Archive for the 'General' Category

Craig, power plant featured in energy video

Published on February 22, 2012 in General, Public Meetings and Public Outreach. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Last October, the “Energy for America” campaign made a stop in Craig, Colo., as part of its national bus tour. With a purpose of visiting communities that benefit from the use of domestic natural resources, the initiative’s organizers recognized that the small northwest Colorado town serves as a great example of the benefits energy development and electricity production can have on a community.

The Energy for America effort was launched in the fall of 2011 by the American Energy Alliance (AEA), in conjunction with the Institute for Energy Research and Americans for Prosperity, in an effort to “educate Americans about the extent of the nation’s natural resources base and the perversity of federal energy policies that avoid reliable, affordable, proven domestic energy sources and embrace unreliable, expensive and unproven energy sources.”

During its visit in Craig, AEA conducted interviews with a number of residents, including Tri-State’s Rick Johnson, plant manager at Craig Station, and Frank and Kerrie Moe, local business owners. The interviews and corresponding footage of the town are the subject of a video produced by AEA.

United Power’s Operation Round-Up tops $1 million

Published on February 21, 2012 in General and Public Outreach. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Many of Tri-State’s member co-ops actively participate in the Operation Round-Up Foundation, a voluntary program funded by consumers who “round-up” their bills to the next full dollar amount – which is an average donation of 50 cents a month, or about $6 a year. In 2011, United Power (Brighton, Colo.) hit the milestone million-dollar mark, 17 years after first launching the program in support of needy families, individuals and charitable groups in its service territory.

The power of the small change being donated every month by thousands of United’s member-consumers provides a substantial, reliable funding source to help meet some needs of the community. The program is run by a volunteer board of directors which meets each month to consider applications from people through the co-op’s service territory.

“We have seen a real increase in the number of applications we consider every month,” said Mary Macomber, president of the United Power Round-Up Foundation. “We see Round-Up as a safety net for people who may be experiencing hard times because of job loss or illness. Most of the money we grant goes to help members who are experiencing a difficult time, but have the means to eventually become self-supporting again.” Continue reading ‘United Power’s Operation Round-Up tops $1 million’

Taos Eco-Park goes renewable

Published on February 14, 2012 in Clean Energy, Energy Efficiency, General and Renewable Energy. 0 Comments Tags: .

The Taos (N.M.) Eco-Park is earning its name. Tri-State member Kit Carson Electric Cooperative celebrated the completion of a 60-kilowatt solar canopy installed in the parking lot at the sports facility with a ribbon cutting ceremony earlier this month. The array was designed to generate enough electricity to power stadium lights for three fields at the Eco-Park. The town has completed the first field, with other phases pending.

Tri-State receives award for IRP process

Published on February 14, 2012 in General and Public Meetings. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Tri-State executive vice president and general manager Ken Anderson was presented with the Western Area Power Administration’s Administrator’s Award for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the association’s board meeting held Feb. 7 in Westminster.

Ken Anderson (right) accepts the Western Area Power Administration award for the association's IRP process.

The award, presented by Brad Warren, Western’s Rocky Mountain regional manager, was given in recognition of Tri-State’s thorough Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) process, which involved seven public meetings, followed by months of research and extensive analysis by Tri-State’s staff. The end product was a 482-page IRP document, which was filed with Western and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission at the end of 2010.

“Tri-State went the extra mile to involve stakeholders and that was a tremendous effort to undertake,” Warren said.

Tri-State’s IRP is a 20-year assessment of the association’s existing resources and electric sales forecast. The report discusses various alternatives for meeting the future needs of its 44 member systems. An Annual Progress Report, updating the 2010 IRP filing, was also completed and filed in November of 2011.

“We worked hard to get stakeholders and interested parties involved in the development of our Integrated Resource Plan,” Anderson said upon receiving the award. “It wasn’t easy, but our team never got off mission – they stayed focused on what needed to be accomplished and made it happen,” he added.

To produce the IRP, a team of Tri-Staters essentially worked full-time for four months preparing the document. “We modeled 24 different scenarios to analyze their different impacts on our loads and resources,” said Kevin Cox, resource planning and analytics manager. “But most importantly we wanted to produce a document that was thorough and a technical review of expected needs, while preserving all resource options in light of future uncertainties,” he said.

Filling a gap in education

Published on February 10, 2012 in General and Public Outreach. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Colorado Reader provides agriculture and natural resource learning opportunities for students

A fourth grader at Naturita Elementary School (Naturita, Colo.) patiently awaits his turn to answer a question posed as part of the discussion around the Colorado Reader.

As a group of students in Norwood, Colo., shuffle into Catherine Kolbert’s seventh grade science class making their way to their desks, a topic scrawled on the whiteboard prompts the first bit of discussion for the period.

“Name an energy source used to generate electricity.”

The students shout out answers such as “hydro,” “coal” and “solar” as they hastily scan the Colorado Readers in front of them in an attempt to locate additional responses. The Colorado Reader — an eight-page student activity newspaper focused on agriculture and natural resources, specifically electricity for this edition — was distributed to the students the day prior in preparation for the current  discussion and subsequent lesson on electricity.

A similar scene is taking place in more than 1,500 Colorado classrooms as students from fourth to seventh grade learn about electricity through the information provided in the Colorado Reader.

Published and distributed at no cost to educators by the Colorado Foundation for Agriculture (CFA), the Colorado Reader was originally produced based on the fact that less than five percent of textbook content was related to agriculture and natural resources.

New Mexico regulators repeal carbon cap-and-trade rules

Published on February 8, 2012 in General and Public Meetings. 0 Comments Tags: .

On a unanimous 5-0 vote, the members of New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board voted to repeal a set of rules that would have created a regional cap-and-trade program for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Tri-State, the New Mexico Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the state’s electric cooperatives have been working together over the past several months in support of this action.

 

10-year transmission plan filed with Public Utilities Commission

Published on February 7, 2012 in General, Public Meetings, Public Outreach, Resource Planning and Transmission. 0 Comments Tags: .

On Feb. 1 Tri-State filed its first 10-year transmission planning document with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission in compliance with CPUC Rule 3627. In support of that filing, and in an effort to update the public and interested parties on the association’s future transmission projects, an extensive revamping of the transmission planning section of Tri-State’s Web site has been completed.

The first ever filing for the PUC Rule 3627 was the culmination of an extensive planning process, mainly by the system planning, transmission engineering and the public affairs groups. Several stakeholder outreach meetings were held in 2011 to engage interested parties, followed by a comment period for people to provide their input on various projects that are on the association’s 10-year planning horizon.

“Through the eyes of the PUC, the purpose of the filing is so that stakeholders – including elected officials, county commissioners and city administrators – are engaged early and often in the transmission planning process,” said Sarah Carlisle, public affairs coordinator. “Since other utilities in the state must also file under this rule, it also may provide the commission with an opportunity to identify mutually beneficial projects in which utilities might partner and provide economic benefits to electric consumers in Colorado.”

Drilling underway at carbon capture test site

Published on February 6, 2012 in General. 0 Comments Tags: .

Major drilling activity began January 13 on Trapper Mine property, part of the process of assessing the carbon dioxide sequestration potential for northwest Colorado, the Colorado Plateau and the Southern Rocky Mountains.

The drilling is part of a three-year project to evaluate the ability of the region’s subsurface rock formations and geologic structure to provide a safe, long-term option to store CO2, a greenhouse gas produced as a byproduct during the energy production process at coal-based power plants.

The Rocky Mountain Carbon Capture and Sequestration initiative is a partnership comprised of Tri-State, the Colorado Geological Survey, the Utah Geological Survey, the Arizona Geological Survey, the New Mexico Bureau of Geology, Schlumberger Carbon Services and the University of Utah.

“This project will provide a fundamental geological baseline of the potential for major candidate rock formations in the region to safely store carbon dioxide,” said co-principal investigator Dr. Brian McPherson, director of the Carbon Science and Engineering Research Center at the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute. “Such baseline is absolutely critical before commercial-scale sequestration can be deployed.” Continue reading ‘Drilling underway at carbon capture test site’

G&T’s EEP program helps bring savings to Colorado dairy

Published on January 27, 2012 in General and Public Outreach. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

New lighting installed with the help of Tri-State's EEP program has helped this Colorado dairy operation save big dollars on energy costs.

With the support of Tri-State and member system Morgan County REA (Fort Morgan, Colo.), a family-owned dairy producer, Empire Dairy, near Wiggins, Colo., is now able to cut more than $1,000 per month in electric utility expenses from its bottom line production costs with the installation of some new high-efficiency lighting.

A very similar retrofit of induction type lighting at Tri-State and several other member co-ops was provided by the same firm, Sustainable Building Experts of Denver. The Tri-State installation was for new lighting in the Westminster operations center parking lot in 2011.

Induction lighting is essentially high performance fluorescent illumination that can be retrofitted in existing fixtures at considerably less expense than the increasingly popular LED (light emitting diode) applications.

These installations are a part of a series of pilot projects funded through the association’s Energy Efficiency Products (EEP) program. Tri-State’s EEP pilot projects are aimed at testing and demonstrating the viability of emerging technologies in lighting and other energy efficiency products, according to Jon Beyer, Tri-State’s member services manager.

Left to right: Riley McLaughlin of Sustainable Building Experts, Bill Annan and Geoff Baumgartner, both with Morgan County REA, were key in the successful implementation of the energy-saving project at Empire Dairy.

Installed in Empire’s main dairy barn, the 97 new induction lights are designed to last up to 100,000 hours before replacement and save the eastern Colorado milking operation more than 9,000 kilowatt-hours per month in energy consumption. Payback for the retrofitted lights is estimated at a little more than a year from the installation date.

Empire Dairy has been a member-consumer of Morgan County REA since 1989. This large operation employs 85 people, who oversee a herd of 5,000 cows that must be milked three times a day. Most of the six loads each of 440,000 pounds of milk that is produced daily at Empire are transported to Leprino Foods in Fort Morgan for the production of cheese.

In addition to Tri-State and Morgan County REA’s support of the project, additional funding was provided through iCast, a Denver-area nonprofit organization that secures funding mainly to electric utilities and local government entities for sustainable technology projects throughout Colorado.

Tri-State safety record beats national averages

Published on January 26, 2012 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The results for Tri-State’s 2011 safety record were presented to the board during its January meeting and revealed that the association’s Total Case Incident (TCIR) and Days Away, Restricted or Transferred (DART) rates are much better than the utility industry averages. This is impressive, considering the association’s diverse operations and the wide range of hazards that employees are exposed to regularly.

In 2011, Tri-State’s TCIR was 2.1 OSHA recordable incidents per 200,000 hours worked versus the national utility average of 2.9. Tri-State is 31 percent below the national average.

The association’s DART rate, which measures how often lost time cases occur, is approximately 42 percent better than the national utility industry average. The national average is 1.8 lost time cases per 200,000 hours worked. Tri-State experienced 2.01 cases where employees were off work, received work restrictions or were transferred to other jobs per 200,000 hours worked in 2011.

These results point to a strong alignment with the Tri-State business plan, which outlines safety as a foundational value of the association. “We believe that all work can and should be done safely,” said Mike McInnes, Tri-State’s senior vice president of production.

Tri-State employees across all of the association’s departments, locations and functions are to be commended for contributing to the overall safety record results of 2011. “This positive record is the result of a lot people paying attention to their daily work and many experienced employees putting a lot of effort into safety,” said Kent Mahanna, Tri-State’s senior manager of corporate safety.