In a recent interview with APPA, Erin Keys, Utilities Director for Columbia, Mo., details how the city’s utility department is proactively addressing power supply planning challenges.
Keys started in her new role as Utilities Director in late May after serving as the Utilities Department's Interim Director since March 2025.
“We are a small community and so I'm sure compared to much larger power companies, my issues are small potatoes,” she said in an interview for APPA’s Public Power Now podcast in August.
“But we have some challenges ahead of us with regard to power supply. I think our recent auctions in the MISO capacity markets show that there's some serious capacity concerns from MISO and so Columbia is also going to need to address those as well,” she said.
“We do annual load forecasts of course that look out 15 years and we want to make sure that we can support both our energy and our capacity requirements as a member of MISO,” Keys noted.
“We're currently forecasting about a 1% increase each year for load. We are a summer peaking utility, but we are seeing increases in both summer and winter,” she said.
“We've got a number of fossil fuel retirements coming in the near future. We have a significant interest in our community to move towards renewables and then trying to balance some of that intermittent load” with more baseload generation, Keys said.
“We've got electric vehicle adoption and electrification issues coming in the forefront,” she added.
Keys noted that “we've also had some data centers that have reached out to us that have interest in our community, but we currently don't have some of that infrastructure needed.”
So that, “along with everybody else's issues, tariffs and environment regulations, all those things, we're trying to balance all of those as we look forward and so we're going to need to investigate some additional power purchases or maybe even constructing our own generation and those are some big and heavy conversations we're going to have to have with the City Council and the city in general,” she said.
“So we're hoping to move forward with an integrated resource plan to get started on one of those to really help us dive into where we need to focus our energies because there's so many avenues out there to explore.”
Keys was also asked if her department has explored utility scale energy storage.
“We recently had a consultant do a study for us on batteries and how that might fit into our system and what that might look like and make sure that it wouldn't damage our system, obviously. So that's one of the things we've started looking at,” she said.
Keys said “we've got a bunch of different ideas and now we need to bring those together with an integrated resource plan to figure out what makes the most sense for us moving forward. Where are we going to get the biggest bang for our buck as far as spending that ratepayer money wisely and effectively to support a reliable system into the future.”
With respect to next steps for the IRP, she said: “The next step will probably be getting a task order with the consultant to help us develop that and then I'm sure we're going to need to do some significant outreach with our customers to one, explain the situation, but then to get their input on what they see as important as we move forward.”
Keys was also asked what her immediate priorities have been since taking on her new role as the permanent utilities director.
She noted that when she started serving as interim director, there were two major things that happened within a month of her taking the position.
“There was a small tornado here in Columbia and it destroyed our material recovery facility for solid waste, which is in fact one of the utilities…so it destroyed our facility that handles all of our recycling.”
She needed to “jump into action and figure out what to do next -- how does the city handle its recycling? What do we do with the employees that were working in that facility, dealing with insurance and next steps and all those things.”
She also noted that the other incident “was quite a serious incident that we had occur where a line worker got injured very seriously. And so that was another thing that right from the get go monopolized a lot of my time in trying to address those issues and how do we move forward and dealing with staff – there were staff there that were able to actually save his life.”
She has also been working to support staff “as much as I can. One of the big things I need to do is hire some assistant directors to help me.”
She noted that as of August, there were three assistant director positions that were vacant “and so trying to get folks to support all of our operations in that role and then each utility has its own set of projects and goals and things that we need to move forward on and so just trying to incrementally move forward on each of those is definitely a priority.”
As for ongoing projects, she noted that two substations are undergoing some major upgrades. “We're upgrading the transformers, adding transformers, replacing switchgear.”
She was asked if there have been any supply chain challenges related to procuring the transformers.
Keys said that “with these particular very large transformers -- I don't recall the exact timeline -- I think initially they told us it was going to be like a two-year delivery date and they backed off quite a bit on that and I think it's down to about a year. We were pleasantly surprised by that.”
Not long after COVID, “we were having significant supply chain issues with the much smaller transformers you see in the neighborhoods and things – we were having very significant delays on those and even difficulty finding companies that would bid on those at all. And then of course the prices for those just went crazy,” she said.
“I think since that time -- since about 2022 -- I think things have calmed down considerably with transformers and lead times,” Keys said.
“Of course, the prices are still quite a bit up there. I don't see those coming back down really at all. I would say it's gotten a little better for sure. But it's not -- based on what people tell me about how it used to be -- I don't think we're there yet and maybe we won't be.”
Keys has spent more than 25 years working at the City of Columbia designing, managing and directing infrastructure improvement projects in Utilities and Public Works.
Prior to her current role, she served as acting assistant director for the electric utility, assistant director for the sewer and storm water utilities, acting engineering supervisor and engineer with the City.
