Who Needs Transmission Wires Anyway? — Episode 175 of Local Energy Rules

And so when I was looking at that and developing my project, I thought, well, there’s gotta be a different way. And you know, the community-based development that we did, we always connected into the lower voltage system, just was more of an economic decision than it was a technical decision. And so I looked at that and then when I built my shop in Woodstock, my first wind farm in 1998, I had to build a shop and the rural electric co-op wanted $25,000 to run the wire up to the building <laugh>. And that was a lot of money at that time for me. And so I thought, well, I can do something different. So I called up Elliot Bailey, I don’t know if you remember Elliot, he was a small wind turbine manufacturer in Duluth for many years called Whirlwind. And he’s an old friend of mine. He passed away unfortunately. And I talked to Stan Osinski who was one of the fathers of solar power to buy some solar panels and I put a small wind turbine up at the shop with some solar panels to provide power for me with, along with some batteries and an inverter. And it worked great and I could see over the time that when high pressure would move in, the wind would slow down, the sun would come out and we’d have all kinds of solar power and then as soon as the low pressure moved in, the wind would kick up and the wind turbines were doing their thing. And so it was a real match there and it was a load matching match to where the wind was always blowing when it was cold and windy and the sun was always shining when it was hot and sunny.

And so that kind of pushed me to think maybe we should look at this hybrid technology and pushing that idea of matching these two together and then tying ’em in at the lower voltage system to where we could blend the power into the grid and not try to force it in where it costs tons of money and causes all kinds of technical issues. And that was kind of the driving force. And so the transmission issue itself was one of the, the driving mindsets for us to look at how can we economically put in commercial scale power into the system and do it in a more efficient way and not really tax the transmission system but actually help it.

The other thing that we can do by doing these hybrids on the, what I call the mid grid level, which is basically below 115 kv, we can add a value to the system by adding ancillary services where you can do voltage support, frequency support and things that the rural power systems experience. Whereas the big cities, they really don’t experience that cuz they have all of the high voltage. That was the mindset on it. And so the transmission was always a big deal for us to try to alleviate that long-term problem and that was why we developed the hybrids in the first place was because of that issue.

And then from 69 it jumps up to the 115,000 volts, which is usually the two poles span, where you have two poles and three big wires on that and that’s 115,000 volts and that jumps up to 345,000 volts, which is the big steel towers, the lattice towers that you see. And that carries the high voltage from the power plants out to us. And so if you think about that, all of those transitions from 345,000 volts down to 240 all requires a transformer and wires hundreds of miles of wires. And those are the losses we experience in the transmission system. And that is another reason why we did the distributed hybrids where we can produce commercial scale and deliver the power directly to where it’s being consumed and we eliminate all of those losses, all of the transformer losses, all of the wire losses, and a lot of the expense of having the upgrade the system for more load.

It’s a complicated system, but it’s pretty straightforward when you look at the actual patterns of how they step up the voltage and step up the voltage. And if you think about building a big wind farm, let’s say out in the middle of North Dakota or wherever, if the voltage transition on that, if you think about it, the power comes off these turbines at 600 volts that gets kicked up to about 34,000 volts and then that gets kicked up to 115,000 volts into the big double pole and then that gets kicked up to 345,000 volts, then it comes all the way across from the middle of North Dakota to Minnesota and then it goes back down again. So there’s transformation losses on the way up, transformation losses on the way down and all the wire losses in between are all eliminated by doing distributed hybrid technology again where we can deliver power directly towards being consumed.

And we’re electrifying more and more and that’s what we need to think about with the electric cars. Everybody’s putting electric cars onto the system. If we’re gonna produce that power in far away places, we need to get the power to where it’s being consumed. And if you have a bunch of electric cars coming onto the end of the wire, a you will probably have to re-do some upgrades to get the power there. But if you put in commercial scale and the hybrids are commercial scale, I mean we use commercial scale turbines, we use the GE 2.8 megawatt machine with 127 meter rotor and then we use one to two megawatts of solar in a package. And so it’s, it’s real commercial power and so you’re putting that power in at the end of the wire and you’re basically helping support the system’s voltage, frequency and the load itself. And there’s a real advantage to this mentality of looking at how can we do this on a distribution level with commercial scale power.

And so the project that we’ve developed right outside of where I live in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, that power is sold to Ottertail Power company. And so we sell power to them right outside of town and at the speed of light, they take that power and turn around and sell it to the consumers in town. And it’s actually, from their standpoint, you’d think that instead of having to take it off some plant out in the wherever and ship it all the way through the wires and getting it to the spot to sell to the consumer could be very expensive. And it is very expensive. Where if we produce the power, we sell it to them at a price where they can make money and we are able to pay for the project. Everybody wins. And then you think of all the rural economic jobs that come with it, I mean the construction jobs and there’s some operations jobs and you know, there’s all kinds of things that trail along with these type of projects from the standpoint of economic development, that’s a big deal. And if you’re doing it for a rural electric co-op or a municipal utility, then you’re keeping those energy dollars in the community and not exporting ’em out to some big power plant out in the middle of North Dakota.

Now times have changed and so we can produce and deliver power cheaper than coming off of a coal plant with all the emission regulations and all of the losses involved in that and the cost of mining the coal and shipping the coal and doing all of the other stuff, all of those costs are higher than ours. I mean, we put this technology out in the field right outside of town. We, we use no fuel, we have no emissions, there’s no pollution, there’s no transmission losses. And so we are economically ahead of the game. And so it’s not like it used to be where we had to fight with the utilities because it was an economic issue. Now we can partner with the utilities and help them provide clean energy to the rural consumers cheaply.

Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. If you’ve made it this far, you’re obviously a fan and we could use your help for just two minutes. As you’ve probably noticed, we don’t have any corporate sponsors or ads for any of our podcasts. The reason is that our mission at ILSR is to reinvigorate democracy by decentralizing economic power. Instead, we rely on you, our listeners. Your donations not only underwrite this podcast, but also help us produce all of the research and resources that we make available on our website and all of the technical assistance we provide to grassroots organizations. Every year ILSR’s small staff helps hundreds of communities challenge monopoly power directly and rebuild their local economies. So please take a minute and go to ilsr.org and click on the donate button. And if making a donation isn’t something you can do, please consider helping us in other ways. You can help other folks find this podcast by telling them about it, or by giving it a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more ratings from listeners like you, the more folks can find this podcast and ILSR’s other podcasts, Community Broadband Bits and Building Local Power. Thanks again for listening. Now, back to the program.

And we’ve looked at with the hybrids, putting hybrids outside of a rural community, how easy it is if you just take a little bit of storage and some inverters and you drop them in into that community and then have that utility, in the case of a municipal utility, offer their consumers an off-peak rate that coincides with the production of the hybrid right outside of town where they could store power. And so when they hit a peak in the system, they just take that home off grid for a couple hours and then you use low cost, off peak power from the system alongside of renewable technology and you’ve got a very efficient, very clean, reliable system.

And if the grid goes down completely, those people still have power to run their lights and their computers and their furnace and the things that they need in the refrigerators and you know, their garage door openers, <laugh>, things that you kind of need. That’s what, if I was a utility executive, I’d be saying, look, I need to get my arms around this. We need to embrace this technology because it’s a game changing. The old way we’ve done it for years and years and years is under serious pressure with climate. And the power plants around here are tremendously old. If you look at the MISO, the average coal plant retirement is 40 years. That’s how old they are when they retire the coal plants they have been and just look at their records and the power plants we have in that are powering northwest Minnesota. And that’s, I’m using that because that’s where I live. Some of ’em are 50 high forties, early fifties years old and they’re worn out. One of the utilities here, they wanna put a 1.6 billion carbon capture on a 52 year old power plant. What’s the economics of that?

You know, they are realizing that and there’s some pretty good, you know, the folks at Xcel Energy I think have really started to get their, you know, they’re pretty sharp guys and they’ve done a pretty good job of how they’re managing it. A lot of ’em, when the coal plants retire, they’re, they’re looking at natural gas to kind of fill in the gap, which is sounds good, it’s cleaner, but by gosh that’s a finite resource and the economics of it are pretty scary on the long term. And so it all points to the three-legged stool, wind, solar, and storage. Actually it’s a four-legged stools. Wind storage, solar and demand side management, basically conservation technologies. You use conservation, storage, wind, and solar. That’s when the wire clipper gets out. <laugh>

But again, you know, I think we can really make a lot of headway and one of the things that’s holding everybody back in our neck of the woods, rural Minnesota – and rural Minnesota is no different than most of rural America. These old antiquated draconian all requirements contracts that have been in place since the forties where the G&T, the generation transmission utility is forcing the rural electric co-ops and the small municipal utilities to buy this power even though it’s way more expensive than the stuff that’s coming out of the box today. You know, with the renewables. We see it firsthand with some of these utilities, these G&Ts where they won’t, you know, we have a one municipal utility that really wants to do a hybrid. They wanna do it because they can see it’s cheaper. I mean we’ve run all the economics with them and we thought if they put a hybrid on their municipal utility, they’d save close to 400 grand a year, 300 to $400,000 a year off their existing power price today per kilowatt hour.

Can’t do it because they have this all requirements contract and the G&T basically sued them to say you can’t do this. They filed an injunction. It’s really terrible I thought. But I think it’s all gonna have to change pretty soon. But that’s one thing I think we could really look at regulatorily is the all requirements contracts that had their day. When they first built the power plants for the co-ops, they needed a dedicated customer to pay for the power plant and all that good stuff and that’s all fine, but in the interim now we have MISO, which is a market for electric power. So the power off that power plant can be sold into the market just as easy as forcing me to as a consumer to buy it at a much higher price than if I can buy it off the market. And so it’s kind of a old school approach and then they built those power plants 50 years ago and they still haven’t debt serviced those plants. What kind of business guys are they? <laugh>, I mean, you know, if you had a business and you’re capitalizing your equipment and your business and you can’t pay for it in 50 years, maybe you’re in the wrong business. I mean it’s, but it’s just the way it is. But that’s something we need to really look at.

And so if you’re producing power out here on the end of the wire and you might be pushing some back into the transmission system, but you’re basically, that reduces having to have that power sent from way out in the middle of nowhere to that point anyway. And so I know there’s a couple engineering groups that are really looking at how can we blend power in more efficiently without having to do all of this transmission upgrade cuz they’re talking billions and billions of dollars of transmission upgrades to try to bring renewables into the system. And that’s because you can’t build big renewables by people. <laugh>, we know that, you know, it just takes one guy with a lawyer to go crazy on you. And that’s just fact of life. If you’re doing these community-based projects where the communities are, it is something for the community and you don’t have the same opposition and you’re putting in one turbine with a small field.

And you know, the project outside of Red Lake falls here, that project takes about seven acres of land and it does 20 million kilowatt hours a year of power. So on seven acres, if you’re gonna do that same thing with just solar, it take hundreds of acres of land. I mean it take a lot of land. And so it’s a very land conscious way to produce commercial scale power. And again, it’s delivered right to where it’s being consumed and that’s a big value.

And then as the transmission system becomes more of an issue, they try to move closer to the load, which means you’re moving closer to people, then the permitting issue becomes another stalemate. And so we want to get to the carbon neutral program. We need to be creative in how we do this and deploy the renewable technologies that we do have. And even the big wind turbines, they’re one at a time. A big a hundred megawatt wind farm is just a whole bunch of wind turbines, <laugh>, you know, it’s not one big power plant. And so if you take those same turbines and you spread ’em out and blend them into the system, then you alleviate a lot of the problems.

If you’re not trying to site a whole bunch of turbines, it’s really not a permitting problem because you’re not causing a huge visual impact. I learned a lot of this when I worked for the Danes back in the eighties when we were first wind power was first becoming commercialized, we would go over to Denmark and northern Germany and the people loved it. And because you’re putting one here, one there over here, over here, and some of ’em are owned by Yens and some are owned by Hans and you know, and they’re just owned by different people that lived in the areas. And it triggered to me that it’s makes a lot more sense to try to do something like that than these big, big projects where the big multinationals come in. That was my whole mentality for the last 40 years is trying to build stuff like that.