The cold weather events of mid-February caused disruptions in electric and natural gas markets throughout many parts of the central United States. Prices for both electricity and natural gas set new all-time highs in many markets. Many electric customers lost power for an extended period of time.
The Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (MMPA) announced that MMPA’s member communities will not see any rate impact from MMPA because of the mid-February events. For more than a decade, MMPA has maintained a rate stabilization fund to cover unexpected, short-term price spikes such as this. The MMPA Board of Directors elected to use some of its rate stabilization fund to offset the higher than budgeted costs rather than passing a rate increase through to members said East Grand Forks Water & Light General Manager Keith Mykleseth. “We did ask our customers to conserve power because we were asked by the distribution supplier to do that,” said Mykleseth. “We were lucky. As far as rate changes for East Grand Forks, we won’t be seeing any. We’re a member of the Minnesota Municipal Power Agency. I’m the vice-chair on that board and we currently have an emergency fund set up for this type of thing. We’re going to take funding out of there and use that to absorb any cost due to natural gas increases, etcetera.”
Mykleseth also said East Grand Forks is also lucky to have redundancies for weather conditions built into its power network that not all other communities have. “East Grand Forks is also lucky because we have two transmission lines coming in from two separate providers,” said Mykleseth. “We have WAPA which is Western Area Power Administration and then we have the Xcel Energy line coming in. So, we have redundancy built-in. So, if we’d had an issue, we would’ve possibly been able to shift some of the load back and forth.”
No MMPA member community had an interruption in power during this event. The MMPA has been asked to comment as to why Minnesota did not experience power outages like those seen in Texas. Below are several differences between the electric power markets in Minnesota and Texas.
- Minnesota’s electric generators, both renewable and non-renewable, are winterized to withstand colder temperatures than those in most other parts of the country.
- Minnesota has natural gas supplies from both the North (Canada) and the South (Louisiana/Oklahoma/Texas). These multiple supply routes provide some backup in case one is unavailable.
In addition to these Minnesota market characteristics, MMPA has backup fuels on-site at two of their large generating resources – fuel oil at Faribault Energy Park and liquified natural gas (LNG) at Shakopee Energy Park. These backup fuels allow their generators to run for some period of time even if gas is not available.
MMPA continues to work diligently with its member communities and other utility partners to help ensure reliable electric service to all of the 160,000-plus Minnesotans they serve.
