From The Williston Herald:
A Williams County power company has just taken a big leap that positions it to to make a bigger mark on the nation’s energy map.
Mountrail Williams Electric Cooperative, on the eve of celebrating its 25th anniversary, was recently
welcomed as the newest member of the Southwest Power Pool, a nonprofit
Regional Transmission Organization that manages the electric grid and
the wholesale energy market in the Central United States.
The SPP blueprint now stretches across 14 states from North Dakota to Texas in the south.
The move will allow Mountrail Williams to finally export power to other regions, something it has been unable to do before.
Under
the new arrangement, Basin Electric, which has also joined the same
pool, still supplies power to Mountrail Williams. But both entities will
now have instantaneous access to the wider energy market to sell excess
power from the region.
And more:
“They’re
going to look at that whole map from North Dakota all the way to
Texas,” Haugen says.
”It will enhance our transmission grid by being able
to drive power in and out. We were only able to drive in before. It’s
not going to be one way any more, and that could mean a big future cycle
combined power plant. We’re not an island any more. This is huge.
Huge.”
That
type of expansion could someday mean that natural gas, which is
presently being flared, could instead become cheap power for areas that
need it throughout the Central U.S.
While
that particular development may be some distance away in the future,
wind farms are already in the works, and that will be something the
region’s power companies, including Mountrail Williams, hope to
capitalize on in the wider energy markets. The wider benefit of that,
Haugen suggested, is a continued downward pressure on regional power
prices.
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