Director Eric Williams engages in dialogue with energy users for OPPD recommendations; Board votes Nov. 14th

One of the members on the OPPD board, Eric Williams offered an opportunity for public engagement and community input. NOISE team participated at Hardy Coffee in North 30th Street, where Williams spoke on his ambitious plans and board recommendations for North Omaha and the city to “power with purpose.”

“Climate change is scientifically true since the mid-1980s.” —Eric Williams

The course that OPPD would take toward the recommended operations would begin with a call for project proposals, to build the new infrasture and services. Williams stated, “The Request for Proposals (RFP) that we would send out, developers would come up with ways to answer that and say, ‘here is how we meet your needs.’ They would be eligiable for tax credits, and there are programs that would help to make some of this cooler stuf happen. The cost of solar is relitaivley lower with major up-coming new types of generation. So the incentives are helping.”

OPPD requests input on two very important topics (see below). To expand opportunities to inform people and take feedback, Williams is hosting events and asks residents to join the discussion. Williams reassures that “there are several more opportunities to talk with me in person about the new generation updates, and the suggested goal of net-zero carbon by 2050.”

Dates for POwer with Purpose and Board Business

Eric Williams hopes to see you at these events in Subdivision 6:

  • Public Power Happy Hour with Director Eric Williams, Tuesday, November 5th.

    • Public Power Happy Hour drinks and appetizers will be provided.
      Tuesday, November 5th from 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
      Annies Irish Pub, 1110 Davenport (in the Capital District)
      facebook.com/events/524632791722579

  • November 6th (facebook live with Eric Williams).

  • November 8th Public Input ends at Oppdlistens.com.

  • An OPPD Committee meeting November 12th

  • Board meeting 14th. Then for developers, Request for Proposals.

Click here on fb @WilliamsForOPPD to provide your thoughts about the future of our public power utility. Continue reading for an extended interview.

About Director Eric Williams

Eric-Williams_Pic.jpg

OPPD Director Williams is originally from Omaha, and he and his partner Kristine live in the Dundee neighborhood. Williams graduated from Rice University. He has served as the President of the Engineers Club of Omaha, and he helped found the Dundee Community Garden.

Williams was elected to the OPPD Board of Directors to represent Subdistrict 6 in 2018. He was also recognized by Earth Day Omaha as the Friend of the Environment in 2016.

Eric Williams is the Natural Resources Planner at the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District (NRD). He works to protect and conserve natural resources, and to build trails across the metro area. Prior to his work at the NRD, he helped to improve energy efficiency in Omaha through evaluations and upgrades to homes and businesses as part of the reEnergize program.

Interview at Hardy Coffee

Quincy Miles and Luis Jimenez took the opportunity to meet Williams, with steaming coffee in a large silver thermos available at hand. Eric Williams dove in on how much direction the OPPD board could give towards powering the community with renewable energy or “power with purpose.”

OPPD is seeking between 400-600 MW of utility-scale solar production. (For reference, the largest current solar installation in Nebraska is around 8 MW.) In addition, the board is considering to modernized equipment which is designed to operate much less frequently, generally at peak times, and during outages across the power system.

Once the green light is given to these recommendations, the process that follows can be achieved through a Request fro Proposals to developers, who can take help from federal tax credits and other programs for renewable energy production.

Director Eric Williams (left) and Luis Jimenez | Photo by NOISE

Director Eric Williams (left) and Luis Jimenez | Photo by NOISE

Quincy Miles and Director Eric Williams (right) | Photo by NOISE

Quincy Miles and Director Eric Williams (right) | Photo by NOISE

Quincy Miles: Is solar energy powerful enough to power the entire city?

Eric Williams: That’s about as much power output as the North Omaha facility or one of the large coal facilities that we’ve had in the past. It’s a little intermittent; so it comes up during the day, obviously, but not at night. The total amount of energy output from a solar array fluctuates. It’s not what we usually call “base-leg, meaning on all day, all night, all the time.” It’s a little bit different type of generation. It does produce during the day when the demand is generally higher, but that’s where the natural gas facilities would be constructed as well, to back that up. So that at times when it might be cloudy but we still need energy, those could be used to bring power online. The solar would not make all the power, but it would make about one-fifth of the total demand at OPPD. So in the summer in the afternoon when the sun is up, [the array] would be making a lot of power.

Power with Purpose

This project is a recommended investment in large utility-scale solar, with an approximately equal amount of modernized natural gas generation.

You can read more information, and provide comments online: www.oppd.com/community/oppd-listens/power-with-purpose

Miles: Do we use nuclear energy right now?

Williams: We don’t anymore. We did in the past have a nuclear station. The Fort Calhoun nuclear station was around for about 40 years, and it became decommissioned. We started the process of decommissioning in 2016. So there are still facilities there. The buildings are still there, but the reactor is offline. The used nuclear material is being moved from one storage area to a more long-term storage area, so it is safe and secure and that some of the other parts of the facility can be deconstructed. We don’t use nuclear here. There is a nuclear station down south that is owned and operated Nebraska Public Power District. A majority of what we have now, about 30% comes from wind energy. There is another wind farm coming online at the end of November. So that will takes up to about 40% of our energy from wind. And the other 60% comes from a mix of gas and coal, mostly. We get a bit of hydropower up north. But it’s about 40% wind, 30% gas, 30% coal.

Miles: This is not related to solar energy, could we use the Missouri River as a source of power?

Williams: There are some places where hydropower works. The Missouri River is a relatively flat river. Usually, what you need for hydropower to work, you need a lot of verticle change. In the Pacific Northwest, hydropower is much more popular because of its mountains. You can a lot out of more energy out of that resource. But a dam in Missouri River? It’s used for barge traffic, so it would be really challenging to put a hydroelectric generation facility in the Missouri River. There are a couple of those facilities further up north, but the likelihood of being in our area is pretty low. Some of those facilities have environmental consequences that are really hard to work through now. A lot of when the big hydro-plants were built, we didn’t fully understand what the impact would be on fish, other wildlife, and other uses in the river. So some of those projects will have to be offline. It is not very common that new and large hydro-projects are getting constructed right now.

Luis Jimenez: On wind energy, you said it was 40%. That is a huge capacity. How is that going to look like?

Williams: Most of that is already up. 30% of our energy comes from wind right now; it’s wind turbines from north-central Nebraska. The newest facility Sholes wind farm is kind of northeast-central, where the wind resources are a bit stronger, maybe more continuous. The Sholes wind farm is a new facility but is similar to the other ones. You can go see those today. They are out there right now. Just like solar, there are incentives for private developers who build wind farms, the production tax credit. OPPD has come up with purchase agreements for a lot of our power from wind farms that are developed by private entities. So we don’t own the wind farm directly, we just purchase all of the power from the wind farms.

Jimenez: It’s interesting that we can have commodities in energy, when it’s wind. The wind goes through a process that big, now you can package it and sell it through a contract.

Williams: What is it? How can we collect it? Put it in a box, then sell it. And that’s kind of what a power purchase agreement is for wind energy. Yeah.

Miles: You said 2050. Why would it take so long to get to the switch? Why is it that we project that far?

Williams: You asked earlier about can we get all of our power? We can’t get all of power from solar, and we can’t get all of our power from wind, because sometimes it is not sunny and the wind isn’t a little blowing. We do need to have some other resources. In the future there will be other types of new resources. So batteries will be able to help store engergy; from when it is sunny, you can store it and use it later. But batteries right now can sotre engery for couple hours. We feel we have about a 4 hour design-increase of a [battery] life. So they are good storing energy in the morning, and then in the afternoon when the engery use is peeking—because everyone has their airconditioners on—then the batteries can realease that enery back [into the grid]. In general batteries don’t work from one day to several days into the future, or one week, or one month. There are shifts in the engergy need between the day and the evening, from one day to later in the week, and from one part of the year to another part of the year. Batteries are not really a great technology for longer term storage yet. That is why the timeline for when we would have all our energy need met for the net zero carbon is still far out, 2050, because new technologies need to be devolped. In the interim, 30% comes from wind now—40% by the end of November—with the solar installion that would probably move us over 50% [from renewable energy]. There are good technologies that can go 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%. Pretty resounably you can get a huge portion of your energy from clean resources. Getting from 80% to 90% is alot harder. Getting from 90% to 95%, 98% is a lot harder as you get closer to having no fossil-fuel generation in your fleet.

Net zero carbon

Williams: The goal of 2050 is base on how long do we think it would take to get all of the carbon emmissions removed from the generation originally or offset by generative agriculture or some other way to take carbon back out of the air.

Director Eric Williams tells OPPD customers that “having a long-term goal is critical to help make sure we understand the implications of our current decisions. As part of the Systems and Nuclear Oversight Committee, I am very glad that we have a recommended update to SD-7 (Strategic Directive) which is focused on Environmental Stewardship. The most notable update is moving from a goal that measures the percentage of energy from renewable sources and carbon intensity to a direct measure of carbon dioxide emissions and a date to achieve net-zero emissions. This goal is in line with the best scientific evidence available.

You can find the information on the right side of this page, and here is the direct link to the PDF showing the new language and a "redline" version detailing the changes. Please use this form to submit comments about the suggested update to this language. Public comment input ends November 8th.

  • The goal of net-zero carbon production by 2050.

  • Includes operations such as building services and transportation.

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