In a recent Q&A with APPA, Gage Huston, General Manager for Iowa public power utility Muscatine Power and Water, provided details on the utility’s Powering the Future initiative that includes, among other things, aggressive carbon emission reduction goals.
Huston commented on the initiative and other topics in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“We developed the Powering the Future initiative about five years ago and that was in recognition of our rapidly changing landscape and the electric utility industry that we're all facing. And we recognized the importance of thinking strategically through the transitions that we had ahead of us,” Huston said in the podcast episode.
“And so as part of that, we established four criteria to help guide our decisions about how we provide power to Muscatine in the years to come. And it's all about balancing these four factors for us -- it's reliability, affordability, flexibility and sustainability,” he said.
"And our belief is that you have to maintain a balance of those four factors. If any one factor gets too heavily weighted, it can....have negative consequences to our customers and the other three areas," he noted.
“That said, though, I will say that reliability still maintains top billing on that list. And the one that I think is going to come under additional pressure in the next 5 to 10 years as we see the electric system continue to evolve.”
With the Powering the Future initiative, “we identified several goals that we're working through,” Huston noted.
“We're expanding our renewable portfolio. We're currently in development of a 24 MW local solar farm and also investigating additional solar generation opportunities, but that first solar project is a unique one.”
The utility is “actually planning to site it on land that we already own...It's also land that has a low agricultural value, so we're not taking prime farmland out of service, which is a topic that actually is becoming a bigger and bigger issue here in the Midwest."
The utility is "also investigating options to replace some of our other local generation resources. We have some local generation assets that are over 65 years old," he added.
"As we plan for retirement of those resources, we need to determine what's the right mix of new resources to serve our community."
One key piece of that right now "is to develop a new combined heat and power resource. This is another really unique project for a utility of our size."
This unit "will actually produce about 35 megawatts of electricity and utilize heat from that process to produce processed steam for a large industrial customer. CHP units are really great because they squeeze absolutely the most you can out of every unit of fuel."
The utility is also planning "to leverage direct pay tax credits, something that APPA staff fought very hard for with the Inflation Reduction Act. And those credits are expected to save our customers about $8 [million] to $12 million on this project. So that was a huge win for APPA and for public power members throughout the country."
Also, "through our Powering the Future effort, we've set some pretty aggressive carbon emission reduction goals," he added.
"We set a goal of a 25% reduction by 2024, which we've successfully achieved and a 65% reduction by 2030, which we're on track to do. So that's a 65% reduction in emissions all while maintaining the same reliable service to our customers and the last very important goal for this initiative is to transition reliably and safely. Our existing generation assets remain critical to Muscatine and this transition is going to take place over many years," Huston said.
"We have a tremendously talented and dedicated staff of employees who work at our power generation facility and they know the importance of keeping those existing assets and the new assets when they come along running reliably for our community."
Communicating With Customers
In the interview, Huston also discussed the ways in which the utility engages and communicates with its customers about the value of public power and how Muscatine Power and Water is providing customers with high levels of service and reliability.
“We're really blessed at MPW to have an extremely talented marketing and PR team. We've received recognition from APPA through the Excellence in Communications award several times over the past three years, also. We’ve utilized several channels to tell the positive story of MPW and public power in general,” he said.
“One of the most impactful is through video. We've run a series of employee spotlights...to highlight our employees and that they're really neighbors serving neighbors.”
He said “it's important that our customers know that the folks working to provide their utility services are their friends, their family neighbors, their neighbors down the street. I think that local connection really matters when it comes to providing service and we wanted to highlight that through that video series.”
Another very “impactful medium for us is through our community and one-on-one presentations,” he added.
“We do an annual power breakfast event where we invite community stakeholders in for a nice breakfast and we present highlights from the previous year throughout the utility as well as an outlook for some of the bigger projects and initiatives that we have planned for the coming year,” Huston said.
“And when we do those events, I open each and every session by reminding our guests of the benefits of the municipal utility model and reintroducing our local board of trustees to the group,” he said.
“We also have a template presentation that we refer to as your utility in your community, which provides an overview of MPW and highlights the critical role that we play in the Muscatine community.”
MPW gives that presentation “to elected officials, business leaders, community development groups, nonprofits – basically, any audience that has an interest and may benefit from [a] better understanding how our utility works and those presentations have been very successful in sharing that message,” Huston noted.
“And last, we just recently completed a customer survey and one of the surprises we found from that survey was that the strong majority of our customers still utilize our utility newsletter that we include with our bills to get information so those newsletters have evolved over the years to be more visual with more pictures, more infographics and less text.”
And then based on the survey feedback “we just received, we're planning to reinforce our efforts to further leverage that newsletter medium to get our key messages to customers, including the benefits of public power, so we're excited about that.”
