Of course they lobbied against the solar requirement. Utility-scale solar isn't ready for this climate. It's only happening in Germany because of massive, unsustainable subsidies.How about, for starters, not lobbying against renewable energy requirements:Given that Xcel is the largest wind provider in the nation, and just proposed a new wind farm as big as the Monticello nuclear plant, to start construction, I'm curious exactly what strides you want them to make
http://influenceexplorer.com/organizati ... dbaa4481f5
http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2013/0 ... rcentages/
Sure do. From today, even.How hard is it to be the nation's largest wind provider when you cover most of the great plains? Still Southern California Edison, having contracted for the two biggest wind farms in the US, has to be close. Do you have a source?
Xcel hardly covers 'most of the great plains. Even if they did, though, they'd still have to invest in hundreds of million-dollar wind turbines.
Where was a traffic lane blocked for two weeks? I heard lots of complaints about Xcel after that storm, too.[/quote]No, I mean letting city-owned trees block traffic for close to two weeks....
If the city had been Xcel last month, do you think they would have been adept enough to get electrical service back as quickly as Xcel did?
Of course you did. People complain when the power's out. Xcel brought in more than 1000 linemen to the south metro to get the power back on after that storm, and it still took several days. If they had tried to do it with the couple dozen that a service territory the size of Minneapolis would require, they probably would still be working on it now.
Yep. All the thousands of miles of overhead and buried transmission and distribution lines, and nearly a dozen substations.Would going through with municipalization require the city to purchase Xcel's infrastructure from them?
No idea, they'd have to work out a deal. Probably between one and three billion dollars just to purchase the assets.If so, what would the cost be, and how would it be paid for?
In addition, interconnections between different utilities grids generally happen at substations. The handoff and metering happens at one point there, and then all the distribution lines to houses from that station are owned by that utility. However, since the metro area was all Xcel's territory when it was built, they built distribution lines to the closest substations, ignoring city boundaries. For example, parts of Linden Hills are fed from a substation in Edina. If municipalization occurs, the city will also have to pay millions more dollars to disconnect and reroute all the distribution lines that cross city limits. This will cost several tens of millions more.
Transmission line owners are required by law to carry anyone's power, for a regulated price. So, Minneapolis could theoretically buy power from anyone in the Upper Midwest. However, Minneapolis is a very large load, so the only Xcel is probably the only generation company that could immediately supply it. In addition, most of the other major generation companies in the area (i.e. Great River Energy, Minnesota Power) use a much greater percentage of coal than Xcel does. Alliant, out of Iowa, is pretty heavily invested in wind energy, but I don't know as much about them. It's unlikely they could supply Minneapolis's needs. All of the major wind farms in Minnesota are either owned by Xcel or contracted to them, as far as I'm aware.What would the city's options be for purchasing electricity- would we just end up buying energy produced by Xcel (seeing as how they own most, if not all, production and transmission infrastructure surrounding the city), or is there another option?