Archive for category: Energy Connections Articles

By Mary Peck

Every job comes with its own unique tools of the trade. For electric lineworkers, those tools include personal protection equipment (PPE) to keep them safe as they work in what has been listed as one of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country.

This PPE includes personally-fitted rubber insulating gloves and sleeves, along with blankets, insulating line hoses, fiberglass hot shot sticks, grounds and jumpers. Keeping this necessary equipment in safe condition, without tears or degradation, means it must be tested regularly. That testing is required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but as Dale Kishbaugh, director of safety and loss control for the Colorado Rural Electric Association, puts it, “It’s the difference between them going home and not going home.”

For years, many of Colorado’s electric coops shipped their lineworkers’ equipment as far away as Kansas and Iowa for regular safety testing. Much of that equipment was purchased from Western United Electric Supply Corporation. Western United was created as an electric materials distribution co-op by Colorado’s electric co-ops in 1976. Today it has 67 member co-ops across eight states with warehouses in Brighton, Colorado; Salem, Utah; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Weekly supply shipments are sent to co-ops with materials needed for construction projects and other line work. However, Western United’s semi tractors then returned empty. That led Western United CEO Mike Prom to a realization three years ago: If WUE built a test lab at its main Brighton facility, much of the lineworkers’ personal protection equipment that was being sent across the country for safety testing could come back to WUE on those otherwise empty delivery trucks.

“We saw another opportunity to provide value to our members,” he said.

The idea to build a regional electrical rubber equipment test lab inside WUE’s Brighton building made so much sense that it was quickly accepted by the Western United board and by late 2015, it was up and running.

Within just a few months, the new test lab was busier than anyone expected. Greg Mordini, CFO at Western United, said that additional testing machines had to be purchased within the first year of operation to keep up with demand. “It’s been phenomenal,” he said. “We’re saving members a lot of money on freight, and the growth of the lab exceeded our wildest estimates.”

For Colorado’s co-ops, which test equipment much more frequently than OSHA standards require, having a trusted testing lab in their own state not only means savings and convenience, it also brings new peace of mind. “We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Kishbaugh said. “Rather than shipping it off to a location they have no idea about, they have a chance to tour the facility, and instead of being a number on a box, there’s actually a name and co-op to go with it. There’s a mutual respect both ways.”

RAISING THE BAR

Western United’s development phase included visits to the highly regarded Cooperative Electric Energy Utility Supply test lab in South Carolina and the Colorado Springs Utilities test lab. It was important to Prom to look carefully at best practices and learn what does and doesn’t work, setting Western United’s lab up for success.

The lab sits in an enclosed area inside Western United’s facility with its own air and humidity control. A full-time lab coordinator and rotating shifts of employees keep testing operations running nine hours a day, five days a week. Shipments of lineworkers’ gloves, sleeves and tools arrive daily. With a total of 80 customer utilities currently, that adds up to approximately 70,000 pieces of protective equipment tested per year in the lab. Prom says a commitment to customer service is key. “People like our two- to three-week turnaround — we focus heavily on this,” he said.

Maintaining the highest possible level of testing efficiency and service requires specific processes and immense attention to detail, including a running track record for each glove tested in the lab. The glove owner’s name, testing dates and condition are all individually documented and the data is stored on Western United’s servers.

The journey of a lineworker’s set of gloves through Western United’s safety testing is a multi-step process. After being washed, disinfected and dried using customized machines and cleaning agents, specially-built AC/DC electric machines with an energized water tank run a series of safety tests. Lab technicians then visually inspect the gloves by hand and place them on inflators to ensure no defects of any kind are present. Finally, the gloves are packaged in heat-sealed plastic for return to the lineworker. Included in that return package is a strong sense of pride from Western United’s lab staff for the work they do. “We test at a higher level than what is required,” Prom said. “That’s your life, that’s your family. It’s critical.”

In cases where a piece of equipment is found to be defective, replacement items can be easily provided from Western United’s extensive stock. “A lot of trust and faith is put in these labs,” Kishbaugh said. “If there’s any question at all, they’ll take that stuff out of service.”

A RESPECTED, GROWING REPUTATION

The Western United test lab recently received the highly respected accreditation certificate from the North America Independent Laboratories (NAIL) for Protective Equipment Testing. A test lab
must be in operation for at least two years and meet rigorous onsite testing standards in order to achieve NAIL accreditation.

“We got a very strong recommendation from them,” Prom said. With Western United’s Colorado test lab now being the only NAIL accredited lab in an 11-state region, it’s certain to attract even more co-ops and municipalities.

With such tremendous growth in its short time of operation, WUE is in the process of adding duplicates for each machine in the lab, so operations will not be affected should one ever need to be taken out of service. WUE is also adding lab technicians to keep up with demand.

In creating a respected regional safety test lab for its members, Western United’s goal of upholding cooperative principle six, “cooperation among cooperatives,” has been quickly realized and thousands of electrical lineworkers across the West are reaping the benefits.

“It’s work and care and effort,” Prom said. “We love showing it off.” To schedule a tour of WUE’s test lab, contact Greg Mordini at gmordini@wue.coop or 720-880-7051.

Mary Peck is a Colorado freelance writer with an extensive background in the electric cooperative industry.

By Robert Taylor

It looks like something plucked from Dr. Seuss’ doodle pad: Mountain Parks Electric’s 1956 Model 423 Tucker Sno-Cat appears to be a cross between a classic pickup and a snow transport, complete with steel sprockets, moving track wheels, dual front runner skis and a vintage grille and hood.

Its once cherry red paint peels from a half century of exposure to ultraviolet rays at 8,000 feet in Walden, Colorado. Patches of its original orange coat and flecks of rust now bleed through. Some call it patina — an oxidized beauty for those who can see it. But even for people who aren’t “gearheads,” something about the vehicle’s contours awakens a curiosity, beckoning passersby to step inside the cab, crank over the Chrysler flathead six cylinder engine and answer that burning question: Does this thing actually work?

Twenty years ago, after just one glance at the Sno-Cat, MPE’s Tom Sifers needed to answer that question for himself. The year was 1997, the same year the Dow Jones eclipsed 7,000 points and people all over the globe mourned the loss of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. The Sno-Cat was 36 years old then, parked behind MPE’s silver Quonset hut on Main Street in Walden, fading from memory. It had been a decade since it was last dispatched. The sight of it immediately lured Sifers, a Missouri native and a longtime Ford Mustang enthusiast. “It’s a piece of history,” Sifers says with a youthful grin. “I had never seen one in person before. I had to know if it still worked. So I talked our lineman Stan Swaney in to turning over the ignition. It sputtered a bit, then fired right up.”

More questions followed: What was the Sno-Cat’s history? How did MPE get it? How was it used? Finding the answers compelled Sifers to ensure that the machine was restored.

Acquiring the Sno-Cat
On September 7, 1961, the Continental Oil Company sold its 1956 Model 423 Tucker Sno-Cat to MPE for $1,010, less than the sticker price of a new pickup truck. The Model 423 — a 400 series model with two tracks and three doors — was manufactured by the Tucker Corporation in Medford, Oregon. It offered dependable over-snow transportation and a heated cab. “No snow too deep … no road too steep,” Tucker’s slogan went. It was a claim that Continental Oil Company substantiated.

Despite an average annual snowfall of more than 60 inches, the Walden snows were not too deep for the Sno-Cat to operate in the McCallum Oil Field. It only stood to reason that the snowfall would not be too deep for restoring power to Jackson County’s more remote areas either. There, heavy snows often buried roads, taxed overhead power lines and sometimes left rural Jackson County residents without electricity for days at a time.

Ute Pass search and rescue
The Sno-Cat became the centerpiece of MPE’s power restoration winter fleet through the 1980s. But with a fuel efficiency rating of approximately 7 miles per gallon and a top speed of only 15 miles per hour, it eventually fell out of favor, thanks to the technological advancements of modern snowmobiles.

Even so, during its heyday, it surpassed all expectations for reliability and usefulness.

In the 1970s, MPE’s Walden linemen Carly Norris, Carol Hale and Stan Swaney trucked MPE’s Sno-Cat south of Walden to the Ute Pass area in response to a small two-passenger plane crash. It was not the only time Sno-Cats were called on in the locality’s search-and-rescue efforts. They were used extensively in the December 4, 1978, Rocky Mountain Airways Flight 217 crash one in Colorado’s Buffalo Pass, a remote area not far from Steamboat Springs.

That day, under blizzard conditions, a small commuter plane full of skiers crashed en route to Denver. Remarkably, thanks in part to MPE’s Sno-Cat rescue operations, 20 survived. MPE lineman Norris was part of the rescue effort that day. He and Jackson County Sheriff Irvin Swayze, using a small receiver, identified the plane’s emergency beacon.

Unfortunately, there were no survivors in a separate crash on Ute Pass. “That was a long, long day,” Swaney’s spouse, Dephane, recalls. “The families of the pilot and passengers were grateful for the help Mountain Parks Electric provided with its Sno-Cat, although that day the snow was soft, and snowmobiles did most of the work.”

Photo contest glory
Last year, MPE’s Sno-Cat once again found itself in the limelight. A photo of the snow machine won the “Vintage Utility Vehicles” category in a photo contest sponsored by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s RE Magazine. The winning picture was posted on MPE’s Facebook page and elicited a response from Patty Tucker (a descendant of the Tucker Sno-Cat founder). “My husband’s grandfather and sons built this,” she wrote.

Future plans
“The Sno-Cat is still 100 percent operational,” says Sifers, now MPE’s general manager. “We have had to replace the water pump on it a few times. From what we have learned, it is one of very few operational models left from the 1950s. It’s not part of our regular fleet anymore, but we plan to put it on a trailer and tow it in summer parades with Mountain Parks Electric’s 1942 Chevy truck. That still works, too. Hopefully, with a little TLC, our Sno-Cat will still turn over on its 100th birthday.”

Robert Taylor is Mountain Parks Electric’s manager of communications and is a novelist and former columnist for the Sky-Hi Daily News in Granby, Colorado.

By Mary Peck

Colorado’s eastern plains are probably the last place a person would expect to find a hydroelectric project installation, but that’s exactly where Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association member Jim Park’s micro hydro generator is planted — along an irrigation ditch on his farm 8 miles east of Kersey, to be precise. The 25-kilowatt generator turns out enough power to run the center pivot on his farm’s sprinkler, which waters 100 acres of corn and alfalfa throughout the growing season.

In a state renowned for pioneering hydroelectric projects of all shapes and sizes in mountainous areas, Park’s micro hydroelectric project is unique to say the least, and the only such project in the Fort Collins-based electric cooperative’s service area. “We thought it was a really interesting project to partner with,” said Tony Francone, PVREA member relations representative and energy use advisor. “We were excited to be able to help Jim and provide the interconnection for it to come back to his metering.”

As the name implies, micro hydroelectric projects are small installations, generally up to 100 kilowatts in size, according to Sam Anderson, energy specialist and program administrator with the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

Growing federal and state support for renewable energy production, particularly through the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s ACRE3 (or Advancing Colorado’s Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency) grant program, is a big driver for increasing interest in agriculture hydropower across Colorado, which has some of the best incentives in the nation. “Since we started this program, Wyoming and Oregon have been working on developing similar programs, so it’s making an impact,” Anderson said.

Earlier this fall, Meeker-based White River Electric Association began operating its co-op’s first micro hydroelectric project. Like Park’s unit, the WREA Miller Creek Ditch Hydro Project utilizes irrigation ditch water to generate power. “The collaborative nature of the Miller Creek Ditch Hydro Project met all of WREA’s goals,” said Trina Zagar-Brown, WREA general counsel and member services manager. “It has been widely supported by our agricultural community and our membership as a whole.”

It was his own lifelong agricultural background and experience as a PVREA board member for more than two decades that helped foster Park’s interest and knowledge in ag-related hydroelectric generation. Through his own research and assistance from Fort Collins-based Community Hydropower Consulting, Park took advantage of grant programs through the Colorado Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development and the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. All three were coordinated under the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, which provides a means to stack the three sources of funding as part of its mission to promote conservation activities led by local grassroots initiatives and supported by the USDA.

“Jim was one of the first to take advantage of the program,” Anderson said. He noted that, while most of the state’s agricultural hydroelectric projects are on the Western Slope, there are plenty of potential generation sites east of the Continental Divide. “It only works well with gravitational energy, but there is a surprising amount of opportunities in Weld County and the Front Range,” he said.

Park had his eye on his farm’s hydropower site for years. Placing the turbine at the bottom of a 25-foot slope in his irrigation diversion off the Lower Latham ditch made sense in terms of water efficiency improvements. “Many times I’ve watched that thing and thought that would be interesting to put a generator on it,” Park said.

Park’s quest led him to the Ossberger manufacturing company in Germany, where micro hydropower projects are relatively prevalent. Founded in 1873, the company’s patented flow turbine was developed to work with small water power resources. Park’s cross-flow turbine was manufactured specifically for his land elevation, water volume and generation needs. The unit took a six-week journey on a container ship to the United States before it was installed. A control panel with a trash collector screen was then set up as was a new net meter, and on June 26, 2017, the cross-flow turbine began generating power.

“My goal was about 40,000 kilowatt-hours. That’s about what my sprinkler uses and I think we’re going to reach that goal,” Park said. He estimates that he will generate around 80 percent of the power required to run his sprinkler. Should the unit generate more energy than is needed, a portion of the overage can be treated as savings in his PVREA account. This is likely since the ditch runs from April to November, before and after the actual time he needs to run his sprinkler. While he will eventually see a positive return on his investment, cost savings wasn’t the primary driver for Park. Still, it’s a nice benefit. “That’s one thing about a hydro turbine,” he said. “Once they’re in place there’s not a whole lot of upkeep. It’s expected to run 60 to 70 years.”

Park’s 260-acre farm was homesteaded by his great-grandfather in 1888 and is designated a Colorado Centennial Farm, meaning it has been owned by the same family for more than 100 years. His father was born on the farm in 1907 and Park lived on it his entire life, so it seems fitting that a historic power source, and one that makes the most of agricultural resources, found its home on the farm, too. “I’m very pleased,” Park said.

Mary Peck is a freelance writer in northern Colorado with a background in the electric co-op industry.

To learn more about irrigation hydropower and funding opportunities, an applicant navigation guide is viewable at colorado.gov/agconservation/hydro-navigation-guide. Get a quick view of the project at tinyurl.com/PVREAhydro.

Dr. Martin Keller, director of the National Renewable Energy Lab, presented to a full room at CREA’s 2017 Energy Innovations Summit October 30.

NREL is all about innovation. It has made advances in generating solar, wind, bio energy, as well as in transportation and grid integration. It has received 147 U.S. patents since 2011, and has 749 active partnerships with industry, universities and local governments.

Dr. Keller noted that renewables are the new normal in the United States. The costs for using renewables are falling and will continue to fall, and yet the US is barely scratching the surface for renewable resources.

According to Dr. Keller, NREL research shows that 80 percent of the electricity the U.S. will need in 2050 can be sourced from renewable technologies. Solar research shows that the cost of solar has gone down 96 percent and grown by more than 50 percent each of the past five years. It makes up 1 percent of all U.S. power generation. NREL wind research shows that innovations have driven down the cost of wind as much as 98 percent between 2009 and 2016. Wind supplies 6.2 percent of U.S. electricity.

Dr. Keller did add that the increase in the diversity of renewables on the grid does require storage options since storage can make renewables dispatchable. And he said that in our modern energy systems, the grid can handle more renewable generation than originally thought. Electric markets were not originally designed for variable renewables, but they can be adapted, he said.

“The old system is going through a tremendous change,” he said, and the challenge is how to develop this new model. He explained his grid modernization vision, noting that the grid of the future must be reliable, resilient, secure, affordable, flexible and sustainable.

Transmission, electric vehicles, wind power, solar power, energy storage and other electricity-related topics were part of a daylong downtown Denver conference sponsored October 30 by the Colorado Rural Electric Association.

An audience of more than 300 people, including students from Mead Energy Academy and Pagosa Springs High School, attended the eighth annual CREA Energy Innovations Summit on October 30 in Denver. The attendees listened to experts from across the country who shared the latest developments in electric cars, renewable energy, power markets and energy technologies. The attendees included Michelle Ren and Julianna O-Clair of Brush and Tate Schrock of Anton, winners of CREA-sponsored EnergyWise Awards at the 2017 Colorado Science and Engineering Fair. The students presented their science fair projects during the vendor fair at the Summit.

Following an opening panel of electric co-op experts discussing the changing industry, breakout sessions looked at the pros and cons of Colorado’s electric utilities joining a regional transmission organization and the state of electric vehicles in rural Colorado.

Leading the RTO panel were representatives from co-op power supplier Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Xcel Energy and the Southwest Power Pool RTO. They discussed how belonging to an RTO would optimize the use of the generation and transmission assets for those utilities in the group and how that could lead to improved renewable integration while reducing production costs. They also reviewed the challenges of bringing all of these different entities together and calculating a regional tariff and various possible cost shifts.

Meanwhile, a parallel breakout session explored how electric vehicles may impact the grid. It was noted that Colorado ranks 4th when it comes to EV growth. And, while much of the EV growth is in Denver, Gunnison County Electric Association CEO Mike McBride noted that drivers in GCEA’s territory have embraced the co-op’s EV and utilize the charging stations the co-ops have helped install. Brian Sloboda of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association explained the research and information that the national trade association has available for co-ops promoting EVs within their territory.

Dr. Martin Keller, Director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was the featured speaker at the Summit luncheon. Dr. Keller discussed the work being done by NREL in renewable energy and the advances being made in renewable and storage technology. During the Summit’s afternoon sessions, a breakout session on distributed energy resources drew a standing-room-only crowd. The panel discussed the grid of the future and what it might look like as more electric users look to smaller power sources behind their meters to meet their needs. Utilities will need to move from just interconnecting with these customers to integrating with their power supplies, according to one panelist. New technology and new forecasting methods will be needed to make this all work.

Other breakout sessions included a look at wind generation and an update on natural gas. Both panels showcased new technology that is advancing the efficiency and benefits of these resources.

The day closed with a panel discussion on energy storage. Experts from the National Renewable Energy Lab, the Electric Power Research Institute and Tesla provided status reports on storage technology and how soon it will be reliable and affordable enough to complement renewables on the grid.

Next year’s Summit is set for Monday, October 29 at the Westin Denver Downtown hotel.