In a recent interview with APPA, Casey Crabtree, Director of Economic Development at Heartland Energy, provides details on Heartland Energy's Demand Adjusted Technology Advantage, or DATA, an interruptible data center rate policy customers can use to facilitate construction and operation of data centers, while also minimizing risk.
He discussed DATA, which was launched in March of this year, in a recent Public Power Now podcast episode.
Heartland is a South Dakota-based joint action agency that provides wholesale electric energy to 29 cities and municipal electric systems in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska.
In the interview, Crabtree detailed why Heartland Energy decided to pursue the development of this rate policy.
“We serve mostly rural customers. A lot of our customers are 2,000 people or less and we were starting to get a lot of inquiries about data centers, data center rates, some of these projects that you're familiar with in different parts of the country that's really starting to heat up here in the Midwest,” he said.
“We needed to have something put together that we could help our customers with and really we've got some areas where I think this is just a fantastic fit for both our customers and Heartland where both can win and so we worked on this. It took us quite a while to be able to put this together, but we built out the DATA rate so that we'd have something that we could show those projects that are looking at our communities, what they could do and how we could partner with them.”
He also detailed the ways in which Heartland Energy is educating customers about the benefits of this rate policy.
“For our customers, we've spent a lot of time on that. I think it's a handful of different ways that we're approaching that. Of course, we reached out with some of that kind of mass communications by e-mail as we developed that looking for feedback,” he said.
“We've also held in-person meetings in our home quarters or our headquarters here where we've invited them back and we went through that, went through the rate and how we developed that and the benefits of that for both the community and for Heartland as a whole.
And then we've also gone out to those communities that we think are probably the best fits for these types of projects based on transmission or other infrastructure restrictions that might exist out there, but the ones that fit best, we went out and we have met with community leaders.”
Also, “We've met with City Councils, mayors, those that lead up the utilities and business folks as well, and the feedback has been extremely positive. And so we're excited about that and we continue to work with folks and make sure that these are a good fit for everybody,” Crabtree said.
“And I think that's the key is it's got to be a good fit for the community, it's got to be a good fit for Heartland, it's got to be a good fit for the project as a whole and it's been a good discussion so far.”
He also detailed the key steps they would need to be taken If another joint action agency were to consider pursuing the development of a similar rate policy in order to be successful in terms of implementation.
Crabtree noted that Heartland has worked with the North Iowa Municipal Electric Cooperative Association, “and we've got a lot of feedback from them and some of their members on how this sets up, how this works in real life. As you're crafting your rate, you think you've got all these things figured out, but it's really good to go back and talk to those who put it into practice.”
Heartland was “not afraid to reach out to others who went through this before and as they say, the school of hard knocks is always a really good educator,” he said.
“And so we reached out to those groups like NIMECA and others to get feedback on that and I think the big thing with that is you've got to be able to be willing to adjust based on that feedback. And so that was part of our process and I would suggest the same to anybody else who's working through that whether you call us or your neighbors that are working through this, I think it's worth really having lots of conversations to make sure that you've got this dialed in and also approach this with some flexibility. It's a changing market and a growing industry and so I think it's just worthwhile to look at it that way.”
