How Nebraska Ranks as a Top State for Energy Affordability and Reliabity: It's the Public Power Model

Emeka Anyanwu (0:00)

Welcome to GridPulse. Today, we're here to talk about affordability, and we're focused on the experience in Nebraska, the only all-public power state in the country. We'll talk about how Nebraska has come to be a leader in both affordability and reliability and how the mission and values of public power model are essential to that. We'll also dive into some of the ways utilities can use grid modernization efforts to continue to achieve leading levels of affordability while also maintaining reliable and abundant energy. Our central question is this, what will it take to ensure we don't degrade affordability while meeting our growing demand and preparing the grid for the future?

I'm Emeka Anyanwu. I'm the Chief Executive Officer at Lincoln Electric System and a former Grid Forward board member. I'm joined by colleagues who bring historical, operational policy and utility leadership perspectives to this conversation. We'll start with some brief introductions. We'll get name, title, and a short description of each utility. Then we'll dive into all of our connections to Nebraska and public power.

I'm going to start by throwing to Tom. Tom, if you will take it away.

Tom Kent (1:02)

Thank you, Emeka. It's wonderful to be here today with both you and Javier, two individuals I consider both close friends and colleagues in the industry and leading public power in the state of Nebraska. I'm Tom Kent, President and CEO of Nebraska Public Power District. Nebraska Public Power District is the largest transmission owner in the state, a little over 5,000 miles of transmission. We serve the wide open spaces that are not the Omaha area and the Lincoln area. And so it's great to be here with my colleagues. Between the three of us, we're responsible for serving most of the state of Nebraska. And one other unique aspect of NPPD's operations is we primarily sell power at wholesale to other smaller municipalities and public power districts. And that's about 75% of our business and 25% of our businesses direct retail sales to 81 communities in outstate Nebraska. A little bit smaller than OPPD in terms of peak load. Our peak load is just under 3200 megawatts right now.

But again, Nebraska is served 100% by public power, and this partnership with the three of us here represents the vast majority of the electric utilities in the state. It's great to be here.

Javier?

Javier Fernandez (2:15)

Tom, I cannot take out of my mind the song White Open Spaces now.

My name is Javier Fernandez. I'm the president and CEO of the Omaha Public Power District. We serve only 13 counties in southeast Nebraska. It's a much smaller footprint than MPPD. However, we serve about half the population of the state of Nebraska. It's basically the Omaha Metro. As Tom said, we've been growing a ton. This year, we now became the largest utility in Nebraska measured by peak. We are now at 3,300 megawatts and growing. Most of our customers are in densely urban populated areas. And I know today's conversation is going to be about affordability and distribution and grid modernization, which is a very important topic for us given the composition of the people that we serve. So I'm excited about the conversation.

Emeka Anyanwu (3:12)

Thank you, Javier. And so I'll quickly do my piece. So again, I'm the Emeka Anyanwu. I'm the CEO of Lincoln Electric System here in the state's capital of Lincoln, Nebraska. And we are the third leg of the stool that serves most of the state. So our peak load is just over 900 megawatts. So we're rapidly closing in on that gigawatt mark. We serve about 153,000 customers here in the state's second largest city.

And we're, like you all have said, we're growing rapidly. We are not as densely populated as Omaha, but certainly very much a city in our own right. Our population served is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 320,000 people. So definitely an urban area. And certainly as we are growing, starting to see some of those urban scale challenges, including some of the things that come from an affordability perspective, where lots of different demographic factors affect, of course, how our customers experience affordability.

So with that, I'm going to really quickly do kind of a brief intro for the listening audience, who may not be familiar with our state. And then we'll launch into some contextual, some framing of this topic. So as we've said, Nebraska is the only all public power state in the country. And so we'll talk a little bit about what that means historically, structurally and practically for our customers. But really, for me, I think the important thing to remember is how that frames the motivations, the justifications, the approaches we take to making decisions around investment in our systems, investment in the customer experience, the ways in which we approach the dialogue around the choices we have to make to run our utilities and keep the lights on. And Nebraska is a state that isn't a super high population state. I think we're just right around 2 million people. And so to Javier's point, part of it is there's a pretty significant center of gravity in two places, which is Omaha and then Lincoln. Right? And so as Tom talked about, the wide open spaces in the basically the most of the western part of the state are less densely populated, but obviously still very interested in the same conversations around affordability.