Powering up
Loans help pay for Oklahoma power upgrades
Loans help pay for Oklahoma power upgrades.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development division has made a $16.32 million loan to the Red River Valley Rural Electric Association to build 30 miles of new electrical distribution line and to upgrade 57 additional miles more.
Work the loans will help pay for has been ongoing for about two years as part of a four-year work program the association develops to expand and grow its system, said Brent Hartin, its general manager and chief executive officer.
“This loan represents four years of work for us,” Hartin said.
“There is a little more red tape associated with them, but we have never found that to be a problem here at Red River. We would rather wait on the money and take advantage of those more competitive rates. It helps keep our members’ costs down,” he said.
Hartin said the association serves about 8,000 members and delivers power to them at about 16,000 mostly rural locations across its service area, which covers parts of Love, Marshall and Bryan counties in southern Oklahoma.
Hartin said the upgrades the work will pay for will add additional capacity and new lines to serve a growing customer base in part of its service territory and will replace older sections of distribution where there is a potential for problems caused by pole or other infrastructure failures.
Hartin also said the Red River Valley Rural Electric Association has used the USDA financing for decades, adding, “we’ve borrowed a lot of money out of it and paid a lot of
money back into it.”
At the same time, he said the association also has been able to reduce its debt load over time because of its ongoing growth.
“Over that four-year period, we are projecting we will add 1,000 new customers,” Hartin said. “But there is nothing abnormal about this growth plan. We generally see a 3 percent growth in customers, year in and year out.”
The loan to Red River Valley was announced Monday as part of a $345.5 million package of loans involving 20 different electricity distribution entities that serve consumers across parts of 14 different states.
Transmission eyed
The area of Oklahoma where Red River Valley operates its distribution system also is getting some attention from Western Farmers Electric Cooperative, but from a different perspective.
Western Farmers provides power to Red River Valley and to other cooperatives that buy their power from the Anadarkobased entity.
As part of that task, Western Farmers has built and operates a network of transmission lines across most of Oklahoma, and parts of Texas and New Mexico that delivers power to substations owned by its member organizations.
Collectively, those transmission lines make up part of a system that commonly is referred to as the electrical grid.
Across Oklahoma and the Great Plains, that grid’s operations are overseen by the Southwestern Power Pool, a regional transmission organization tasked with ensuring the grid operates in a way that reliably supplies affordable power to consumers across the region.
Pool officials and all of its member operators, such as Western Farmers, conduct annual assessments to identify potential grid problems that could be caused by congestion, overheating or low voltages. Pool officials then work with the operators to design and build improvements to avoid those issues.
This year’s assessment, for example, identified an area of the grid owned by Western Farmers in southern Oklahoma that could be impacted by voltage issues if one of its key lines were to fail.
Kalun Kelley, the cooperative’s manager of transmission and distribution engineering, and Calvin Daniels, its transmission system reliability engineer, stressed the evaluations aim to avert potential future problems before they ever exist.
Once solutions to problems are identified, pool members are directed to build them. This year’s assessment, for example, requires pool members to build 13 new transmission projects in six states during the next five years, at an estimated cost of $47 million.
Officials said those upgrades are expected to resolve 101 anticipated reliability needs that will be caused by increased electric consumption expected in certain pool areas and from announced generation retirements in eastern Kansas and western Missouri.
Pool officials said assessments the past 14 years already have brought nearly $10 billion in upgrades to the region’s grid.
As for Western Farmers’ portion of the grid and its issue, Kelley said potential solutions are being evaluated this year.
“We (Western Farmers and the pool’s transmission working group) will take a look at it in January and decide on the right solution,” he said.
“In a year, or a couple of years from now, a solution actually will be built, so that way, if a line were lost, we won’t have that problem.”