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Joplin’s Empire District Electric Company feels the affects of wind every day — most of the time it’s a good wind helping generate electricity — but all to frequently wind can be destructive.
Empire President and Chief Executive Officer Brad Beecher talked about both kinds of wind at the Carthage Rotary Club’s Annual Rural Urban Dinner, held Thursday at the Carthage First Baptist Church.
Farmers, ranchers and other rural residents were invited to dinner with city and county officials and Carthage Rotarians in an event that has been held in Carthage since the 1930s.
“It’s always one of our most well attended meetings, said current Carthage Rotary Club President Kip Smith. “It was under the guidance of Walter Frost that the Carthage Rotary Club invited eight farmers to the Mount Moriah Church at the first Rural-Urban Dinner in 1931.”
A committee of Rotarians, led by Jim Honey, Eastern District Jasper County Commissioner, chose Beecher to talk about the role wind energy plays in Empire’s mix of power resources and the impact of the May 22 tornado on his company.
Bad winds
Beecher was emotional when he talked about the 23 employees who lost their homes in the disaster. Beecher didn’t mention it himself, but Honey told the group after Beecher spoke that Beecher and his family were among those 23 Empire employees who lost their homes.
“My goal as we went through all of this was to hear CJ Huff (Joplin school superintendent) talk a lot; it was my goal to hear Mark Rohr (Joplin city manager) talk a lot,” Beecher said. “It was my goal to keep Empire District and my name off the front page of the paper because if we stayed off the front page of the paper, it meant we were doing our job.
“For any of you who drove our around the airport in Joplin in mid-july, early August, you saw every Empire truck that there was in the whole system in 106 to 110-degree heat getting those services up. It made me really proud of our guys for how hard they worked and I’ve got to tell you, we stay out of the paper. That’s the best news I have.”
Beecher said Empire had spent about $19 million on manpower and logistics as of the latest numbers available publicly from September 2011. That number jumps to $27 million when you include the cost to replace the huge substation on 26th Street near the St. Mary’s Catholic School and Church that was demolished in the tornado.
Joplin’s Empire District Electric Company feels the affects of wind every day — most of the time it’s a good wind helping generate electricity — but all to frequently wind can be destructive.
Empire President and Chief Executive Officer Brad Beecher talked about both kinds of wind at the Carthage Rotary Club’s Annual Rural Urban Dinner, held Thursday at the Carthage First Baptist Church.
Farmers, ranchers and other rural residents were invited to dinner with city and county officials and Carthage Rotarians in an event that has been held in Carthage since the 1930s.
“It’s always one of our most well attended meetings, said current Carthage Rotary Club President Kip Smith. “It was under the guidance of Walter Frost that the Carthage Rotary Club invited eight farmers to the Mount Moriah Church at the first Rural-Urban Dinner in 1931.”
A committee of Rotarians, led by Jim Honey, Eastern District Jasper County Commissioner, chose Beecher to talk about the role wind energy plays in Empire’s mix of power resources and the impact of the May 22 tornado on his company.
Bad winds
Beecher was emotional when he talked about the 23 employees who lost their homes in the disaster. Beecher didn’t mention it himself, but Honey told the group after Beecher spoke that Beecher and his family were among those 23 Empire employees who lost their homes.
“My goal as we went through all of this was to hear CJ Huff (Joplin school superintendent) talk a lot; it was my goal to hear Mark Rohr (Joplin city manager) talk a lot,” Beecher said. “It was my goal to keep Empire District and my name off the front page of the paper because if we stayed off the front page of the paper, it meant we were doing our job.
“For any of you who drove our around the airport in Joplin in mid-july, early August, you saw every Empire truck that there was in the whole system in 106 to 110-degree heat getting those services up. It made me really proud of our guys for how hard they worked and I’ve got to tell you, we stay out of the paper. That’s the best news I have.”
Beecher said Empire had spent about $19 million on manpower and logistics as of the latest numbers available publicly from September 2011. That number jumps to $27 million when you include the cost to replace the huge substation on 26th Street near the St. Mary’s Catholic School and Church that was demolished in the tornado.
He said a total of six substations were damaged or destroyed in the storm.
“I’ve got to tell you, nobody has seen damage like that to any substation around,” Beecher said. “The recovery in Joplin has been going better than any of us had ever thought possible. It’s still not going fast enough, but it’s going better than anyone thought possible. We heard a lot and we still hear that we had 8,000 homes destroyed in the tornado. Where we were at the end of September, is we only had 3,900 fewer customers in Joplin that are paying. That number has dwindled down closer to 3,000 as we sit here today. The recovery in Joplin has been going great and it’s been going great because the people of Southwest Missouri work hard, we’ve got a lot of help both from regionally and nationally and I’m just so proud to live here and watch what’s going on in Joplin. It’s a lot of work and we have a long road to go, but we are really, really making good progress.”
Good winds
Beecher also spoke about the amount of wind-generated electricity the company uses from two big wind farms in Kansas.
One is located near Beaumont, Kan., between Fredonia, Kan. and Wichita on the south side of U.S. 400 and the other is located along I-70 near Salina.
Beecher said the two farms generate about 15 percent of Empire’s power, making Empire one of the top utilities in the country when it comes to the percentage of power it uses from renewable sources.
He said wind energy is not reliable and requires backups in the form of fossil fuel or nuclear plants to regulate the amount of electricity going out to the grid.
Empire uses coal-fired plants at Asbury and Riverton, Kan., and a natural gas-fired plant on the Missouri side of the state line near Galena, Kan., to regulate the amount of power transmitted to homes. It has stakes in other plants near Kansas City and in Arkansas.
“The folks that have to deal with this are sitting in our dispatch center and they’re trying to balance the power that goes out,” Beecher said. “I’ve heard them call wind power Dracula power on a couple of occasions. It seems to only come out on nights and weekends. There’s a little bit of truth to that. When our load is the lowest tends to be in April when you’re not running air conditioners, in May when you’re not running air conditioners, in October when it’s 65 degrees. We have no load and generally speaking it’s the windiest time of the year. It blows the least in the summer when you’re running air conditioners so it causes issues on nights and weekends.”
