June 29, 2022

SDCEA Board Meeting

This is a summary of the SDCEA board meeting on June 29. All notes are provided by Tom Plant and comments are in italic.

Public Comment Period

AVCSEF board chair Tom Plant raised an issue regarding the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) ruling on the United Power v Tristate challenge. Specifically, the ALJ determined that energy storage could not be used by cooperatives to reduce their demand charges by managing their load. This flies in the face of one of the primary uses of energy storage, to manage demand and manage load so that the utility can operate more efficiently and at the lowest cost for their members. The ALJ determined that regardless of if the cooperative uses the storage to reduce their costs they will be charged for GROSS demand not NET demand - that is they will be charged for demand as if the storage were not there. Plant asked the board to write a letter to the FERC to not adopt that portion of the ALJ’s ruling and to uphold the financial benefits of energy storage as a way for distribution cooperatives to manage their load and control costs for the membership.

Board Meeting

Transparency was discussed and the board described their approach to transparency as posting the agenda publicly and having their board meetings open to the public (if you register for the webinar).

Dan Daly described the process of the three member search committee interviewing applicants for the Director seat vacated by Dave Volpe on April 21. This interview took place three days before the election results on June 3. The chair of the search committee was Tom Flower who was defeated in the election three days later. Daly said that all the candidates were excellent and qualified. They unanimously recommended Blake Bennetts as the replacement. Daly said at the time they didn’t have an engineer on the board (Sandra Attebery who was elected three days later is an engineer). Blake Bennetts was appointed and will be seated at the July board meeting (three months after the resignation of Volpe).

Sandra Attebery was elected Secretary.

Sarah (staff) went over a new accounting method for retiring unallocated credits that over the past decade or so have been carried forward because members moved or died. The motion was approved.

Directors were chosen to attend various meetings of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) Sept 27-29 in Portland OR. Joe Redetzke (chair), Nick and Sandra were chosen to go and there’s a class prior to the meeting. NRECA (and CREA - the Colorado Rural Electric Association) offers various educational forums for directors that reflect NRECA’s perspective on a variety of issues. Unfortunately, SDCEA does not participate in other educational events that offer alternative perspectives on issues.

They discussed the name of the “operation round-up” or “power of change” program the utility runs that allows customers to round up their bill with the rounded up portion going to a charitable fund that the utility distributes to charities of their choice.

There was a discussion about whether or not SDCEA should continue to support the BV Chamber of Commerce at a level of $500 with their charitable fund.

The net metering policy (C-20) was amended to include language that clarifies customer equipment must be mounted on their own structures and not on SDCEA structures or poles (and 10 feet from any SDCEA structures).

Director Roundtable

Charlie talked about a meeting he went to

Dan talked about an email he got from a member (Rich Shoemaker of AVCSEF) about micro-grids. What he was wondering is when they’re ready to invest in batteries, is it better to attach it to Trout Creek or put it in micro-grids? He’s also interested in Vehicle to Grid technology, particularly how it feeds into the electric school buses. On micro-grids, NRECA has established a micro-grid consortium to help cooperatives that are interested in looking more at micro-grids.

Suzy - had two or three phone calls about an outage west of town. Paul said there was a substation outage. Power was out for about 45 min.

Sandra - has received many positive calls

Nick - circling back to comments at the beginning of the meeting regarding the upcoming FERC ruling on storage may direct whether or not it’s cost effective.

Paul started talking about a variety of things, mentioned that the only reason we’re concerned about resiliency now is because of intermittent resources. Of course, SDCEA had much worse resiliency 10 years ago before they had renewables, so they’re not really connected. He went on to talk about how he thinks we’re going to use renewables in the future more for creating hydrogen through electrolysis, but because of politics we introduced a bunch of intermittent resources to the mix, but we should have used those to create hydrogen to store electricity. This is not a well supported view, but it’s what Paul conveyed at the meeting.

Joe: The micro-grid bill passed this year and that will provide money to cooperatives to put in some micro-grids. CORE is leaving CREA at the beginning of August. Joe went to San Luis Valley, Holy Cross and Gunnison annual meetings.

Dan talked about Rivian (he has one on order) and how they will have chargers at every state park in Colorado.

CEO’s Update:

Talked about the fire in New Mexico and how the cooperative there lost a bunch of their distribution system. SDCEA donated some transformers to the cooperative there to help them get back up on line.

Paul believes that the opposition to the rate change was “from special interests” and they had bad information. He claims that everyone opposed to the rate change was misled, but that it was SDCEA’s fault because they didn’t get out in front of the “misinformation”

Then he got back to “cost causers”

Paul said he’s opposed to demand side management on the customer side of the meter because it’s “forced” on the consumer. Most Demand Response programs are “opt-in” and with the best programs, customers are compensated for lowering demand through those controls.

HB 21-1286 - bills requires large multi family and public buildings to report energy use to the energy office (that includes utility owned buildings). That means the utility needs to provide that information to the building owners. Then the state will require a reduction in their GHG usage 7% by 2026 and 20% by 2030.

At this time I had to leave for a meeting, but I understand that the CEO began attacking net metering again.