Ryan Hurst, Utilities General Manager for the City of Wahoo, Nebraska, has plenty on his plate these days. Among other things, he is overseeing a transition to advanced metering infrastructure for city residents and making sure a substation upgrade project goes smoothly.
Wahoo was founded in 1870 by a group of settlers who believed this area would become one of the richest farming regions in the state, the city’s Chamber of Commerce notes. It has a population of just under 5,000 residents as of 2021.
Wahoo, the county seat of Saunders County in east-central Nebraska, is located approximately 25 miles from both Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska.
The number of customers served by the city’s utility is as follows:
- Electric – Residential-1,983
- Electric - Small Commercial-439
- Electric - Large Commercial-19
- Electric – Industrial-3
- Electric – Wholesale-1
- Electric – Municipal-33
In an interview with Public Power Current, Hurst noted that he manages the distribution and generation “of our power here in Wahoo.” He also manages the natural gas distribution system. His department is also responsible for water production and distribution for the city and all aspects of sanitary sewer collection and treatment.
Hurst, who first started in his role at Wahoo in July 2019, noted that “we sell some wholesale water to another community,” and also sells wholesale power to “another small community next to us.”
Hurst reports to the Wahoo Board of Public Works.
AMI Project
In the interview, Hurst detailed the utility’s project that will move manual meter reading to Advanced Metering Infrastructure for residential electricity, water, and gas utility customers.
The biggest benefit from the shift to AMI will be accuracy of billing. Another benefit will be “some of those analytics that AMI provides,” Hurst said. “We can see more detail of our usage,” so things line loss and water loss reports “are much more accurate.”
AMI will also benefit Wahoo customers. “They can see what their usage is on a smaller scale so as opposed to a snapshot once a month,” customers will be able to see daily usage numbers.
Hurst said that the plan is to complete the AMI transition this year.
He pointed out that smart meter supply chain challenges have lengthened the time for the project “but I think things have caught up now. If we can get the meters we can finish it this year.”
He noted that the smart meter supply chain challenges have slowed down the project for both electric and water meter changeouts.
“We took a pretty aggressive approach” when it came to communicating with customers about the AMI project, he noted. “This is something that people are just not used to,” he noted.
“We hired JEO Consulting,” an engineering firm that “helped us put together a community outreach campaign.”
The outreach included sending letters to customers as well as bill stuffers “saying, hey, this is coming.”
Electric Projects
Wahoo also has a substation project underway that involves upgrades to “modernize some of our breakers.”
He also said that the utility is in the design phase “of a big loop around our community” to boost the community’s redundancy and resiliency.
Also underway is a power plant expansion feasibility study. Hurst noted that the Nebraska Public Power District is looking at additional capacity needed “and so we’ve just discussed with them – hey, what if we expanded our capacity?”
Wahoo is currently contracted for ten megawatts of capacity with NPPD. The city uses about sixteen megawatts.
“We talked about, hey, what if we were able to design up or build up to provide enough for our whole community” so that if “there’s an emergency we can take care of ourselves and you guys purchase that capacity from us.”
He noted that NPPD has not agreed to pay for the additional capacity from Wahoo but is open to the idea.
Wahoo is going to look at the feasibility of this idea and “see what are the economics of this” and see if it is possible, Hurst said.
Solar Project
Meanwhile, Wahoo Utilities recently provided an update on a solar project in Wahoo.
“The 2 MW Solar project started from our Board of Public Works' interest, after seeing many throughout the state. The main benefit of this project and partnership was affordable power very closely priced to what we buy our blended power from the Nebraska Public Power District,” said Hurst. “The 30-year contract on this purchase power agreement was a way to hedge a portion of our power portfolio affordability for the next 30 years.”
