Where Your Power Comes From
Grand Valley Power has a long-term contract to purchase power through Xcel Energy, our wholesale power supplier. GVP also contracts with Western Area Power Administration for a small portion of renewable energy (hydroelectricity).
In order to ensure that we have a reliable and affordable source of electricity to distribute to our consumers, about 30 years ago Grand Valley Power entered into a long-term Power Purchase Agreement with Xcel. This contract, which is approved and regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), ensures that Grand Valley Power has a source for all of its power needs at a price that is based on the cost to produce that power. We pass this power cost through to our members directly, without mark-up, on every monthly bill.
Xcel Energy provides the energy that powers millions of homes and businesses across eight Western and Midwestern states. Headquartered in Minneapolis, the company is an industry leader in responsibly reducing carbon emissions and producing and delivering clean energy solutions from a variety of renewable sources at competitive prices.
Xcel Energy is one of the fastest growing investor-owned transmission systems with more than 20,000 miles of transmission lines and more than 1,200 substations across 10 states, serving 22,000 megawatts of customer load. They operate in three North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) reliability regions (Midwest Reliability Organization, Southwest Power Pool, Western Electricity Coordinating Council). Xcel Energy has assets in two Regional Transmission Organizations (Midcontinent Independent Transmission System Operator, Southwest Power Pool). Xcel Energy has four operating companies, Northern States Power Company Minnesota, Northern States Power Company Wisconsin, Public Service Company of Colorado and Southwestern Public Service Company.
Western Area Power Administration is one of four power marketing administrations within the U.S. Department of Energy whose role is to market and transmit wholesale electricity from multi-use water projects. WAPA’s service area encompasses a 15-state region of the central and western U.S. where more than 17,000 circuit mile transmission system carries electricity from 57 hydropower plants operated by the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the International Boundary and Water Commission. Together, these plants have an installed capacity of 10,504 megawatts. WAPA sells power at wholesale to customers such as Federal and state agencies, cities and towns, rural electric cooperatives, public utility districts, irrigation districts and Native American tribes.
How Power Reaches Your Home
Electricity makes a long journey before it reaches your home. In this video, we start at the beginning and explain how you get the power you depend on every day. The electric grid is a complex system of power plants, transmission lines, substations and distribution lines that transmit electric power from the place where it’s generated - all the way to electric co-op members at the end of the line.
Video courtesy of North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives. Permission to edit and use was given.
Historically, the production of electricity is much more efficient and affordable when it is done on a large scale. For this reason, the electricity consumed by most Coloradans is generated by one of the big utilities like Xcel Energy, Tri-State G&T or Black Hills Energy.
In the past, these large utilities did not want to take on the burden of distributing this electricity to consumers in hard-to-reach rural areas because they could not make enough money doing so. Over 30 years ago, Grand Valley Power contracted with Xcel to purchase wholesale power. Once delivered to our substations, we deliver it to consumers by reducing the voltage and transferring it to smaller distribution lines that allow it to safely travel to your local homes and businesses. Grand Valley Power maintains over 1,600 miles of distribution line and has $100 million in utility plant.
GVP, as well as a network of 900 cooperatives throughout the country, are primarily located in rural areas. Although electric cooperatives are not the dominant providers of electricity nationwide, they are the primary providers in most of the country’s rural areas. That’s why you sometimes see businesses like Grand Valley Power referred to as “distribution cooperatives.”
If an outage occurs due to a problem with a distribution substation, line, or equipment, the crews from GVP repair the problem and restore power. If an outage occurs due to a problem with the high voltage transmission system, Xcel Energy crews are responsible for repairs and fixing the problem.
Transmission towers, lines and equipment typically supply power to multiple transmission substations, and while transmission systems seldom fail, they are susceptible to damages from weather, critters and equipment failure just like a distribution system. They also supply electricity to large numbers of consumers and to large geographic areas, therefore transmission outages tend to be larger and more widespread than distribution system outages. Potentially, thousands of consumers could be served by one high-voltage transmission line, so these lines get attention first in the event of a large-scale, widespread outage.
Looks and weather can be deceiving. While everything in our area may look fine, there could be a storm a long distance away that caused extensive damage. It is often hard for GVP to explain to our members that we don’t even know the cause of an outage and that we are waiting for more information from our operations team members, who work closely with Xcel operations. Most members automatically assume since we supply them with power, we should be out there fixing it. But as mentioned earlier in this section, we don’t generate our power, we just distribute it to consumers in our local service area. When something goes wrong, we have to wait until repairs are made to transmission and power is flowing again before we can resume restoring efforts and provide your home or business with electricity. Sometimes, repairs may be necessary on the member-owned equipment which can include your service lines to your home or business, the service panel or meter socket.
The electric transmission network in the United States is organized into three interconnections – large grids that operate in sync and are carefully coordinated to prevent widespread blackouts. These interconnections effectively set boundaries for where electricity flows across the U.S.
Excludes Canda in illustration
Our diverse energy mix includes coal, natural gas, wind, solar and hydroelectric power. Just over 33.4% of the energy we provide our members was supplied through clean and renewable resources, such as wind, solar, hydro and biomass. Having a diverse energy mix presents advantages such as excellent reliability standards and lower emissions.
Some sources of power can be ramped up and down fairly easily, while others must run continuously. Continuously operating plants are also called “baseload resources” and plants that are used only when energy use increases are called “intermediate” or “peaking” resources. The baseload power plants typically are coal-fueled or nuclear plants due to low-cost fuel and steady-state power they can produce. Hydropower and geothermal power can also be used for baseload electricity generation if those resources are regionally available. Generation systems that can be easily stopped and started include natural gas and oil plants, or hydro-facilities.
Renewable sources generate electricity only when there is sufficient energy, such as from the wind or sun, and in the absence of associated storage capacity, are considered “intermittent” or “variable” resources. These are intermittent energy sources, with their output and capacity factor depending on weather conditions, daily, and seasonal variations. So, unless there is an effective energy storage system in place, they cannot be relied upon to meet constant electricity supply needs, nor can they be immediately employed to respond to peak demands. However, as intermediate sources, solar and wind systems can be efficient and can help reduce dependence on fossil fuels.