The following is a transcript of the August 19, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's news director.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APA's news director.
Our guest in this episode is Brad Koehn, who became general manager of California public power utility Turlock Irrigation District in June of this year. Brad, thanks for joining us.
Brad Koehn
Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
Brad, you have served in a variety of roles at Turlock Irrigation District in the lead up to your current role as General Manager.
Can you detail your career at the utility and how have your prior roles at Turlock Irrigation District positioned you for success in your new role as General Manager?
Brad Koehn
I have had a fairly unique path here at the district.
I've been here about 13 years. I started at the district in 2011 in the Civil Engineering Department, which really handled mostly the water side of the house and in 2017 moved up to power supply, where I really furthered my experience on the generation side and energy market side of TID. And had the opportunity to become the Chief Operating Officer in 2020, which really combined both the water and power sides and then was very fortunate to be appointed to the GM, as you mentioned, June of this year.
To highlight the point you made, I think there's two things that really have helped me in my current role so far and the first is that I've had that past experience of both the water and the power side of the house here at TID and then secondly the COO position, that was a position…created recently in 2020.
I was the first COO for the district and that really got me access to a lot of the top level strategy that the GM at the time was working on and it's really helped with the transition into the GM role, so really, really pleased that I had the opportunity to have the diverse background that I did at the district.
Paul Ciampoli
What have you been your immediate priorities since becoming general manager?
Brad Koehn
First off, I think that the district's running very well. I don't feel there's any major course corrections that are on the list. But I do want to highlight two priorities of mine that I feel very passionate about and I'm putting a lot of effort towards and they're both long term planning efforts and one is on the water side.
We call it the water master plan and it has just been completed and we're in the beginning stages of implementation and really it's a vision that goes through 2045 and the vision is a fully automated water system that provides irrigation water…where the supply is matching demand and we can deliver water to our customers even within the hour. And so really the benefits of this fully automated canal system front and center is water savings, but also water quality improvements, increased level of service to our customers and workforce efficiency.
So a multi benefited water master plan and really excited to see that into the implementation stages.
The second long term planning effort is not as far along, but we're calling it the energy road map and it is also out looking to 2045. Here in the West, we have a very aggressive path to carbon free energy. And this energy road map is really analyzing all options and paths that can get us there.
This is inclusive of even pumped hydro, even nuclear we’re assessing and really the filter we're looking at all of these paths through is reliability and affordability, which is the mission of TID and that is the key focus. All of these options are being looked through that lens.
And I think that this plan will be unique because I think many of the plans that we see and within the industry sometimes lack those cost projections, and therefore that affordability metric sometimes is muted or sometimes even missed and so we're really excited to see what this plan shows and depending on what it shows, we're going to use it heavily in what our statement is and moving forward, like I said, it's a very aggressive path to carbon free.
The one thing that's front and center is that we have to remain reliable and we have to remain affordable as a district. So again, those two plans are really two top priorities for me as I as I've started in the GM role and I'm excited to see them come to fruition.
Paul Ciampoli
One quick follow up if I could. With respect to the water master plan -- you mentioned the idea of supply matching demand -- just curious how unique is this in terms of this specific element of the plan?
Brad Koehn
Automation’s been around for irrigation solutions like ours…We've toured Australia -- Australia went through a 10-year drought and they were basically mandated to come up with a solution that's saved as much water as possible.
That kind of influx of money from their government at the time really [expedited] the utilization of technology in their country and so they jumped out front as far as leading in this automation front, so it it's been done…I would say it's cutting edge technology and we're really looking forward to seeing all those benefits come to.
Paul Ciampoli
Just switching gears a little bit, one of the things that jumped out me [in preparing for the interview] is TID's Project Nexus, which, as you know, calls for the installation of solar panel canopies over various sections of the utility’s irrigation canals.
So could you provide additional details on Project Nexus, including what the goals of the project are and timeline for completion?
Brad Koehn
A unique thing about Project Nexus is we've done a lot of big projects here at the district and this is very unique and we're excited to be part of this project.
But it's not a tremendously big project...we have had more media coverage on Project Nexus than I think anything in the history of TID, including international coverage, so really excited to be part of something that has become such a covered project.
It's extremely unique. It's a public-private academic partnership, DWR and TID are the public entities.
Solar Aquagrid is the private entity and the UC system is UC Merced -- the academic piece of the puzzle. So that's a unique partnership to start.
The project has been funded by the state of California and really the goals at the highest level are install solar panels over the top of a water conveyance system and study all things you can to determine what are the costs? What are the benefits? How does the project perform all to support how this could be scaled in the future. Obviously there is a lot of water conveyance systems in California. And is this a solution that can be scaled large scale and become a solution as we transition to carbon free energy as a state.
So there are two separate projects at TID that that make up Project Nexus. One is what we call the narrow span section, it's roughly 1,400 feet long and it's covering about a 20 foot wide canal system. So that's kind of the narrow span section.
And then there's another section called the wide span section -- that's further up in our system on our main canal and it's much shorter in length -- about 120 feet long…the canal is 110 feet wide. So that's more representative of some of the large aqueducts up and down the state of California. And again, the goals -- at a little more granular level are -- how do the solar panels perform over water?
There's been claims of solar generation is increased when it's in a more humid or cooler state. How much evaporation is saved by shading the canal? We're really interested in what happens to aquatic growth when you remove sun from the equation.
We spend a lot of money as a district cleaning our canals because of aquatic growth, and I think there could be some real maintenance savings by shading the canal system. And in general this is a solution that is installed on property that TID already owns.
In comparison to a typical ground mount solar farm -- you're buying hundreds of acres within the district. And because of our water reliability, our land value is significant here. We're $50 to $60,000 an acre. You start doing the math on a large scale solar project and it becomes very, very cumbersome cost wise to be competitive.
And so this has a unique ability to be placed on property we already own. It's our canal banks and also TID is a unique project participant because we are an integrated utility as well, so we are the water provider and the electric provider. And so that builds some efficiencies in interconnections et cetera. And so as far as timing -- the narrow span, we are happy to say, construction has started. We have foundations installed. And after the irrigation season, probably Octoberish of this year, we will put the structures up, put the panels up and that is slated to be completed this year. Wide spans -- a little bit behind. We're finalizing design. We plan on starting construction and completing that that portion next year for Project Nexus.
So really a great example of a unique project. It involved TID saying yes when it was so easy to say no because there's some real challenges of putting solar panels on top of a canal system. And happy that we said yes. Happy we're part of the project and I think it's an example of diversification. I think the only way we're going to get to carbon free here in the West is these unique and diverse solutions like Project Nexus.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks, Brad. Are there any other completed or ongoing utility projects you'd like to highlight?
Brad Koehn
One that's another big project that we've been involved in for probably almost 10 years now and we're seeing the end come a little clearer -- it's our Don Pedro Life Extension project.
Don Pedro is our large hydro facility on the Tuolumne River and it was built in the early 70s. It's currently in the relicensing stage and the life extension project is exactly that. It is a refurbishment or replacement of basically all components of the project to completely extend the life of this hydro facility.
That includes increasing the capacity. It's currently a 203 MW capacity and because of more efficient turbines and generators will increase that to over 260 megawatts.
It's slated to be complete in 2028. We'll be doing one unit. There's four units in the facility. We'll be doing one unit each year here and this project is so critical to TID -- one, it's also our water storage facility which is a 2 million acre feet reservoir -- Don Pedro Reservoir -- that's what provides our irrigation water to our customers. And so it's so critical to optimize Don Pedro, because it's the perfect example of the water and power nexus, as this is our water supply as well as a big portion of our carbon free energy generation fleet.
Paul Ciampoli
You mentioned the energy road map and plans related to that, so there may be some overlap in terms of your details on that as it relates to my last question which is actually a two-parter.
One, I wanted to give you the opportunity to offer details on the utility’s current generation mix and plans for adding power supplies in the years ahead, and also how has resource planning for Turlock Irrigation District evolved over the years?
Brad Koehn
Great questions. I feel like TID is pretty unique. We're what I would consider probably a medium-sized utility, but we are our own balancing authority…a decent portion of our generation is internal generation within the district and that generation includes as I mentioned, Don Pedro is our large hydro facility. We have quite a few small hydro facilities.
We have wind in the Northwest, we have solar inside the district, we have solar down in Southern California. We are part of a geothermal plant. And again we have a combustion turbine fleet that also helps us maintain our balancing authority and as far as power mix goes, our power mix annually does vary due to the hydro year because of Don Pedro and the hydro facility there and so we range between about 50 to 75% of our of our annual mix being carbon free.
And again we have an aggressive path here in California, as I mentioned previously, so we are currently looking at adding renewable energy both inside and outside of the district and we're pretty agnostic to the type of renewable energy. But again solar, wind, geothermal -- they're all in the mix, but we will be adding those in the years to come and are currently involved in some negotiations that will bring those online in the next couple of years.
Again, just to make the point again, our plan is that to meet these goals, it is not going to be an all in one solution -- that diversified plan forward is the only way that this is going to happen, so happy that we already got a great head start on this diverse portfolio. The second part of your question -- resource planning and how has that changed?
That's a big question. I'll try and be concise. The proliferation of renewables in the West has definitely changed, but one thing specifically that it's changed is load shapes.
The daily load shape -- everybody's familiar with what we call the duck curve and what that duck curve shows is that as solar gets more and more common here in the West, when that solar comes off and when the sun goes down, it's creating this steep curve and a later peak -- it's pushing the peak later in the day, and it's creating a pretty steep curve, which just means we need to rely more on fast acting generation and so that shows value in some of our fast acting combustion turbine fleet.
Batteries are things that we're looking into. They're also fast acting. They're just pretty expensive still and so really that's some of the things we're seeing as far as load shape goes.
The other thing that's really changing resource planning is how the markets are changing here in the West – the Energy Imbalance Market -- the district’s been part of that for probably about six years now, seeing huge benefits in being able to gain access to energy, when it's at its lowest value, being able to import more energy when it's cheap and being able to sell some of our excess capacity into that same market when it's when it's highly valuable. Also there's an another product called EDAM. It's the extended day ahead market which is really moving the benefits of EIM even to the day ahead time frame.
And so that's not quite a fully formed market yet, but we are involved in that and plan on continuing to keep that on the front of our minds because participating in these markets really offsets the cost of these renewables to our customers and that's really our goal -- to optimize every part of our business that we can to really maintain that affordability for our customers.
Paul Ciampoli
A theme that I've been picking up on in recent interviews with executives such as yourself is just it strikes me that the level of predictability as it relates to integrated resource planning -- is it fair to say that there's a lot less predictability these days and second, I would imagine the internal generation that you noted earlier provides some level of kind of comfort in terms of being able to plan long term, right?
Brad Koehn
It does…I haven't been involved in the power industry near as long as many, but in the decade or so that I've been involved, I have seen that this volatility or lack of predictability definitely increase. Internal generation -- you're right, that definitely is a hedge towards some of some of that, but an area where that also is the opposite is -- I think it was January of 2022...and it was the natural gas spike in in December and January.
And so that goes the other way where our internal generation -- obviously that combustion turbine fleet is reliant on natural gas and here in California if you know you pick a number of natural gas -- $5, $7 bucks is kind of the general dollar amount -- it almost went up 10 times for a couple of months and so that volatility, there was a lot of people asking questions about what drove that up and I think we have a lot of good answers after the fact, but that was something that was not predicted and it was really something that put a lot of pressure on a lot of the utilities in the West and we saw a lot of rate shock, we saw a lot of people increase rates.
Locally, TID can mitigate some of that because we have what we call a power supply adjustment, which is a portion of our rates that can float up and down with the market of purchased power and fuel.
But it was still something that really caught us off guard. And I think it makes your point well is that that volatility is something that I definitely have seen increase and it just puts more and more emphasis on being involved regionally, talking to as many people as you can about what they're seeing and really trying to do your best to look as far forward as possible because our customers deserve it.
Paul Ciampoli
Speaking of customers, obviously I would assume it goes without saying that keeping them in the loop in terms of these ever evolving markets and generation options is key, right?
Brad Koehn
Yes. In fact, that's one thing I left out of these long term plans that are a high priority for me is having multiple customer meetings. We're big on bringing our customers in, making sure that they have a venue to hear what the district's vision is and to weigh in on what is this going to cost, what are the benefits? Very transparent and we do a lot of outreach on these areas.
As a public utility, I tell as many people as I can -- we are spending our customers’ money and that really means something to me and that's something I say here at the district over and over again. Because this is the truth. This is our customers’ money. This is our customers’ utility and they need to be involved in these big decisions because they're very big.
Paul Ciampoli
Brad, thanks again so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with us. It's been a really illuminating conversation and I'd love to have you back perhaps some time around next year in June or July or sometime next summer if you'd be open to that.
Brad Koehn
Absolutely. It's been a pleasure to speak with you this morning. Thank you for the offer.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
