The following is a transcript of the March 24, 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 in this episode is Kevin Bihm, the general manager of the Louisiana Energy and Power Authority, a joint action agency. Kevin, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Kevin Bihm
Thanks for having me, Paul. I appreciate it.
Paul Ciampoli
So Kevin, you started your career at the authority in 1996. Can you detail your career path at the JAA and leading up to your current role as general manager?
Kevin Bihm
Yes, I was hired on as resource planning engineer with LEPA in 1996. My role was basically doing our planning for our budgeting process. I was in that role for about a year and then I was asked to be a support services manager for the Authority. In that role, I was over our technical aspects. We had technicians that supported our home office here in Lafayette, Louisiana, and also our power plants out in the field. We were also over our Energy Control Center, which involved our EMS system. Part of that role back in 1999, was replacing our EMS system because our current system was not Y2K compliant at that point. So I was in that role for about four years and then moved up to assistant general manager in 2001. So I was in that role for 18 years and obviously, in that role I was pretty much over all of the LEPA operations, our power plant operations, the control center, accounting, technical services. And then in 2019, I moved up to the general manager role when our existing general manager at that time retired so I've been in that role for going on five years now.
Paul Ciampoli
I would imagine there's a lot of obvious advantages of not coming into a role from an outside organization, where your experience has allowed you to get insights into various operations at the authority. Right?
Kevin Bihm
Yeah, you know, one of the benefits here at LEPA is we are a small organization. With our power plant operations, we probably have 31-32 employees. I think APPA even has an award they give for multiple hats that people wear, and that's one of the benefits of being in a small organization, you get a lot of grounding in different areas. And that certainly helped me through my years here at LEPA and my experience.
Paul Ciampoli
Could offer an overview of the authority for listeners who may not be familiar with it?
Kevin Bihm
Yeah, so LEPA is the joint action agency in the state of Louisiana. We were formed back in 1979 through legislation here in the state. So we are a what they term a political subdivision of the state of Louisiana. The short story on that is, like I tell people, we are basically set up as a municipal would except we don't have citizens. So we fall under all the same rules and guidelines as a municipality. We have 19 member cities today, we are looking to increase that to 20 hopefully in the next month or so. So our governance is each of those 19 member cities has a director and alternate that sit on our board of directors. And that is the entity that regulates our organization. You know, the the investor-owned utilities and the cooperatives in the state are all regulated by the Louisiana Public Service Commission. But LEPA is actually regulated by the cities that make up our our membership.
Paul Ciampoli
So you mentioned your member cities and actually one of the jumping off points for me in terms of my interest in interviewing you was recent news involving the city of Abbeville and the town of Gueydan selecting the Authority as a wholesale electric provider. In that context, what are the ways in which that city and town are going to benefit from having the Authority as their wholesale electric provider?
Kevin Bihm
Well, one of the things is LEPA is a nonprofit organization. So of those 19 member cities that I mentioned earlier, today nine of those we service what we term full-requirements electricity, which means every kilowatt-hour that flows over the the main transformer of that city, LEPA supplies. Some of it we supply through our own resources, some from the market, some from bilateral arrangements, but every one of those kilowatt-hours comes from us. What happens is because we are nonprofit, anytime a new member comes in as a full-requirements member, those costs get distributed over more billing units. So not only does the cost for the new member go down, but the cost for our existing full-requirements members also goes down, which is a benefit for everyone. One of the other benefits that I find is when a city is serviced say through an IOU or a coop or whoever that supplier is, once they sign a contract, that term is set. Say it's a five-year contract. If any changes in the market happened during that five years, that city has no ability to go back to the their supplier and be able to negotiate something different. The term is set, the conditions are set. With LEPA, once we have a new member come on. We're at nine full-requirements members, now about to be 11 with Abbeville and Gueydan, it's a constant communication, because as I said earlier, we are regulated by them, they sit on our board. So if there's something that we need to change, because of changes in the marketplace or with natural gas prices or coal prices or anything like that, they have the ability through us and the LEPA staff communicating with them to make changes as the contract is moving forward.
Paul Ciampoli
And that's huge. Obviously, I think it's fair to say that volatility in the energy markets is not going away anytime soon.
Kevin Bihm
Yeah, I don't think volatility in the electric market is ever going away.
Paul Ciampoli
I guess it's just a matter of degrees. So yeah, that's a great set of details so thanks for offering that. So, Kevin, just to kind of wrap up our conversation, I want to kind of take a bigger picture, look at the southeast region and give you an opportunity to talk about some of the key challenges facing the utility sector in the region and how LEPA is helping its members cities successfully meet those challenges?
Kevin Bihm
Well, when you when you talk about challenges, I think it's it's not only in the southeast region, I think it's probably countrywide or U.S.-wide. And it's on both fronts. When you look at generation and load, you know, on the generation side, obviously, we're on the forefront of the energy transition that everyone's talking about going, you know, you've got a lot of coal plants that are being retired, even some legacy natural gas units. And when you start retiring dispatchable resources and replacing them with renewable resources, that transition in and of itself is going to be a challenge. And then when you start looking at load, a lot of these data centers are coming online, they're talking that the next thing is going to be A.I., and the additional load that that's going to bring for these systems, and just manufacturing that's coming back to the U.S. When you look at both of those fronts, I think that's going to be probably in the next five to 10 years an extreme challenge to the electric industry as a whole. And I think one of the things that's going to help that is is going to be technology. I think as more cities and and entities rollout the [advanced metering infrastructure], I think that's going to present some unique opportunities. You know, you're talking about electric vehicles being charged and being able to push back onto the grid. So there's a lot of moving parts right now. You know, we were talking about the electric industry has always been transitioning, but I think right now and probably into the the next five or 10 years are going to be critical to the industry.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, definitely, I totally agree with that. Kevin, thanks again, for taking the time to speak with us today. And perhaps around this time next year we'd love to have you back as a guest on the podcast.
Kevin Bihm
I'd be happy to do it. Thanks, Paul.
Paul Ciampoli
Sure, thanks. 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. We'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
