A new report from consulting firm Siemens could give direction to a city utility project that has lain dormant for six years.
For 15 years — since 2007 — the Columbia City Council and staff have discussed the need for and location of a possible new electric substation and accompanying transmission line.
The details of the project have been long debated, as council members, city staff and neighborhood organizers weighed in on where the planned line should run.
After initially approving plans for a transmission line along Nifong Boulevard in July 2013, the council put the project on hold in early 2016 after hearing objections from dozens of residents living in that area.
Siemens was commissioned by the council in 2019 to complete two separate but related reports. The Integrated Resource Plan, or IRP, and the Master Plan.
Integrated Resource Plan and Master Plan
This Nifong route was called “Option A” at the time, and a version of it is referred to as “Option Z” in Siemens’ new report. Five other possible routes are laid out.
The council will be briefed on the report at pre-council meetings Monday and again in June. Renewable energy could be a focus for the council at these sessions, with a new mayor, Barbara Buffaloe, and new Fourth Ward council member Nick Foster.
“We intend to go through and bring the council up to date on the IRP and then kind of give staff’s feedback on the Siemens report,” said Christian Johanningmeier, power production superintendent for Columbia.
The IRP forecasts the load that Columbia’s electric utility will need to meet in the coming years and to plan for how the utility can add resources to meet that load.
The Master Plan is concerned with how reliable the city’s grid is and if it can deliver the amount of power needed.
Johanningmeier explained that while staff regularly draft IRPs themselves, the Master Plan’s proactive approach to system planning is new.
“So while this effort by Siemens is somewhat useful, it’s different than what we knew as part of the normal practice,” Johanningmeier said.
The scope of both of these reports is large and covers more than updates to the ongoing transmission line project.
Transmission lines are large, high-voltage wires that carry electricity between powerplants and substations. These substations step the voltage down using transformers and send it along regular street-level wires to residents’ homes.
Depending on the size of the wires they carry, transmission poles can tower over 150 feet.
A growing city
The need for a new substation and accompanying transmission line in southern Columbia was identified for a few reasons.
At the time, Columbia was forecast to grow in the southwest part of the city. A new substation would add capacity to the grid in that location.
This hypothetical “Mill Creek” substation would have been connected with a transmission line to the existing Perche Creek substation. Perche Creek currently has only a single line connecting it to the rest of the city electrical grid. Adding another would build redundancy for if a line is knocked down or a repair is needed.
Another benefit of the new substation and transmission line would be to increase the overall capacity of the city’s power grid. Increasing capacity is necessary to avoid overloading the grid at peak times, usually during the summer when both usage and temperatures are high.
If the grid was overloaded it would be a problem for more than just the city. Columbia is connected into the national electricity grid, and an outage here could cause a “cascade effect” that triggers outages in neighboring grids.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, is responsible for maintaining reliability between grids and keeping a cascade from occurring. They employ heavy fines of up to $1 million a day for municipalities that pose a risk to the larger grid. According to staff at the time, a new substation and transmission line would have kept the city in compliance with NERC.
Staff originally presented three plans to the council to address all of these concerns. Each called for building the new Mill Creek substation but included different routes for the necessary transmission line. Staff recommended “Option A,” a 161-kilovolt line that ran along Nifong Boulevard, connecting Perche Creek, Grindstone and Mill Creek substations.
Before the project was paused, Columbia residents approved a bond issue to pay for the proposed Mill Creek substation and Option A transmission line. A bond election was held and passed by residents in April 2015.
As part of the bond issue, residents approved a 3% electric rate increase to pay off the bond over time. That increase is still in effect.
Siemens was chosen out of a lineup of other consulting firms by a taskforce set up by council in 2018.
Jay Hasheider was the chair of this Integrated Electric Resource and Master Plan Task Force.
“The task force was a unique attempt to get citizen involvement in this really complex and usually kept-within-the-utility topic,” Hasheider said.
The task force has provided its comments on the new reports to the council.
Plan proposals
The biggest change in the new Siemens report has made to past plans is how it forecasts Columbia’s load. Contrary to past predictions, the Siemens report didn’t recommend a southern Mill Creek substation as necessary for Columbia’s grid. Should a new substation become necessary, Siemens recommended a location closer to the city’s water treatment plant.
The six proposals are as follows:
- This route connects Perche Creek and Grindstone substations with a 161-kilovolt transmission line. This plan takes the original route of Option A, without the “Mill Creek” substation.
- Option B-2:
- This route connects Perche Creek and McBaine substations with a 161-kilovolt transmission line. Option B-2 is another route that was provided to past council alongside Option A. This route utilizes city-owned land in the west to reduce costs.
- Option E-2:
- This route connects Perche Creek and Bolstad substations with a northward 161-kilovolt transmission line through the Second Ward. This route was proposed by former Mayor Brian Treece and the details of it were explored in a report by consultant Burns & McDonnell.
- This route connects Perche Creek to an Ameren substation west of town using a 345-kilovolt transmission line. This plan was created by Siemens.
- This plan adds a 161-kilovolt transmission line along the existing 69-kilovolt line between Perche Creek and Hinkson substations, as well as adds a 161-kilovolt line between Hinkson and Grindstone substations. This plan was created by Siemens, as well.
- Option NWA:
- This is the “non-wire alternative” and looks to add capacity to the grid by building a large solar array and battery.
Cost of the plans
The specific price of any of these options can only be estimated. According to the Siemens report, the NWA Option cost is around $68 million for both the solar array and the battery.
All other options are estimated under $30 million, but according to the task force, Siemens ranked Option Z as the cheapest, followed by Options F and W.
The cost to build any line has gone up since 2016 due to the labor shortage and pandemic-related supply chain issues. According to Johanningmeier, even routine utility operation has become more expensive.
More information about possible prices for these plans could be revealed at the coming work sessions, or when the currently-uncompleted cost-of-service analysis is finished.
The Siemens report cost ratepayers $831,741, according to staff. An IRP report would have been required regardless of the city delay on the transmission lines.
This new look at the transmission line issue comes on the heels of other reports the city has commissioned to help find a route for this line.
In the intervening years after the pause of Option A, the city commissioned reports from the consulting firms Quanta, Burns & McDonnell and the utility Ameren.
These reports gave insight into alternatives to Option A, and totaled over $200,000 in costs to the ratepayer, according to Sarah Read, a utility attorney, who has been tracking the proposals.
The Mill Creek substation and Option A transmission line were in early progress when the council paused them. The funds committed to Option A neared $7.3 million, according to past Missourian reporting.
However, it’s difficult to tell how much of this money was “lost.” Some of the funds were used for surveying, soil sampling and determining pole locations. Other funds were used for equipment the city could still make use of on other projects, according to staff.
Public impact
Read has been critical of the council throughout the time the project has been considered, believing the city’s struggle to make progress on the project is due to weak leadership in the face of political pressure.
“The driving force [behind the pause] was the unwillingness of our leaders to make the hard decisions that needed to be made and to educate the public on the complexity of the issue,” said Read.
She believes the task force hasn’t worked to educate residents about this latest report either.
“It was not clear [from the report] what baselines will be used for comparing different options,” said Read, “and a baseline is needed for both sound analysis and clear communication on the relative merits of different options.”
Residents have also been paying off interest for the bond issue in their monthly electric rates for the last seven years, despite Option A not being completed.
According to staff, funds from a bond issue don’t have to be used for exactly the same projects presented to voters in the election. Johanningmeier explained that after Option A was paused staff used the bond funds for smaller, related projects.
The Siemens report determined that Columbia is currently in compliance with NERC regulations and will continue to be into the future.
“There are a lot of different ways to be in compliance with NERC,” said Johanningmeier.
The city won’t necessarily need to increase the grid’s capacity, as long as they can ensure a cascade won’t occur. Siemens projected that an overload emergency is likely to occur only if two or more elements on the grid have failed.
In such an emergency, the city’s current plan is to “shed load.” This means that the utility would keep the grid from overloading by targeting parts of the city for blackouts, lowering the overall load.
Siemens estimated that the chance of such an event occurring would be once every 100-200 years.
While shedding load will keep a cascade effect from occurring, it’s potentially dangerous as residents will lose power. According to the task force, should a “do nothing” option be chosen by the council, shedding load will be the only way to avoid a cascade in an emergency.
Siemens rated that Option W would deal with such an emergency best.
“The consultant presented us with options. We pointed out the things we thought were valuable in what was presented and council has all of those options now,” Hasheider said.
It’s uncertain how the council will proceed or what the process will look like.
“There’s some risk involved in delaying the approach,” Hasheider said, “It might be that [council] is going to take some time to come to a resolution, and they should start as soon as they can.”
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May 15, 2022 at 06:00PM
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Council gets update on long-delayed electric transmission plan - Columbia Missourian
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