By Mark Cowling | Pinal Central
The Valley and Pinal County are growing so quickly that the energy capacity that Salt River Project spent 100 years building and acquiring must now be doubled in 10 years.
“The growth that we’re seeing is tremendous … more than double what we saw in the previous decade,” Bill McClellan, SRP’s senior manager of resource development, told the monthly Pinal Partnership breakfast Friday at the Florence Community Center.
Mike Eugenis, director of Arizona Public Service Co.’s Resource Planning group, said his company is in similar straits, predicting 4% to 6% annual growth for the next 10 years. Moderator Court Rich asked the question “how nervous should we be?” about energy providers can keeping up with demand.
McClellan said they’re “very confident.” SRP has a robust planning process and a lot of interaction with its communities to understand new demands or “loads” headed for the system, “so we can plan appropriately.”
Eugenis said there are two main parts to maintaining reliability — planning and the “constructs that we exist in as utilities.” APS is looking at joining a “day-ahead market” with other providers in the West. For example, APS might be able to use excess power from the state of Washington as summertime depletes supplies in Arizona.
Arizona Corporation Commissioner Rachel Walden said utilities understand the situation.
“Nobody wants to see blackouts so I know there’s a lot of planning that’s gone into that. I’m not worried about it because I’ve met with utilities that have said we are prioritizing reliability — we cannot sacrifice residential reliability in order for there to be development.”
Todd Czaplewski, a senior manager for Southwest Gas Corporation, said the company is always looking for ways to increase the reliability of its service. Natural gas, piped in from Texas and Colorado, generates about 46% of the electricity in Arizona. Czaplewski said Southwest Gas works with its utility partners to “keep the game going” and “add new partners as needed.”
Kellie Pitera, Arizona development market lead for clean energy company AES Corporation, said her company relies on its supply chain to make sure it’s serving its utility customers, such as “ensuring that we have enough transformers.”
