jersey have set the nation’s largest regional offshore wind target of installing over 16 GW of offshore wind by 2035.
According to Interior, the New York Bight offshore wind auction will include several innovative lease stipulations designed to promote the development of a robust domestic U.S. supply chain for offshore wind and enhance engagement with Tribes, the commercial fishing industry, other ocean users, and underserved communities. The stipulations will also advance flexibility in transmission planning.
The Sale Notice also requires lessees to identify Tribes, underserved communities and other ocean users who could be affected by offshore wind development.
More information about the auction, lease stipulations, list of qualified bidders for the auction and Interior’s collaboration with New York and New Jersey can be found on BOEM’s website.
NREL Report Assesses Value In Managed EV Charging Strategies
January 12, 2022
by Peter Maloney
APPA News
January 12, 2022
Managed electric vehicle charging offers “significant potential benefits for the grid,” such as demand side flexibility, according to a new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The NREL researchers conducted a literature review of research papers on the potential value of electric vehicle charging to better understand how electric vehicles and the electric grid can work together as the electric and transportation sectors become more intertwined.
The simplest form of electric vehicle managed charging—sometimes called smart charging – is time-of-use pricing that offers lower electricity rates to charge an electric vehicle during off-peak periods. More sophisticated managed charging plans control charging based on a user’s travel needs and grid conditions. In the most sophisticated managed charging systems, electric vehicles can act as temporary electricity suppliers by sharing power back to the grid.
The report, published in Energy & Environmental Science, summarizes findings from hundreds of studies considering multiple value streams for the power system, enablement costs, and perspectives of different stakeholders, including utilities, electric vehicle owners, charging station operators, and rate payers.
“Managed charging can be a tremendous resource for the grid but there are trade-offs to solutions at different levels of commercial readiness,” Matteo Muratori, NREL analyst and principal investigator of the study, said in a statement. “Some solutions offer a wider range of grid services and value streams but require increasingly complex communication and control technology and demands on users, which come with a cost.”
Among the benefits, the NREL researchers identified decreased emissions, improved reliability, support for large-scale deployment of variable generation, and lower power system costs. “Some studies show that EV managed charging could provide thousands of dollars of value per EV every year,” the researchers said.
Although the power system will likely require upgrades to handle higher levels of electric vehicle charging, managed charging has the potential to improve system efficiency and lower average retail electricity rates for all consumers, not just electric vehicle owners, the researchers found. Managed charging is particularly valuable in systems with high levels of variable renewables to provide flexibility to match supply and demand, they said. In contrast, power system cost savings from managed charging is lower in systems with other sources of flexibility, they added.
The strategy used to deploy electric vehicle charging stations can change the benefits available to the grid. If electric vehicle managed charging is based solely on minimizing owner costs with no consideration of the grid, “it could negatively impact system cost and operation,” the NREL researchers said.
In addition, the benefits of managed charging for distribution systems are more difficult to nail down, the researchers found. “Distribution system issues are location and system-specific, so it’s very hard to generalize insights,” Muratori said.
Overall, managed charging can noticeably reduce distribution system peak loads and congestion across the board, but more modeling and analysis is needed in collaboration with utilities, the researchers said. They also warned that the enablement and implementation costs in the report are “highly uncertain due to limited market implementations and a lack of scale.”
Many questions about the potential value of electric vehicle managed charging remain to be answered, the NREL researchers said. Among other things, they recommended a complete benefit-cost assessment that considers the entire extent of value streams for the power system, enablement costs, and the perspectives of all stakeholders.
Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative Transfers Plant Ownership
January 12, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 12, 2022
The Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative (CMEEC) recently transferred ownership of its Alfred L. Pierce 84-megawatt electric generating facility located in Wallingford, Conn., to MPH AL Pierce LLC.
MPH AL Pierce LLC is a Delaware limited liability company that is indirectly owned by affiliates of Hull Street Energy (HSE), a private equity firm.
CMEEC CEO Dave Meisinger noted that since its repowering in 2007, the Pierce plant has been a valuable project for CMEEC and its members, but added that the continued operation of the plant was no longer projected to provide the same wholesale rate stability and overall benefits that CMEEC’s members have come to expect.
“The sale of the Pierce plant is an important step in the alignment of CMEEC’s mission to add economic value to the communities we serve while thoughtfully addressing the impacts of climate change,” he said.
“We are confident that HSE will operate the plant in a manner that will contribute to the reliability of the New England electric grid as our wholesale market structure continues to evolve in response to regional decarbonization goals.”
The parties had previously announced the signing of the asset purchase agreement on October 8, 2021.
CMEEC is a political subdivision of the State of Connecticut created in 1976.
It is a non-profit municipal joint action electric supply agency that provides the power supply requirements, at wholesale, of six municipal electric utilities with retail electric service territories in Connecticut as well as for other customers who purchase power at wholesale.
Its municipal electric utility members are Bozrah Light & Power, Jewett City Department of Public Utilities, Groton Utilities, Norwich Public Utilities, South Norwalk Electric and Water, and The Third Taxing District of Norwalk Electric Division.
Daniel Beans Appointed As New Director Of Roseville Electric Utility
January 12, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 12, 2022
Daniel Beans has been appointed director of California’s Roseville Electric Utility. He will start Feb. 7, 2022.
Beans is currently the Director of Redding Electric Utility, where he has worked since 2005. In 2017, Beans was appointed to his current position.
He began his career with Redding Electric Utility in 2005 as an electrical engineer and has worked in all aspects of the utility in the years since. Prior to that he worked for more than a decade in engineering firms in the private sector.
Beans is currently the vice president of the California Municipal Utilities Association, board member of the American Public Power Association, and commissioner for the Balancing Area of Northern California.
In October 2021, Roseville Electric reported that Electric Utility Director Michelle Bertolino was retiring after nearly 30 years in the electric utility industry.
LADWP Line Crews Complete Navajo Nation Mutual Aid Training Exercise
January 12, 2022
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
January 12, 2022
Electric line crews from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) recently completed work on the Navajo Nation for a mutual aid training exercise that included extending electricity to Navajo homes.
More than 40 LADWP crew members volunteered to travel to the Navajo Nation to train in challenging conditions, such as adverse weather and isolated locations where dirt roads are the only access. The training exercise ended after 41 days and resulted in 80 homes being connected to the electric grid before the Christmas holiday.
“LADWP teamed up with the NTUA for this Mutual Aid Training exercise and the benefits far exceeded our expectations,” said Brian Wilbur, Senior Assistant General Manager of Power System Construction, Maintenance, & Operations, at LADWP. “In this simulation we were able to deploy vehicles, personnel, and equipment to a remote location to preform restoration and infrastructure work over rugged terrain in harsh conditions. The challenges, pitfalls, and victories of this complete deployment is something we have not been able to examine when we do our typical tabletop training simulations,” he said in a statement.
“Everyone from our executive leadership to our transmission and distribution crews were involved including our Office of Emergency Management, Fleet personnel, Procurement, and Communication groups.”
The combined crews worked and trained 10-hours a day to finish projects in 28 communities located across the Navajo Nation. The most extensive project, which extended over nine miles, was the Chilchinbeto community powerline project. Once the crews completed their work, 20 Navajo homes were powered up. It had been a project that was more than 10 years in the making, following years of acquiring rights of way and securing the land use permits.
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez stopped by Chilchinbeto to personally thank LADWP crew members for volunteering to be part of the training project.
As the Chilchinbeto project was underway, the community watched daily as the power line was being built. Some residents drove by the powerline route daily to measure its progress. The project was completed in 15 days after which the community leaders and residents cooked and hosted a “thank-you” meal for the LADWP crew members.
“With heartfelt tears, family members told LADWP crews this was the best Christmas present they could ever receive,” said Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) General Manager Walter Haase. “We are very happy this mutual aid training exercise was a success. LADWP completed its training and families are now enjoying the benefits of electricity. We are thankful that LADWP chose the Navajo Nation as the location for its rural mutual-aid field training exercise. We hope this is the first of future partnership projects.”
Planning Is Underway For Project That Will Bring Power To Navajo Nation Residents
Meanwhile, planning for Light Up Navajo III, which will connect Navajo Nation families to the power grid, is underway. Public power utilities are encouraged to consider participating in Light Up Navajo III, which will start in the spring of this year.
The American Public Power Association (APPA) is working with NTUA, based in Fort Defiance, Ariz., to help volunteers continue to bring electricity to families in need.
Light Up Navajo III is scheduled to take place from April through June of 2022.
Interested public power utilities should contact lightup-navajoproject@ntua.com for more information on this important event.