Photo courtesy Brett Sayles
An interim legislative committee tasked with studying the impact of large loads on the electric grid convened for the first time Aug. 27 in Ellendale.
Legislators on the interim Energy Development and Transmission Committee toured the Applied Digital campus in Ellendale and heard presentations from several electric and data center industry professionals and local and state officials.
While the study looks at the impact of all large energy users on the electric system, data centers have emerged as a primary concern.
“The large energy users we are focusing on are primarily data centers, although there are other entities that use large amounts of electricity as well,” says Chair Anna Novak, Hazen.
Background information provided to the committee by N.D. Legislative Council cites North Dakota as an appealing location for data center development due to its cold climate, low energy costs, favorable tax policies and stable energy resources.
In addition to the energy impact of large load users, the committee will look at other impacts of data center development, including workforce, housing and education, Novak says.
“A couple of the major positive impacts that data centers can have on a rural community are increased property and sales tax revenue,” Novak says. “That can be a total gamechanger for a small community like Ellendale.”
CO-OP PLANNING FOR LARGE LOADS
Novak invited electric cooperatives to present at the meeting in Ellendale. Zac Smith of the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives spoke about the cooperative business model and the sophisticated planning and coordination that occurs across co-op systems when onboarding large electric users to the power grid, and Jean Schafer of Basin Electric Power Cooperative discussed the co-op’s new large load program.
Adopted by the generation and transmission cooperative’s board in June, Basin Electric’s large load program was designed to ensure the costs and risks associated with serving new large loads, including data centers, are not passed to the co-op’s existing membership. Serving non-traditional large load customers requires significant investments in generation and transmission infrastructure, the cooperative states, so the program requires those customers to bear the financial responsibility for the resources needed to serve them.
Since the program’s adoption in June, Basin Electric has received 12 applications for a combined total power request of 6,000 megawatts (MW), Schafer told the committee. The cooperative’s current peak is 5,150 MW.
“We are being asked to more than double the current system that took 80-plus years to build,” Schafer said.
“Cooperatives are happy to serve any new large load, as long as it can be done without negatively impacting the existing member or sacrificing reliability,” Smith says.
GRID CAPACITY
Other topics included electric grid capacity, reliability, infrastructure, generation and transmission.
The N.D. Transmission Authority (NDTA) is currently conducting a transmission capacity study, which was expanded last year to include resource adequacy, and will look at data center load sensitivity in the state. NDTA Executive Director Claire Vigesaa expects the report to be completed later this fall.
“The magnitude of these loads, it doesn’t take long to run out of capacity,” Vigesaa said.
Montana-Dakota Utilities (MDU), which serves Applied Digital in Ellendale, said it completed the required studies before the data center was brought onto the grid, but more infrastructure will be needed going forward.
“It will require a lot more generation to be built in North Dakota if we are to become the data center state,” said MDU’s Darcy Neigum.
“The good always has to outweigh the bad when it comes to our policies, and our citizens have to come first,” Novak says.
