Dept. of Energy officials visit utility projects

DENMARK – The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Office of Electricity got a snapshot of what federal grant funds are doing to reinforce the area's electrical grid Thursday.
The DOE’s David Denton spent about an hour in Danville and another hour near Denmark looking at electrical resilience work that is being done with the assistance of a federal resiliency grant from the agency.
Denton said his visit was strictly a visit to meet with local energy providers and utilities who are capitalizing on the Iowa Grid Resilience Fund Program administered by the Iowa Economic Development Authority. He said his visit had nothing to do with the state’s recent announcement around a steel manufacturing facility for Lee County.
“We try to be intentional about these. I was in Texas two weeks ago. It’s part of our job to be out in the field. It’s always good to get this firsthand. But we’re definitely not coming for that,” Denton said.
“Iowa is just one of many states that we’re going to.”
Denton was joined by Jeff Geerts, the program director with IEDA, and Kristin Hanks-Bents, the IEDA Energy Division Administrator. He was also joined by Access Energy Coop’s CEO Kevin Wheeler; Tyler Thein, Access’ Director of Engineering; and Kimberly Davis, Access’ director of member services and public relations.
Danville’s electricity comes directly from New London and they are susceptible to any cuts or interruptions along old Hwy. 34. They are trying to create a split so that not all customers in the city are on the same leg of power.
Bryon Heater, the city’s Public Works Superintendent said the city is also looking at potentially partnering with Alliant on the north side for supplemental power in the event there is an outage. Part of the project is to run some electric lines underground. He said currently the city is about 90% above ground, but underground costs about triple to install than above ground cabling.
Danville was awarded $436,645 from state and federal grant pools and contributed $126,590 in city funds to complete the project.

At Denmark, Access Energy is also splitting service in the community on a 2-1 basis where about 200 homes would be on one feeder and about 110 on the other. The work is being done north of the Northeast Missouri Power substation to Hwy 16.  The feeder splits will cost about $400,000 with $88,500 coming from Access Energy and the rest in state and federal grants. Access and Northeast Power are also rebuilding the substation in Denmark, but that project is funded privately.
The IGRF program awarded more than $19.5 million to 17 projects, including Mt. Pleasant Municipal Utilities and Southern Iowa Electric.
Thein said the split in Denmark gives customers and the coop reliability benefits and reduces the exposure to customers.
“When an issue occurs, it just affects less people and gives us more resiliency and more reliability there,” he said.
A second phase of the project is technological upgrades in component communication that will allow more efficient reactions to service. He said the substation in Denmark will increase capacity, but the improvement was driven by age.
Denton said it’s great to see the partnerships and tie-ins working.
“It’s great to see this money invested being put to good use. Trying to move forward with safe, reliable, and optimized systems and that looks like what’s being done here,” he said.
He said a third tranche of funding will be coming soon and the state will work with the DOE to set up some kind of grant system to get that funding out, as well.
“We have other funding out there. We just put out $1.9 billion worth of funding for reconducting or projects that allow greater capacity to get to the grid, and meet the needs of growing industry and growing economies,” Denton said.