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ERMUSR Misc Notes 04-11-2006~// Elk River Municipal Utilities 13069 Orono Parkway Elk River, MN 55330 April 6, 2006 To: Elk River Municipal Utilities Commission Jerry Takle John Dietz Jim Tralle ~,, From: Bryan Adams Subject: Miscellaneous Issues phone: 763.441.2020 Fax: 763.441.8099 Enclosed is the packet for the Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 commission meeting at 4:OOpm. March and the first part of April have been good to us for spring has sprung! The Otsego substation is nearing completion, although we did have a theft of cooper wire, for a loss of approximately $1500. The new transformer and the West substation is in place. Wiring is being completed and should be energized this week. The Target feeder construction will start after road restrictions are lifted. Materials for the construction season are being received. Delivery for the AC tree program starts April 20, 2006. Maintenance for wells #4 & 6 are complete and wells are operational. The business expo was a great success. We again gave away 400 compact florescent lights and we received 10-12 contacts for security systems. Many of our electric projects are becoming less ambiguous as the details are defining themselves. Our new employee, Troy Adams will start April 17, 2006. As I mentioned above, we had a theft of cooper wire from the Otsego Substation. Many other utilities are experience this same problem. Attached is and article "Thieves turn cooper into a few pennies". Attached is a National Geographic 3-06 article titled "The High Cost of Cheap Coal" that is worth your time to read. On a final note, the Target Data Center through their engineers EYP is requesting a $338,879.70 rebate for energy efficient equipment. See attached letter. Our policy is to limit CIP rebates to $10,000. Our annual CIP budget is approximately $208,000. GRE limits their contributions to $50,000 per customer. The best we can offer Target is $60,000 in 2007, $10,000 from us and $15,000 from GRE unless this commission desires otherwise. Yage 1 of 3 Michael Thiry From: Tim Bergh [Timbe@connexusenergy.com] Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 12:11 PM To: Mthiry@nsatel.net Subject: FW: Article in the North Suburban Star and Tribune From: Chuck Jensen Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 10:23 AM To: Leo Offerman; Merle Mettler; Brian Weidenfeller; Bruce Rosine; Dick Watson; Larry Nelson; Mac McMenamy; Tim Bergh Subject: FUV: Article in the North Suburban Star and Tribune Saw you weren't copied -thought you wanted to stay up on this. From: Leone Sweeney Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 7:46 AM To: Rick Newland; Tom Quiring; Matt Yseth; Pete Miller; Chuck Jensen Subject: Article in the North Suburban Star and Tribune Thieves turn copper into a few pennies stlgt~ paces for copper ana otilcr scrap n~etais are iuehi~~ a rise i~l ti~e~s ri•c~m stlt~u~'c~ati ~~~a~rt. S1LeS al]tl pU:,lllti 53If'T~,' I:~tZ~~TC:S. Sarah Lemagie, Special to The Star Tribune Lu.F~,ri t,i j~°~'c`3. iv. {v~~ui ~.i i ~i ~', ~~..~~.iv °_~ ~: ~~ . ~i ~ 6`~e~% For electric utility employees throughout the suburbs, the scene has become all too familiar: Workers lay cable in a trench leading to a new housing development, then leave it overnight. When they return in the morning, the cable is gone -- ripped out of the ground by thieves who strip it and sell the raw copper to scrap dealers for a fraction of its value. Thefts have increased so much in recent months that electric utilities are tightening security to stop criminals from taking wire from suburban storage facilities, construction sites and even live transformers. In the past eight months, 114,000-customer Connexus Energy, based in Ramsey, has reported five thefts, most from new housing developments in north-metro towns such as Blaine and Ham Lake. Dakota Electric Association, which serves 95,000 members, including many in south-of--the-river communities, has had two break-ins since August, losing nearly $10,000 in copper wire from its main facility in Farmington. Utilities have been hit hard 3/27/2006 Xcel Energy, which serves about 1 million customers in the greater Twin Cities area, has been dealing with a spate of wire thefts for more than a year. "In the past, you might have heard of something every three or four months, but nothing like this," said Kurt Kumlin, director of loss-control services for the Minnesota Rural Electric Association. The trade organization represents 44 electric cooperatives, including suburban utilities such as Connexus and Dakota Electric. Kumlin named nearly a dozen co-ops that have reported copper wire thefts since last summer. "We've seen it go up dramatically in the last eighteen months," said Xcel Energy security director Scott McCoy. Brazen, or stupid, thefts Criminals have stolen several Xcel utility trucks, including two in the past month. Lt. Dan Votel, who heads the Weapons of Mass Destruction at the Ramsey County Sheriff s Department, said that he collects information on those cases from local police departments because of the risk that a stolen truck with Xcel's logo could be used to gain access to other company equipment and facilities. Last week in East Bethel, awould-be wire theft broke into a locked Connexus transformer carrying 7200 volts and tried to cut the copper and aluminum wire, likely receiving a painful shock in the process. "We didn't find a body, but we don't imagine they'd be in a hurry to do it again anytime soon," said Connexus safety officer Chuck Jensen, who added that scorch marks were found at the scene of the crime. McCoy said he was amazed at the danger thieves are putting themselves in for $50 of scrap wire. "It's not like they're going out and picking gold up off the ground," he said. Copper prices fuel trend Metal theft is nothing new, but the skyrocketing price of copper has made it more attractive to thieves looking for quick cash. According to data from the International Copper Study Group, the price of copper has tripled in the past three years, to more than $2.20 per pound. Copper theft also is a hard crime to track given the vulnerability of construction sites and the fact that, unlike typical pawn shop fodder, most scrap metal lacks identifying markings. Minnesota law requires scrap dealers to collect the name, address, and driver's license number of people selling wire commonly used by communication and electric utilities, but many law enforcement officials are either unaware of the law or lack the resources to enforce it. Lt. Jim Heimerl is a police officer in north Minneapolis, where he said that metal theft is particularly common because of the area's relatively high concentration of unoccupied buildings and construction sites, as well as the presence of many of the city's major scraps dealers. Heimerl said that scrap dealers put little, if any, effort into tracking suspicious transactions. "I've never had one of them call and say, 'Joe Blow has been in here 20 days in a row,' " he said. 3/27/2006 - --a- - -- Contractors, plumbers, electricians, and other businesses throughout the metro area are reporting a spike in similar thefts and burglaries. Costly for victims Thieves have made seven nighttime forays onto gravel pit owner Pete Fischer's Apple Valley property in the past six months to cut cabling from conveyor belts and machinery. On Feb. 22, Apple Valley police arrested a man in connection with one of the thefts. According to charges, the man dragged stolen cable away from the pit and left it in a pile near a road, then returned with two other people the next day to pick it up. The arrest was good news for Fischer, but he said that more cable turned up missing the following weekend, "so apparently there's quite a few people doing this kind of stuff." "It's annoying, it's frustrating, and it's costly," he said, adding that his business has lost close to $15,000 in copper wire alone. Medina Electric, which wires housing developments throughout the metro area, has been hit about 10 times in the past six months, said president Roger Georges. The company has resorted to hiring security guards and making daily deliveries of wire to its sites. "We've just been bringing out what we can put in in a day's work," Georges said. Jensen, of Connexus, said that his co-op has beefed up security at its main facility, printed fliers for scrap dealers and door hangers for customers in hard-hit areas, and even offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of thieves. Xcel Energy tightened security when it first realized it had a problem, an effort that McCoy said has reduced the number of burglary attempts at the company's service centers. Now, McCoy said, thieves are more active in the field, where they are more likely to come across energized wire. "We're not aware of any deaths yet, but God, it's just luck," he said. 3/27/2006 March 13, 2006 Mr. Bryan Adams, PE General Manager Elk River Municipal Utilities 13069 Orono Parkway Elk River, MN 55330 Email: bryadaC~nsatel.net Re: Target Technology Center East Motor Starters & Rebates Dear Mr. Adams: ~,~ ~ ~~ ~~ --~ ,,~; ~~ ~, N _~__ 1 ,f ~~rl ~, We are acknowledge receipt of your letter dated February 8, 2005 regarding the motor loads at the Elk River Target Data Center. The design of the motor starters will reflect your request to change the six (6) 40HP motors to a reduced voltage auto-transformer type starter. All the other starters on the building motors will remain as previously indicated in our letter to you dated January 24, 2006. In regards to the lighting, premium efficiency motors, adjustable speed drives and HVAC equipment rebates we have done some preliminary calculations per the attached based on the forms you provided. In summary the total rebates per are as follows: Lighting: $540.70 Premium efficiency motors $23 310.00 Adjustable speed drives $160,160.00 HVAC equipment $154,869.00 Total Rebate: $338,879.70 You had indicated on your previous letter that there might be a rebate limit of $50,000. Would Elk River Municipal Utilities allow Target to take full advantage of the energy efficient equipment that they are installing in the facility? If you have any questions, please feel free to call me to discuss this at 312-291-0039 extension 101. Best Regards, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, Inc. Addam A. Friedl, PE Principal Cc: Jim Todd, Ryan Construction By Tim Appenzeller NATIONAL GE OGflAPNIC SENIOR EDITOR FUEL OF THE FUTURE I Workers loading coal in Shanxi Province, China, help feed the country's vast appetite for the fuel. Burned in homes, factories, and power plants, coal provides 65 percent of China's energy. Consumption -already the world's highest-could more than double in 20 years. 9R NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • MARCH 2O0G The Coal Paradox We can't live without it. But can we survive with it? PETER ESSICN, AURORA N A SCORCHING AUGUST DAY IN southwestern Indiana, the giant Gib- son generating station is running flat ` out. Its five 180-foot-high boilers are gulping 25 tons of coal each minute, sending thousand-degree steam blasting through turbines that churn out more than 3,000 mega- watts of electric power, 50 percent more than Hoover Dam. The plant's cooling system is strug- gling to keep up, and in the control room warn- ings chirp as the exhaust temperature rises. But there's no backing off on a day like this, with air conditioners humming across the Midwest and electricity demand close to record levels. Gibson, one of the biggest power plants in the country, is a mainstay of the region's elec- tricitysupply, pumping enough power into the grid for three million people. Stepping from the sweltering plant into the air-conditioned offices, Angeline Protogere of Cinergy, the Cincinnati- based utility that owns Gibson, says gratefully, "This is why we're making all that power." Next time you turn up the AC or pop in a DVD, spare a thought for places like Gibson and for the grimy fuel it devours at the rate of three 100-car trainloads a day. Coal-burning power plants like this one supply the United States with half its electricity. They also emit a stew of dam- aging substances, including sulfur dioxide-a major cause of acid rain-and mercury. And they gush as much climate-warming carbon dioxide as America's cars, trucks, buses, and planes combined. Here and there, in small demonstration proj- ects, engineers are exploring technologies that could turn coal into power without these envi- ronmental costs. Yet unless utilities start build- ing such plants soon-and lots of them-the future is likely to hold many more traditional stations like Gibson. Last summer's voracious electricity use was just a preview. Americans' taste for bigger houses, along with population growth in the West and air-conditioning-dependent Southeast, will help THE HIGH COST OF CHEAP COAL 99 When you turn up the AC, think of Gibsan and the grimyfuel it dev®urs at the rate of three 100-car trainloads a day. WHO HAS COAL? The world has more than a trillion tons of readily available coal. The U.S. has the largest share, but other energy-hungry countries, such as China and India, are richly endowed as well. U.S. RUSSIA CHINA INDIA AUSTRALIA SOUTH AFRICA OTHER WHO USES COAL NOW? Global coal consumption is roughly five billion tons a year, with China burning the most. Western Europe has cut coal use by 36 percent since 1990 by using available natural gas from the North Sea and Russia. MILLIONS OF TONS [.~ry~ CHINA EUROPE" U.S. INDIA RUSSIA OTHER WHO WILL USE IT TOMORROW? China's coal needs will more than double by 2025 to satisfy factories and consumers. The country also plans to convert coal to liquid motor fuels. Worldwide, consumption will rise by 56 percent. MILLIONS OF TONS CHINA U.S. EUROPE" INDIA RUSSIA OTHER "Excluding Russia push up the U.S. appetite for power by a third over the next 20 years, according to the Depart- ment of Energy. And in the developing world, especially China, electricity needs will rise even faster as factories burgeon and hundreds of millions of people buy their first refrigerators and TVs. Much of that demand is likely to be met with coal. For the past 15 years U.S. utilities needing to add power have mainly built plants that burn nat- ural gas, a relatively clean fuel. But a near tripling of natural gas prices in the past seven years has idled many gas-fired plants and put a damper on new construction. Neither nuclear energy nor alternative sources such as wind and solar seem likely to meet the demand for electricity. Meanwhile, more than a quarter trillion tons of coal lie underfoot, from the Appalachians through the Illinois Basin to the Rocky Mountains SUPPLY AND DEMAND I A coal train rumbling across Montana is a mile and a half long yet carries barely a day's fuel for a large power plant. The U.$. burns more than a billion tons of coal a year but has the world's richest deposits (above-, enough to last 250 years. -enough to last 250 years at today's consump- tion rate. You hear it again and again: The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal. About 40 coal-burning power plants are now being designed or built in the U.S. China, also rich in coal, could build several hundred by 2025. Mining enough coal to satisfy this growing appetite will take a toll on lands and communi- ties (see following story, page 104). Of all fossil fuels, coal puts out the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy, so burning it poses a further threat to global climate, already warming alarm- ingly. With much government prodding, coal- burning utilities have cut pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by installing equipment like the building-size scrubbers and catalytic units crowded behind the Gibson plant. But the carbon dioxide that drives global warm- ing simply goes up the stacks-nearly two bil- lion tons of it each year from U.S. coal plants. Within the next two decades that amount could rise by a third. There's no easy way to capture all the carbon dioxide from a traditional coal-burning station. "Right now, if you took a plant and slapped a carbon-capture device on it, you'd lose 25 per- cent of the energy," says Julio Friedmann, who SOURCE: ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION. DOE NGM ART THE HIGH C 0 $ r Q F CHEAP COAL t~t U.S. ELECTRICITY GENERATION COAL NUCLEAR NATURAL GAS RENEWABLES OIL U.S. POWER PLANT COZ EMISSIONS coAL _ F NATURAL GAS OIL WHAT'S IN COAL SMOKE? SULFUR DIOXIDE NITROGEN OXIDES MERCURY CARBON DIOXIDE PARTICULATES The sulfur in coal forms this gas which The heat of power- plant burners turn The traces of mercury i l Coal produces more Particles from coal- , gives rise to acid rain s nitrogen from the n coa escape in power-plant exhaust. COz per energy unit than any other fossil burning plants can harm people who when it reacts with air into nitrogen Falling hundreds of fuel. COz is a green- have heart and water in clouds. Many plants control sulfur oxides, which can contribute to acid miles away in rain house gas, affecting breathing disorders. emissions by burn- rain and ground- or snow, the mer- curt' builds up in climate by trapping heat that would Soot and ash are captured before ing low-sulfur coal and passing the ex- level ozone. Pollution t l fish, making some otherwise escape to they go up the stacks, haust through scrub- con ro s on many plants limit nitrogen species unsafe for children and preg- space. Power plants today release all but finer particles can form later from tiers, which capture sulfur dioxide oxide emissions. Want women to eat. their COz into the , oxides of sulfur . atmosphere. and nitrogen. studies carbon dioxide management at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But a new kind of power station could change that. A hundred miles up the Wabash River from the Gibson plant is a small power station that looks nothing like Gibson's mammoth boilers and steam turbines. This one resembles an oil refinery, all tanks and silvery tubes. Instead of burning coal, the Wabash River plant chemically trans- forms it in a process called coal gasification. The Wabash plant mixes coal or petroleum coke, acoal-like residue from oil refineries, with water and pure oxygen and pumps it into a tall tank, where a fiery reaction turns the mixture into a flammable gas. Other equipment removes sulfur and other contaminants from the syngas, as it's called, before it's burned in a gas turbine to produce electricity. Cleaning the unburned syngas is cheaper and more effective than trying to sieve pollutants from power plant exhaust, as the scrubbers at a plant like Gibson do. "This has been called the cleanest coal-fired power plant in the world," says Steven Vick, general manager of the Wabash facility. "We're pretty proud of that distinction:' The syngas can even be processed to strip out the carbon dioxide. The Wabash plant doesn't take this step, but future plants could. Coal gasification, Vick says, "is a technology that's set up for total COz removal:' The carbon dioxide could be pumped deep underground into de- pleted oil fields, old coal seams, or fluid-filled rock, sealed away from the atmosphere. And as a bonus, taking carbon dioxide out of the syn- gas can leave pure hydrogen, which could fuel a new generation of nonpolluting cars as well as generate electric power. The Wabash plant and a similar one near Tam- pa, Florida, were built or refurbished with gov- ernmentmoney in the mid-1990s to demonstrate that gasification is a viable electricity source. Projects in North Dakota, Canada, the North Sea, and elsewhere have tested the other parts of the equation: capturing carbon dioxide and seques- tering it underground. Researchers say they need to know more about how buried carbon dioxide behaves to be sure it won't leak back out-a potential threat to climate or even people. But Friedmann says, "For a first cut, we have enough information to say, `It's a no-brainer. We know how to do this: " Yet that's no guarantee utilities will embrace the gasification technology. "The fact that it's proved in Indiana and Florida doesn't mean 102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MARCH 2006 souaceerveacv wFOaMnnoN nommisrannoN, ooe. NCm War executives are going to make abillion-dollar bet on it," says William Rosenberg of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The two gasifi- cation power plants in the U.S. are half the size of most commercial generating stations and have proved less reliable than traditional plants. The technology also costs as much as 20 percent more. Most important, there's little incentive fora com- pany to take on the extra risk and expense of cleaner technology: For now U.S. utilities are free to emit as much carbon dioxide as they like. Cinergy CEO James Rogers, the man in charge of Gibson and eight other carbon-spewing plants, says he expects that to change. "I do believe we'll have regulation of carbon in this country," he says, and he wants his company to be ready. "The sooner we get to work, the bet- ter. Ibelieve it's very important that we develop the ability to do carbon sequestration:' Rogers says he intends to build acommercial-scale gasification power plant, able to capture its car- bon dioxide, and several other companies have announced similar plans. The energy bill passed last July by the U.S. Congress offers help in the form of loan guar- antees and tax credits for gasification projects. "This should jump-start things," says Rosenberg, MITCH EPSTEIN A CLEANER WAY I A North Dakota chemical plant transforms coal to a gas while stripping out carbon dioxide and piping it underground to an oil field in Canada; only steam escapes. This plant sells the gas, but clean power plants of the future could make coal gas, then burn it to generate electricity. who advocated these measures in testimony to Congress. The experience of building and run- ning the first few plants should lower costs and improve reliability. And sooner or later, says Rogers, new environmental laws that put a price on carbon dioxide emissions will make clean tech- nology look far more attractive. "If the cost of carbon is 30 bucks a ton, it's amazing the kinds of technologies that will evolve to allow you to produce more electricity with less emissions:' If he's right, we may one day be able to cool our houses without turning up the thermostat on the entire planet. ^ R Insatiable Appetite Can the Earth sustain our growing coal consumption? Is the government push- ing hard enough for cleaner coal technologies? Share your thoughts in our forum at ngm.com/0603. THE HIGH COST OP CHEAP COAL 103