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.

• Watch the video on AEA’s YouTube page

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.”

The program has guidelines that limit the lifetime amount families and individuals can receive. It is generally best utilized for one-time assistance, or very limited assistance. The program pays any bills – including mortgages, rent, utilities and other costs that the board carefully considers.

“Payments are always made directly to the provider,” explained Steven Whiteside, treasurer of the foundation. “We are very careful stewards of the money pledged by United Power members. We make payments directly to landlords and service providers. We want to know exactly how the money is being used and be able to verify it was used as intended.”

In 2011, the board saw a substantial increase in the number of applications received from charitable groups in the area. For instance, the board recently approved a grant to fund a summer camp experience for the Brighton Boys and Girls club. These programming dollars offer additional opportunities for the neediest in the community and helps to offset other funding dollars the groups receive.

• Read more about the project
• Watch a time lapse video of the project’s construction and a ribbon cutting ceremony

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.

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.

• Read more from the latest issue of Network magazine
• View additional photos of classrooms using Colorado Reader

• Read more

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.”

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.”

In 2009, the group was first awarded $3.8 million from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, with a $1 million match required from the partners. A year later, the coalition submitted a proposal to the DOE to increase the level of funding from $4.8 million to $11 million, which was accepted.

Drilling began Jan. 13 on Trapper Mine property; crews expect to go down nearly 10,000 feet by mid-March.

Last year a crew of geologists from the Colorado and Utah geological surveys took approximately 1,700 rock layer measurements in the area to gain a better understanding of what formations might be encountered below ground. Seismic data analysis followed and then the final selection of the well site was made – located in an inactive area at Trapper Mine (which provides coal used at Tri-State’s nearby Craig Station).

The round-the-clock drilling activity is scheduled to continue through approximately mid-March, which is when crews should reach their targeted underground distance of nearly 10,000 feet – or almost two miles. A detailed geologic model will be generated of the subsurface rock formation and the four state geological surveys will then use the information to assess the CO2 sequestration potential.

Late last month, Tri-State and the other project participants conducted tours of the drilling rig site and hosted an open house at Trapper Mine for area elected officials and other interested parties. Those in attendance received an overview of the project, a recap of work completed to-date and an update of current and future activities.

“The open house provided us a terrific opportunity for everyone to get together and see first-hand some of the work that is being accomplished,” said Tri-State public affairs coordinator Sarah Carlisle. “It also was great to see the tremendous amount of interest and support the project is receiving from many of our constituents from throughout Moffat County.”

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.

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.

• See more photos of Empire Dairy’s operations and lighting

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.