A Conversation With … Doug Colvin

In June, Nixa City Council approved a 25-year solar agreement with Nixa Solar LLC to create the largest municipal facility in the state. Tell me about it.
The city of Nixa is not going to own the solar farm. We have contracted a private entity, Nixa Solar LLC, who wants to build a solar farm and sell the power. We will be its sole customer. It’s joint; they are not going to build it if we aren’t going to buy it. It goes two ways. It is a partnership.

They are building a 10 megawatt-hour farm, well let me back that up, a 7.92 MW farm.  Solar panels produce DC power, like a battery. They have a generator that converts that to AC power, which is what we use to power buildings. In that conversion, you loose some of the megawatt capacity. The DC power of this solar farm, which is a little over 70 acres in size, is 10 MW. We will actually have 7.92 MW AC power coming to town. We will be a little over 15 million kilowatt-hours of power a year. Right now, that’s about 10 percent of our total power load.

It’s going to be just west of town on the south side of Highway 14. There is a large substation out there just past Nicholas Road, and it will be to the south.

Will the addition of solar save the city any money?
Our rate is moving. Basically, we started out just a little under the power rate we are paying (City Utilities) right now. We are going to start out paying 4.87 cents per kW, plus the demand component. There is an escalator each year based on a percentage that’s a little under an anticipated increase amount from our current supplies for the next 25 years. We will be just under or right in line with CU.

Our big savings will come from the reduction of transmission costs, actually transmitting that power to town. We will be hooked directly to it; there won’t be a need for transmission. In transmission, you pay for two components: The actual energy that flowed across the lines and what it took to get it there. That’s where we anticipate savings. It will reduce demand on the transmission. We are talking about tens of hundreds of a cent less than we are paying CU. It’s very close. We estimate the potential savings somewhere around $2 million at the end of the 25-year contract.

How long has this plan been in the works?
I would say close to two years. It got hung up for other reasons with the developer. They came to us and talked to us, but then got busy doing other things for a little while. Then they came back to the table.

They approached us. David Bunge and Solexus [Development LLC] were already in this part of the country; it’s the same company that has CU solar. David was driving around, saw the substation out there, thought it was ours and came knocking on the door. Turns out, that substation, which belongs to the Southwest Power Administration, has nothing to do with us, but since we have a line going to it, we could hook on and bring it to town.

What’s the cost to the city to add solar?
There is a little bit of cost as far as modifications to our system to be able to receive the power. We are talking less than $100,000. If we had to build out to it, then yes, hundreds of thousands. But since that substation was already there, it is cost effective for us.

How will solar use affect city residents?
The net effect is basically a price hedge. Other than that, Mrs. Jones at her house isn’t going to know the difference. Everything we do to keep these prices helps us delay rate increases. This isn’t going to be a big windfall, but if it helps delay a rate increase, we are doing it.

What does Nixa’s energy portfolio look like now?
Primarily it’s from Springfield. We do have 5 MW of federal hydropower that comes off the Table Rock Dam. We currently have two private customers who have solar on their homes. They have net metering and sell it back on our system, but we are talking about very small amounts. A part of our load had green energy because CU has green energy.

What’s the next step?
We are finalizing the little details of the contract. It’s really in (the developer’s) ballpark. I don’t have a start date from them yet. The not-to-exceed date is June 1, 2016. My guess is, it will get pulled in closer than that.