The Columbia City Council received a detailed presentation from The Energy Authority (TEA) and City Utilities on the 20-year electric resource plan (IRP) for the city. The presentation covered load forecasts, capacity needs, resource options, and multiple scenarios to address a projected capacity shortfall through 2045. Council members engaged in extensive discussion on accreditation, lead times, renewable goals, and risk management. No formal votes were taken; the presentation is meant to inform future decisions, with a follow-up work session planned.
All right, I'm gonna go ahead and have to get started because I know we're asking you to do two hours and 90 minutes. Um, and now it's like 86 minutes. So I'm gonna kick it over to Aaron Keys. Okay. Thank you from Aaron Keys, Director of Utilities. Uh I have uh Dwayne Hortius, our assistant director for Utilities, uh Electric. Uh RT Kimming with the Energy Authority and Greg Lavvy, the Energy Authority here tonight to talk about our electric resource plan. Uh and this is about uh fulfilling our capacity needs, our generation capacity needs for our community uh into the next 20 years. So I will let them get going. Thank you. Thank you, everybody else. Um we've worked very closely with uh utility, uh, myself and Marquise will do a quick introduction here momentarily, but we're gonna spend about the next 90 minutes going through our findings, our recommendations and where where we think utilities should go to meet these capacity requirements as you operate in these organized markets, particularly the MISO market here in the Midwest. Um, you know, we're gonna do some quick don't know what everybody's background is on resource planning, particularly on the utility side. So we're gonna use some terms that we're probably pretty familiar with, but maybe the community and the council might not be as so we're gonna start with some quick definitions, um, go through the forecast. So um what really drives an IRP is what your future load looks like. And so we've done a long-term econometric load forecast. Start with that's really foundation to to what the utility is gonna need long term. Um, what type of resources we considered for the IRP? Um, you know, probably not gonna be building new coal plants, but like what other resources are we looking at, and what kind of resources are are in the current portfolio. Um gonna look at what we call a load resource balance chart. It's a very simple like bar chart with a line that just tries to determine and show what the utility's needs are over the next 20 years. IRP is typically a long-term outlook. Uh, we're not looking at next month, we're really looking decades in advance, right? Um, the base case, we call it a reference case. What did the models we use a production cost model? It's a big optimization engine, tries to determine the least cost portfolio, meeting all the requirements, either the utilities put out there or the community is asked for, or the market itself. Um, then we ran about six additional scenarios calling futures. What else could we possibly see, you know, coming up into the future? And what we're hoping is that when we look at all of these cases together, we see a very uh uniform portfolio. So, regardless of whether there's administrative changes, whether there are econometric changes in the future. Hopefully, we pick a portfolio that uh that really hedges the utility. And then we're gonna open it up for some you know discussion at the end. So it's gonna be very quick. We're gonna try to cover a lot in a very short period of time. If uh you all have questions, whether it's the council or whether we open it up for public comment, I don't know what the rules are, but we will be more than welcome to answer any questions in case now. Um again, my name is Greg Lavvy. I'm our director of corporate analytics at TEA oversee our our resource planning team uh with the energy authority. I'm out of Jacksonville, Florida. Uh we have an office in Jacksonville, we have an office in Bellevue, Washington, and we really work only exclusively with public power in the United States, right? So no IOUs, no big utilities, just public utilities in the US. That's our our our core focus. Um this is the teams essentially that worked on it, as you can see. Uh there's quite a few people from the Columbia side, quite a few people from um from the TEA side. We spent a good part of almost eight months working on this project. So this is not something that we just fly by night, you know, put together over a weekend, right? It's a lot of time, a lot of effort from both sides. Um we're a trading shop at TEA. We are uh Columbia's market participant, and so we are their interface in the organized market. So we do a lot with the utility. This is just one of the facets.