The following is a transcript of the Nov. 25, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s news director.
Our guest on this episode is Mark Montgomery, executive director for Logan City Light and Power, the utility that serves the public power community of Logan, Utah. Mark has served in that role since May of 2012.
Mark, thanks for joining us.
Mark Montgomery
Thank you.
Paul Ciampoli
Mark, to get our conversation started, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about your responsibilities as Executive Director as well as provide an overview of the utility.
Mark Montgomery
My department consists of 34 employees. I feel like we have a really talented group. We do almost all of the work in house as opposed to contracting it out including building solar installations, maintaining hydro on the river, building our own substations, building our own transmission lines, et cetera. I report to the mayor and City Council, as you can imagine, and my biggest concern through all of that is generally budget issues. Logan City has about 22,000 meters and we're a summer peaker and we peak at just over 100 megawatts. The footprint of Logan City is just under 20 square miles.
Paul Ciampoli
What prompted me to do this interview with you was energy storage news and specifically the utility and WATTMORE recently announced the successful completion of a 125 kW, 500 KWh battery energy storage system in Logan. I have a two-part question. One, could you offer additional details on the system? And second, how is the system going to help the utility understand how to implement a larger scale energy storage system?
Mark Montgomery
We came up with the concept with a member of our Power Board. His name is Mike Taylor. And we kind of came up with the idea to apply for an APPA DEED grant. And we would purchase a smaller scale bulk energy storage system so that we can kind of see what that looks like. I know other utilities are putting these energy storage systems in on a much larger scale, but we wanted to see what this would look like since we feel like we're kind of a smaller utility. So we applied for that grant and we received it.
As part of the grant, we proposed that we do different scenarios and collect data and produce some reports on what this looks like and while this is a small-scale installation, we feel like we can scale the data up to a bigger installation so that it makes sense. So we came up with scenarios like peak shaving or emergency operation of our control peak shifting. And that's kind of kind of how we came up with the idea and that's how we're hoping to see how a bulk energy storage system might benefit our utility.
Paul Ciampoli
There's no solid timeline in terms of when you guys might decide to perhaps go to a bigger scale of energy storage?
Mark Montgomery
I don't have anything immediate, but it's certainly in the back of our minds. Honestly, the biggest constraint I have is just budget.
Paul Ciampoli
I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about the utility’s current generation portfolio mix and specifically I wanted to see if you could talk about how Logan City Light and Power approaches resource planning as well as if you could detail the portfolio mix.
Mark Montgomery
We have a pretty wide range of resources. We've got hydro from the Colorado River storage project. We've got wind in Wyoming. Of course, we have some coal resources, natural gas generation resources. We've got a waste heat generation resource down in southern Utah. We have several solar resources. We have some natural gas generation that we own behind the meter here in Logan.
We also have some run of the river hydroelectric that is behind the meter located up the Canyon here in the city -- near the city. And then we've got lots of projects in study phase including more natural gas, ome solar plus storage possibilities and also a geothermal [project] that's looking pretty promising. And as we plan, like everyone else, we look to push our carbon free resource mix higher and higher as we can, but we are a little bit limited to just what's available locally and what we can get wheeled in. But we're always looking and I talk to different companies who want to...sell us power. That's kind of a regular ongoing thing, to be honest.
Paul Ciampoli
Any elaboration you could give on that geothermal that you mentioned?
Mark Montgomery
It's just in study phase and I think you want to talk about UAMPS in a little bit, but this is a project done through UAMPS. And this company has approached UAMPS with a certain number of megawatts that they want to sell and then UAMPS is a project-based organization, so we've signed up for what we can get and we'll end up sharing that with the other interested municipalities.
Paul Ciampoli
That's a nice segue as you mentioned to the final question I had for you. Given that Logan's a member of of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, I want to give the opportunity to talk about the ways in which Logan benefits from that membership.
Mark Montgomery
UAMPS is a political subdivision of Utah...they're a nonprofit organization. Logan City by itself is a pretty small utility but we are one of the larger members of UAMPS. The reality is that we have a lot more leverage in the market coupled with other member entities through UAMPS, so if somebody comes -- for example, this geothermal, we just spoke about -- comes and says hey, we want this big chunk of power, well, I'm too small to really take much to even get their time of day, but with UAMPS and 40 some odd members, they can usually have a good chance at selling all of that resource, as long as the pricing and everything looks good.
UAMPS gives us a lot of power in the market as a bunch of smaller utilities tied together. We have a lot more leverage and then just because these entities that want something, whether it be solar or natural gas or geothermal, whatever, they know that UAMPS is known out there, so they know that they come to UAMPS to sell their product. I would say one of the other advantages to UAMPS is they help us vet these proposals that just frankly, I don't have the expertise or the time in my department alone to do this, but UAMP’s will vet them through their in-house legal counsel.
And also just do cost analysis on it to see if first, the guys coming to sell a product really have gone through and dotted all their I’s and crossed all their T's, and just as a little entity, I just don't have that expertise or time to do that. So we think it's pretty valuable and UAMPS is also our scheduling authority, so a lot of this makes sense that it comes through them.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks Mark and thanks so much for taking the time here today to speak with us. Would you be open to returning as a guest perhaps sometime next year?
Mark Montgomery
Sure.
Paul Ciampoli
Among other things, perhaps we could revisit that storage project and I'm sure there's other topics we could discuss as well, so thanks again for your time.
Mark Montgomery
You bet. Thank you for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
