Electric rates stable for city residents

By JoAn Bjarko
Fossil Creek Current

While natural gas bills are going up nationwide, the wholesale supplier of electricity to Fort Collins and Loveland does not foresee a rate increase for a few years.

At a media tour of Platte River Power Authority's Rawhide Energy Station on Oct. 5, PRPA general manager Brian Moeck said wholesale rates could increase about 4 percent around 2008, but it's all speculative.

The wholesale rate to Fort Collins represents about three-quarters of the operating costs for the city utility, he said, so a 4 percent increase from PRPA translates to a 3 percent increase at the retail end, if just passed on directly.

Located 26 miles north of Fort Collins, Rawhide is a coal-fired power plant also equipped to burn natural gas to meet peak demands during the summer air-conditioning season. The company is owned by the communities it serves --Fort Collins, Loveland, Estes Park and Longmont. The plant facilities and surrounding land cover 4,200 acres. The company's business office is located in Fort Collins at 2000 E. Horsetooth Road.

On Sept. 24, Rawhide stopped making electricity to undergo a scheduled maintenance, and its customers didn't notice. Long before the switches were flipped, PRPA had purchased power from other utilities to serve its customers. The purchased power will cost PRPA about $7 million, said plant manager Jason Frisbie.

"Platte River will spend around $29 million to complete over 700 individual jobs within six weeks and purchase replacement power," he said. Rawhide's 93 employees and 300 contractors are doing the work.

One of the key jobs is to install a new low-pressure turbine rotor that will increase the plant's output without increasing emissions. With the new rotor, the plant can generate 3 to 6 more megawatts, Frisbie said. If it reduces output to the usual 270 megawatts, the plant will use less fuel.

Another major part of the maintenance effort is installation of new burners that will reduce nitrogen oxide by about 35 percent. This change is part of a voluntary emissions reduction agreement Platte River signed with the state in 2002. The first part of the agreement, involving voluntary reductions of sulphur dioxide, was completed in 2003.

Rawhide historically has and continues to operate below all state, regional and local permitted levels, according to Rae Todd, communications and media relations specialist.

Additional jobs to improve and maintain reliability include repairs to valves, an upgrade to the ash recycling system, installation of a new main control system and coal belt replacement.

Frisbie said Rawhide burns the cleanest coal it can buy from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. "It's an additional expense we incur because we think it's the proper thing to do," he said. Rawhide burned nearly 1.3 million tons of coal in 2004.

PRPA also gets power from two coal-fired units at the Yampa Project's Craig Station, from federal hydropower and from 10 wind turbines at the Medicine Bow Project.