The following is a transcript of the March 10, 2025, 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.
Our guest on this episode is Chris Weiner, Executive Director of Electric Services for the City of Coffeyville, Kansas, a public power community.
Chris, thanks for joining us.
Chris Weiner
Thank you very much for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
Chris, just to get our conversation started, I wanted to give you the opportunity to detail your role and responsibilities as Executive Director of Electric Services.
Chris Weiner
Overall, my job is to manage the operations of both the electric and the fiber departments. The city has its own fiber utility as well -- Internet -- and so I manage that.
So within that, we have really kind of four departments, the electric distribution department, the electric transmission department, the electric generation department or division and then the Internet side, the fiber side, as well.
I have individual department heads over each one of those and work with all of them to make sure that we're moving forward in the right direction in each of those areas and getting our day-to-day operations done, providing power to the community.
We make sure that Coffeyville is an excellent community that provides very reliable and safe power to our community, so certainly we're thrilled to be able to have that opportunity as a community to have public power.
It's a game changer for our local community.
So along with managing the operations, I also prepare and manage the budget for each of those departments -- get that prepared every year.
I've only been here six months, so this is really kind of my first budget working with for the city of Coffeyville, trying to kind of get a good feel for where this year 2025 is going to go, but certainly I'm glad to be here and excited for the future here.
We've put that together and then get that through the city manager and through the city Commission to set priorities for the year.
I also try and find opportunities to improve cash flow of the department -- obviously, decreasing expenses and increasing revenues.
Our department generally subsidizes the overall city's general services, whether that's police, fire, streets, etc.
The electric utility, like a lot of communities, provides that subsidy for the general fund for those general city services, so it's a big deal that we need to try and make sure that we’re keeping our utility in a good financial position to be able to not only take care of itself, but to provide for those other city services.
And then in addition to that, I plan for the future of the utility and work with consultants, developers to try and help grow the community and the utility.
Paul Ciampoli
So in terms of planning for the future, I think that's kind of a nice segue to the next question.
The department recently completed a five year capital improvement plan along with budget updates.
Could you detail what's included in that plan?
Chris Weiner
So the leadership team here at the city has recently changed. As I said, I've been here about six months.
The city manager has been here about nine years, and so when he came in, brought in a few other individuals to join a leadership team.
And so there was a period there where, you know in Kansas, you've got to get a budget submitted to the state well in advance of the next fiscal year.
Typically, that's done in August of each year, and so he had just gotten on board.
I joined in mid August and so was trying to get a budget sent into the state for this 2025 calendar fiscal year.
It was challenging and so we're going through the process of getting updated budget figures and so I've done that for my departments that I supervise and manage, obviously.
And in conjunction with that tried to build out a five year capital plan and so that's got a lot of things in it.
Overall in 2025, I plan in this budget that I'm hoping will get approved here in the next few weeks by the City Commission for these budget amendments -- but I've got planned in 2025 about $5.5 million of total investments in capital improvements, which also includes some equipment improvements.
Some of that is for large scale projects that are already underway.
For instance, we've got a $16.8 million project to upgrade one of our substations here that serve our largest customer, which is the Coffeyville Resources nitrogen facility and their subsidiaries -- they're our largest customer.
Our overall peak load is about 107 megawatts and they make up about 70 of that, so that's a large portion obviously of our overall load and so we're trying to get their transformers and that substation all upgraded to allow them for some better redundancy as well as opportunity for growth.
That's overall about a $16.8 million project but we're looking at being reimbursed for the majority of that because it's an upgrade that's specifically for them.
So the taxpayers won't have to take on the majority of that, obviously, but certainly we're excited for the growth that that opportunity provides -- this project will provide.
We're also going through at the moment an engine overhaul of our three Wartsila units. We’ve got three Wartsila gas generating units that were manufactured in 2016.
We went operational with those in 2017 and so we're about 22,000 hours on those units right now. We're going through an overhaul on those engines, it's about a $3.25 million project. And we spent a good chunk of that last year in the actual parts and components for that, but now we've got the labor ongoing as we speak. I was just out there right before this interview and meeting with the team and trying to go over what we're seeing. We found a couple things we need to address on that that weren't planned but overall we're doing pretty well and moving forward on that project. Just under $3 million -- $2.8 million substation improvements out here also already in the works -- a lot of that work got done last year, ordering parts and what not, but upgrade improvements out here at the substation out here at the North Industrial Park.
We’ve also got a $300,000 project to upgrade our SCADA system here in the community.
We're looking at two bucket trucks for the utility at about half million dollars, a new digger derrick for $400,000 [and] a boring machine at about $225,000 -- that'll be shared between the electric utility, water utility and fiber utility trying to get some underground lines buried.
And then a bucket truck for a tree crew that we're trying to get started, so just in 2025 alone there’s a lot of money we're looking at trying to spend to get us into a position that, hey, we're able to take care of some items that have been deferred for a lot of years.
Obviously, not sure if the city Commission is going to be able to work through all those items, but we may have to postpone a few of those, but hopefully we'll be able to get those taken care of here quickly so we can move forward on a lot of these items.
[In] 2026 we're looking at about just under $1,000,000 for a line pulling tensioner and boom lift are the big items there and then ‘27 about another $1,000,000 for another bucket truck and a backyard machine.
In ‘28, [the utility is] looking about just over a million for a power plant bypass on our transmission system to try and give us some redundancy there and be able to take part of our substation offline to be able to do maintenance without having to to kill the power entirely, and then in 2029 and 2030, looking at $150,000 and $75,000, respectively.
I anticipate those numbers will go up as we move forward in these next few years, but don't have anything planned at this point in time, so we've got a lot overall in the queue I should say, but looking forward to hopefully getting that kicked off here shortly with getting the budget approved.
Paul Ciampoli
So one quick follow up if I could. So obviously everything you've described -- there [are] going to be a lot of benefits for the customers of the utility, so just curious as to how you guys whether formally or even informally communicate those benefits to customers?
Chris Weiner
In the budget documents [we] try to put a good narrative in there that explains what we're doing, what we're going to use these items for within the capital improvement plan, had a justification for each of those. Look to try and put that on the website and share that on our Facebook page, so that way if anybody is interested, they’re welcome to go through and look at each of these items individually and say, OK, this is what that's for, this is how it's going to benefit us.
From an overall high level snapshot, just try and get out there in the community from time to time -- business association meetings...to try and really make sure that people get an opportunity to understand what their electric utility is doing for them, what public power means, what it means to our community and what kind of difference that we can make by having these utilities in our community and the investments they make and how these overall projects are going to allow us to move forward.
Looking forward to being able to do some more of those meetings here in the near future to talk to people about what we're doing and why we're doing it.
A few months ago I did a radio interview with a local radio station just trying to communicate, hey, this is what the electric utility is all about, and this is how we are trying to move forward on various items and projects and so just really excited about trying to communicate to the public what we're doing and why we're doing it and how it benefits them.
Paul Ciampoli
It's my understanding that the Electric Services Department's looking at potential options for the possible replacement of the city's 30 MW steam plant.
Any additional details you can offer on that?
Chris Weiner
We do have a steam engine plant. It's our downtown power plant. It's very iconic for the community. We've got on top of that plant, Coffeyville Municipal Power and Light all lit up – it lights up at night.
We put Christmas lights up there during the holiday season, et cetera, and it's just a very iconic image for the community, so that's where that's located.
But there's seven engines in that power plant. The power plant itself was built in 1901.
And they put in 70 engines over the years, but only one is still operational. It's the steam plant we were just talking about. Its nameplate capacity when it was installed in 1966 was 38 megawatts. It's a GE, a General Electric steam turbine and it’s worked great for us, worked terrific for the community over the years. But at this point it's almost 60 years old. With that 38-MW GE turbine that brought the community up to 78 and a quarter megawatts of production out of that power plant.
Today, it's the only one remaining that operates out of that power plant.
We've built this new power plant out here where my office is at and it's got the three Wartsila engines that are undergoing the overhaul right now, but certainly the steam engine -- we've reduced its overall operating capacity to about 30 megawatts even though its nameplate is up to 38 because it is old, 60 years old.
We really don't want to try and run that. A lot of things break if we try and max that out for any length of time.
We do need to replace it. It's not nearly as efficient at making energy as what today's modern engines are, but it's been a workhorse, it’s been terrific for us and so we're in the process right now.
I'm talking with some consultants, trying to get a study approved where we're looking at new generation.
With our 56 megawatts out here, we've got these three Wartsila piston engines which are 18.7 megawatts each we're looking at.
This facility itself was constructed with the intent and the design that it could be expanded easily. So do we look at going ahead and...expanding this facility? Do we double the size of this facility?
Do we go solar? The city has ample land available for a solar farm. Do we go with some battery storage?
All options are on the table. We're looking at just trying to come up with an idea of what makes the most sense for our customers and our community.
We want to make sure that we're able to provide a stable, reliable power source for our community into the future and that would be cheap energy so we can try and stabilize and provide long term, good, cheap energy for our community.
Energy's the name of the game. Capacity is going to be incredibly important moving forward here.
In today’s world, the capacity demands on the market are just enormous and they're just going to keep growing, so certainly we want to try and replace that generation, that 30 megawatts of the steam plant with some new generation.
It's just trying to figure out which option is the best for our community is the question at hand at the moment.
We're hoping to get a study done to really look at that and give us good, good direction moving forward.
Paul Ciampoli
I was going to circle back to the discussion of the maintenance overall, the reciprocating engines. Do you have anything else to add on that?
Chris Weiner
The city made the made the determination – hey, we want to try and have these maintenance overhauls, which are recommended by the manufacturer – Wartsila's the manufacturer, they're a great company out of Europe. I think their headquarters is in Helsinki, Finland.
But we’re trying to get these maintenance overhauls done. They're scheduled for 18,000 and 24,000 hours of runtime [is] what the recommendations are. We're trying to combine those into one cycle, working with the SPP, which obviously is the public power regulator within the Midwest footprint. We're working with them.
Trying to get an outage scheduled is very difficult. Post COVID, post-Winter storm Uri, it's been very challenging to try and get an outage scheduled just because the capacity is so short.
And so they're unable to accommodate outages in a very responsive fashion and so we struggled trying to get an outage scheduled that would work for the market as a whole and would work for SPP as well as work for us and so it's been delayed a little bit longer than what we would like...so we’re just over 21,000 hours of runtime at this point, so a little bit beyond the 18,000 that’s recommended but we are finding some things that we're going to have to address.
There are obviously some scheduled items that we were planning on. This overhaul is a lot of work.
We brought in a company doing great work for us called KE Marine to assist our own maintenance personnel on this overhaul -- we're getting our personnel a lot experience and great knowledge of how...the inner workings of [the engines] go and so that hopefully when we run into problems in the future we’ll be able to address some of those issues ourselves, but great experience for our guys.
KE Marine came in to help us out, but we found some items that we weren't anticipating that's going to add to the cost of this project.
We've had some broken springs that were not expected and we don't believe should have occurred, as well as some paint’s peeling off on the inside of these engines.
We're going to have to address a couple of those issues with the manufacturer, but I think overall these engines have been great for us. We’re certainly thrilled with how reliable they've been over the years.
And we're really looking forward to continuing to work with Wartsila and trying to get these items resolved and be able o get these units back in service as quickly as possible.
We had another $170,000 in extra labor costs beyond what was expected, so a total quarter million or so beyond what we were expecting -- just halfway through the first engine.
Obviously there's a lot of extra costs and the maintenance on these machines is an enormous cost, but the fact that we're able to operate these and the value that they provide to the community is incredible.
Back to the component of talking to the community and educating the community that's just where we try and make sure that they understand and we're able to have that conversation with our community members and our customers that by having these engines, by having this generation -- it's incredibly beneficial for the Coffeyville community, for industry, for our businesses and our residents that we're able to provide power at a much cheaper rate than a lot of communities can.
Even your investor-owned utilities, your cooperatives, what they're able to provide power for -- Coffeyville is able to be very competitive compared to a lot of those companies because of the fact that we have a lot of generation -- about 90 megawatts covers almost our entire load. Certainly that provides us with some tremendous opportunities to cover our community in the event that there is any kind outage or storm that we now have to generate to provide power for the town -- whatever the situation may be -- we're set up very well and looking forward to the future, the future is very bright in Coffeyville.
It's just we've got to get through some of these big-ticket items to try and get these maintenance items taken care of and repair and replace our equipment that's aging and be able to try and look forward to the future.
Paul Ciampoli
Chris, a follow up question.
Not specifically tied to what you just discussed in terms of the engine overhaul project, but you mentioned earlier the idea of solar or energy storage.
Anything you can elaborate on in terms of whether the department's taking a closer look at that or is that just kind of a perhaps in the future idea?
Chris Weiner
We have seriously been considering solar options, battery options. Battery would probably be coupled with solar. We wouldn't likely do battery without the solar. But the solar conversation has been very, very in depth discussed.
It is interesting to see, well, what's going to happen at this point with the new administration in Washington, DC -- are a lot of those incentives going to change?
What are we going to do in terms of what's going to be the most economical for our customers -- a lot of grants have been out there over the past few years, few decades, really for green projects, for solar projects.
If that goes away, then solar may no longer be as attractive, as good of a long term investment -- at least at this point in time, compared to the cost of that service, the long-term cost and if there are grants that come out for baseload generation similar to what we already have here with our gas reciprocating engines that if that flips to where there's now grant dollars available for some baseload because obviously the need is there for that type of generation that may be something that the city looks at more seriously being [prioritized] over solar.
At some point, I do anticipate that...that the administration changes back you wind up that, hey, these types of renewable energy resources are now being incentivized again.
The overall dollar figure then may pencil out that hey, that is a better long-term cost of energy than gas or nuclear or anything else.
At this point, our objective is to look at what's our best long-term cost of energy looking out -- this steam plant we're looking at replacing is 60 years, so want to look at the next 50 or 60 years, when you capitalize that cost of the infrastructure of everything out over the next 60 years, what is that going to look like?
Solar is incredibly attractive still from the standpoint that you have no inputs. And essentially once you're built, you just have operation and maintenance costs, so that's always going to be a very attractive option, but if it winds up being that, hey, you know, with these incentives that are given on build the new gas plant -- If that does happen -- that hey, that may become more of a priority.
You also have to look at what the SPP is going to do in terms of capacity credit -- capacity credit for renewables isn't as good as what it is for oil or gas, nuclear, et cetera because it's reliant on that resource being available and it's a lot more available when you have those other types of resources, those fossil fuels to be able to rely on, but all of that is relevant in the conversation.
What's the price of natural gas look like in the next 20-30 years?...Hindsight's always 20/20 and you're never going to get it get 100% correct, but certainly solar has been very intensely talked about and we're still very interested in.
We would like to diversify our generation portfolio and so we are certainly looking at all options on the table and solar certainly being a priority one.
Paul Ciampoli
Chris, thanks again so much for taking the time to speak with us and I wanted to know if you'd be open to returning as a guest at some point in the future.
I would imagine we could start -- if we speak perhaps a year from now, we could do an update on that capital improvement plan, among other things.
Chris Weiner
Absolutely. That sounds like a great plan.
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.
