In a recent Q&A with the American Public Power Association, Brad Bickett, general manager of Kentucky public power utility Henderson Municipal Power and Light, details the ways in which the utility is proactively engaging with its customers in terms of explaining the value of public power and discusses how HMPL consistently keeps customers front of mind.
“One of the first things that I focused on as GM was to get the name of the utility out more to our customers, which had not been done a lot before that,” he said. Bickett has served as general manager of the utility since early 2022.
“So we now have a lot more of our apparel with logos and we provide funds for our employees to go buy a certain selection, if you will, that they would like to have with the company logo...on the apparel and that's showing people in the community that the people that provide the power and the fiber services to them live and work in their community...a lot of times they may not know that,” he said in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“The other thing is we really promote community engagement. And when it makes sense, involvement with civic organizations around town and the fact is we, like many other municipals and other public power utilities, do have very low rates.”
He said that “communicating that message…combined with the excellent service that we provide is the message that we try to get out there. And I think it's about being involved and it's about a small town like us -- we get that message out a lot by direct communication with our customers, word of mouth.”
Energy Storage Project
In May of this year, the utility entered into an agreement with NextEra Energy for the construction of a battery energy storage system.
“What we're planning for is a 12 MW system that will discharge that amount over a four hour period,” Bickett said.
“So far, we're working with NextEra towards a definitive agreement and right now...terms have been agreed to generally and the pursuit of this project began after conducting our most recent integrated resource plan,” which looks “out over a 20 year time horizon and evaluates what our options are and what's the lowest cost option to be able to serve our customers.”
Out of that that study, “there were a couple different recommendations and so we actually issued an RFP – a request for proposals -- for a natural gas reciprocating engine peaking plant and based on what we got back in response to that, we ultimately decided not to pursue.”
At that time, “there were some challenges with the supply of gas as well as the cost came in quite a bit higher than what we had planned and budgeted for, so we focused a little bit more on the storage, which was also a part of the outcome of the IRP -- to pursue storage combined with solar and/or wind and in our region solar is the more economic option, if you will, when you talk about intermittent resources.”
And once the utility began looking at “storage and looking at…how the prices have trended down we issued that RFP and we were very pleased with some of the responses we received and so that led us to continue forward.”
He noted that “generally speaking in our region, we are pretty heavily reliant on fossil fuel generation and that's changing over time but probably more quickly than a lot of people are comfortable with and expect that storage is going to be very important for us as we see a lot more intermittent resources being put on onto the system.”
The benefits from “this storage project are going to be coming from the different value streams, if you will, that we can receive from being a participant in what's called MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the regional market operator that we’re a part of.”
So HMPL believes “there will be some value from this battery storage project in the form of capacity which we're required to have to meet the needs of our customers as well as ancillary services that we could see some revenue from and also with basically buying the energy that we use to charge the battery and then selling the energy at a time of higher demand,” Bickett said.
In the Q&A, Bickett also detailed the steps that HMPL has taken to maintain high levels of reliability. The utility has been recognized by APPA for high levels of reliability.
