A project proposed by Iowa public power utility Montezuma Municipal Light & Power and Iowa State University researchers has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for award negotiations with the goal of building the first “microgrid” in a rural Iowa community.
The proposal submitted by Iowa State researchers and Montezuma Municipal Light & Power called for a federal investment of roughly $9.5 million and a local cost-share of $2.4 million from university and Montezuma sources. That $11.9 million investment would provide Montezuma with a microgrid, a small-scale electricity network that can operate as an independent system or can be connected to the larger grid.
The proposal would transform the generation and distribution of electricity in Montezuma, a town of about 1,400 residents 70 miles east of Des Moines. The project will create a utility-scale microgrid to provide reliable, resilient and affordable electricity. The new system would feature power generation from solar panels and a battery storage system.
The project would also replace aging substations, load monitoring and control systems and provide the town with its first two electric vehicle chargers. It is expected to drop energy costs in Montezuma by an estimated 18%. It would also reduce costs for Montezuma Municipal Light & Power by an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Project leaders say the new microgrid would provide electricity to local communities, Poweshiek County offices, small businesses and manufacturers. The system would produce 3 megawatts of renewable energy, reduce energy purchases by 3.5 gigawatt hours and reduce transmission costs by 34%. They expect the project will take about four years to complete.
“This is a huge benefit for our customers and for local economic development because it provides long-term rate stability from the solar and the battery energy storage systems,” said Kevin Kudart, the superintendent of Montezuma Municipal Light & Power. “Our reliability will increase with the new, more modern switchgear, and our outage time will be reduced by having new controls. And we’ll promote good customer relations by providing vehicle charging stations.”
“This project will make the entire town of Montezuma the very first utility-scale microgrid in Iowa with the best reliability and resilience,” said Zhaoyu Wang, a Northrop Grumman associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State who’s affiliated with the university’s Electric Power Research Center and is the project leader.
“The Montezuma microgrid will revolutionize and modernize the Montezuma Municipal Light and Power system by integrating smart grid technologies. It will be a model for other rural utilities,” Wang said.
“The microgrid will improve Montezuma by ensuring energy supplies for critical loads, controlling power quality and reliability at the local level, and promoting customer participation through demand-side management and involvement in electricity supply,” Wang said.
