Melissa Houston
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The Columbia City Council and the Water and Light Advisory Board will meet for their second joint work session Monday night to discuss and take a long-term look at Columbia’s generation assets.
Erin Keys, the City of Columbia’s utility director, said that as the Columbia community continues to grow and energy needs increase, the city must plan for the future. The meeting plans to look ahead 20 years to determine what is needed to meet capacity requirements.
The city must have a certain amount of capacity in energy units available for seasons that use a lot of that energy, like in summer, people use more air conditioning, and in winter, the heater is used. The full capacity does not need to be used, but there is a requirement to have enough to call on for peak usage times.
According to the city memorandum, the city has had a 45-megawatt capacity contract for over five years with Dynegy, an electric company. The original long-term contract expired in 2026 and the city renewed a one-year contract with them to keep the capacity requirement through 2027.
Keys said that when the city originally awarded the contract to Dynegy, it was a “good price” at the time, but market prices are now much higher. City documents said that under current market conditions, costs have increased by about 300% from previous costs for the same 45 megawatts of capacity.
In the next couple of months, Keys said they plan to work a deal with Dynegy for their capacity needs, but if they are unable to make a deal, then the city will look elsewhere.
“What we’re hoping to do is to continue more of a longer-term contract with them for that capacity,” Keys said. “We’ll start negotiating with them for a longer-term contract.”
The city has a contract with Sikeston, a coal power plant, but they are planning to retire their plant sometime in the future, which has not been disclosed, according to Keys. Monday’s meeting will also discuss what will replace the 66 megawatts of power that the Sikeston plant is currently giving the city.
Keys said they are still determining what could replace the coal, such as gas, renewables, and batteries, all of which are being considered. The goal of the 20 year plan is to have a diverse portfolio of energy.
“In my opinion, we want to have a diverse amount or types of energy resources so that we don’t incur as much risk. So if you only have, you know, gas units that you can call on during high gas price times, that’s a risk to our community,” Keys said. “Whereas if you have a variety of generation resources, then it’s a lower risk and ideally a lower cost to our customers.”
According to the city documents, the city is reviewing a solar Power Purchase Agreement with a Missouri developer to introduce renewable energy into the city’s power supply.
Keys said that the city can’t have only renewable energy like solar energy because it does not receive much credit in capacity calculations, as it is an intermittent resource rather than a resource that can be turned on and off like gas or coal. If batteries are paired with solar energy, then those resources give more credit for capacity.
The solar contract the city is looking into also has a battery component that would help reach the desired capacity, said Keys.
“We are looking at a solar contract and again, that doesn’t get much capacity, but that same company is also looking at a battery storage component, which would give us, you know, not quite 20 megawatts,” Keys said. “So that would help us in the future when Sikeston went away.”
The Columbia Energy Center gives a sufficient amount of capacity, but Keys said those units are close to reaching the end of their useful life, and it is time to decide what the future of those units is. Keys said they need to discuss if they want to replace the units or do a power purchase agreement to replace them somewhere else.
“Those are some of the kinds of, the big picture, vision questions that we want to try to work out with council and the water and light advisory board,” Keys said.
Keys said each piece of this project will have its own timeframe, with all of it taking multiple years to come to fruition. But the importance right now is to start planning for what each of those pieces will look like.
“We just want to make sure that we’re all on the same page and headed the right direction,” Keys said. “So that we can start laying the groundwork for that vision.”
The memo states that during the prior months of an analysis for the City’s future electric capacity needs, the city held public input meetings with presentations of detailed scenarios to gather feedback. Public comments from those sessions showed that solar energy and gas power were popular opinions from the public.
Keys said during the public sessions there was a push from the public to have a diverse portfolio of energy.
“I do feel like there was an emphasis to have a diverse generation portfolio, there was an emphasis for us to have our own, continue to have our own generation assets, like we already do, with the power plant and the energy center,” Keys said. “The other thing they wanted us to do was be more a little more proactive.”
For the joint work session, Keys said the goal is to make sure everyone is on the same page and understands the material they are bringing forward, and after finding a vision for the future of Columbia’s energy.
“Once we get on the same page, hopefully we can have a discussion about, you know, ‘what is our vision?’, ‘what makes the most sense for our community?’,” Keys said. “We’re getting a direction to head in is what we’re doing, and not necessarily specific decisions.”
Monday’s joint work session will begin at 6 p.m. at City Hall.
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