This past month, the BLP hosted a stakeholder luncheon to update their business and industrial customers. Grand Haven BLP reported on recent and upcoming projects to improve reliability, affordability and sustainability for the utility’s customers. The lunch also provided space for customers to ask questions of BLP leadership and to offer their perspective as business and industrial constituents.
Grand Haven BLP General Manager David Walters presented to the group, sharing information about projects to improve power reliability and fiscal responsibility through the power supply cost adjustment (PSCA), which the BLP expects to reimplement this summer in order to offset the increasing costs of power purchases through the regional transmission network.
Changes in Regional Capacity
Walters also discussed how recent regional power plant closures may affect the capacity and energy markets as soon as this summer. Though the BLP has contracts to purchase power from many other sources throughout the state, recent and upcoming power plant closures such as Palisades and JB Campbell directly affect the amount of capacity and energy in the regional market. With all of Grand Haven’s power now purchased from the grid, these changes more directly affect our community’s power supply costs.
For example, in Michigan, as renewable and other cleaner sources of energy come online to provide energy supplies to the grid, new power supply will not outpace or replace the capacity and energy that will be lost with the closure of the 805MW nuclear power plant near South Haven and the 1560MW coal-fired power plant in West Olive. The closure of older base load plants is common across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid, which is the transmission network for our region.
Valuing the feedback of customers and hoping to remain transparent to all of our stakeholders, the BLP expects to hold reporting meetings with different groups of stakeholders on a regular basis.
