Colorado wholesale provider has a new division for transition & integration
Platte River Power Authority has created a new division for transition and integration and named its first director, Raj Singam Setti.
Jason Frisbee, the chief executive of Platte River said the division was created to focus on executing the utility’s Resource Diversification Policy that was adopted in December 2018.
That policy identified a goal of reaching a 100% non-carbon resource mix by 2030. Directors of the utility representing its member cities — Fort Collins, Loveland, Estes Park and Loveland — recognized a number of pre-conditions would be necessary. They include:
- An organized regional market must exist with Platte River as an active participant;
- Battery storage performance must mature and the costs must decline;
- Utilization of storage solutions to include thermal, heat, water and end user available storage;
- Transmission and distribution infrastructure investment must be increased;
- Transmission and distribution delivery systems must be more fully integrated;
- Improved distributed generation resource performance;
- Technology and capabilities of grid management systems must advance and improve;
- Advanced capabilities and use of active end-user management systems;
- Generation, transmission and distribution rate structures must facilitate systems integration.
Paul Zummo of the American Public Power Association says positions such as that of Platte River are becoming more common as member utilities set environmental and clean energy goals and gear up for electric vehicles and other components of beneficial electrification.
The association had 2,000 members, about 60 of which are generators like Platte River, wholesalers.
One of its members, the Seattle municipal utility, is working with the city to electrify bus fleets. Others are working in the hydrogen realm, said Zummo, director of policy, research, and analysis.
Singam Setti most recently served as a principal advisor for a clean-energy investment bank and as director of grid integration and portfolio integration for Wabash Valley Power Alliance, a generation and transmissions electric cooperative in Indianapolis.
Also during his 20 year-career, Singam Setti has worked with investor-owned and public power utilities across 10 organized energy markets, both in the United States and elsewhere. This was on behalf of GE Grid Solutions and clean energy developers.
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I have to say after reading comments from Mr. Best recently in my hometown paper, the Pueblo Chieftain, that Mr. Best is an activist first, and a journalist second. I do wonder what it would be like to have persons in this country that reported and made it very hard to discern their particular leanings on any given issue. What a world that would be…
I also wonder what it would be like to once again have a left-wing that was intelligent about economics, didn’t pander to bourgeois tastes, and had some measure of sympathy for the plight of the middle (read: petty bourgeoisie) and working classes at the hands of the aforementioned and thoroughly rapacious bourgeois class which is currently pillaging those lower classes through its handling of the financial system of this country and accompanying environmental boondoggles. I see little evidence that any of this hogwash about electrification, or electric cars, or anything else associated with “clean energy” would do anything to mitigate the ongoing western drought and alleviate chronic western water shortages. I do however see strong evidence for the elitist thinking of David Brower in forums such as this, where this subject can be discussed with the window dressing of intelligence of the kind that contributors to the Natural Resources Defense Council pride themselves about. I desperately wish to live in a smarter, more rational age. This is not that age, sadly.
Sir, you have provided no evidence that the facts I delivered were wrong, nor have you found specific fault with my reasoning. Instead, you have essentially called me names. So, what, exactly, is your point? Journalism without analysis is … well, clutter. Here, I have analyzed after giving this subject considerable study.
It’s not my job to do your job. You purport to be the journalist, not I. I have read your articles in the Chieftain about the proposed shuttering of the Comanche generating units in Pueblo. You have provided no real details about the impacts of this to the ordinary man or woman, such as possible increases in their utility rates, the capital costs in construction of alternative energy sources to replace those coal fired units, also to be passed on to the consumer, and the required mix to replace coal fired power on a 1:1 (or equal) footing, from a fuels input perspective.
What is apparent from your articles is your activism. You want this transition in energy, it is easy to see. I don’t care about that, while I don’t necessarily agree with you. But I want details, and most particularly, details about how this benefits the common man, or alternatively, doesn’t benefit the common man.
I have a full time job, sir, and have a family to raise. I am required to be an expert in my field, not in every field. If you are going to publish content in this area, and wish to be taken seriously as a reporter, then do the hard work, find and publish the details, and you and I (and many others) will have little to disagree about, other than what to do with the information at hand.