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Discover how Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West in our new podcast, Western Watts!
We'll dive into the heart of energy issues, from reliability to wildfire mitigation, and share firsthand insights relevant to rural, agricultural and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
This podcast may contain certain forward looking statements concerning Tri-State's plans, performance, and strategies. Actual results may differ materially because of numerous factors, and Tri-State undertakes no obligation to update these forward looking statements. We urge you to review Tri-State's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of these factors.
Tim Cusick:It's all about calculated risk. No storm is ever the same. No heat wave is ever the same. You have to look at is it localized or is it in a broader region. Communication is the key.
Tim Cusick:Everyone has specialties and knows how to move power about the system.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thank you for joining us for Western Watts. I'm Elizabeth Schilling. I'm Julia Perry. And we are here today talking with Tim Cusick. Tim, thanks for being on the podcast.
Tim Cusick:Thanks everyone for having me. I really appreciate it.
Elizabeth Schilling:Tell us what your title is here at Tri-State.
Tim Cusick:I am the power and gas marketing supervisor. In the industry, it's known as the day ahead team. Essentially, I oversee all operations from a day ahead perspective. So next day to a couple days out, and then we have a term basis all the way out to a year.
Elizabeth Schilling:So how long have you been with Tri-State?
Tim Cusick:So I've been at Tri-State for five and a half years now.
Elizabeth Schilling:Always in this role, or has it evolved while you've been here?
Tim Cusick:So I started as a trainee in the energy markets team. I was an energy portfolio trainee, and then worked my way up to supervisor from there.
Julia Perry:Awesome. You mentioned it before, but compared to other G and Ts, is Tri-State a more complicated system or a middle of the road kind of system, just with as much transmission and resources and geography that you're working with?
Tim Cusick:I'll say, Tri-State is probably the most unique system and complex system in the area that I know of. We have wire from, we always say, from Canada to Mexico, pretty much. We have generators all over our footprint. We have tons of transmission reservations. It's so unique, and there's so many ways that you can balance and maximize using our transmission reservations.
Tim Cusick:It's super complex, and once you understand it and figure out how it all works together, it makes a lot of sense, but it can be confusing, definitely.
Julia Perry:Is this something you brought from work into your real life? Are you also like an extreme couponer? This plus this plus this gets us the best deal. I try
Tim Cusick:to just stay relaxed and laid back. You have to just be adaptable. It's always gonna change. You'll plan your entire day, and you'll finish up your day ahead plan, and power plant trips offline, so you have thirty minutes to redo the entire system. And recall all of your tags, and buy new transmissions, see if anyone can sell you power until it doesn't happen.
Tim Cusick:You gotta just roll with it, stay relaxed. And that's why having the team that we have is awesome. They're very dynamic. Everyone is super adaptable and just friendly and reliable. That's the key.
Elizabeth Schilling:This work might be intimidating to some, but what was it about this type of work that drew you in particular?
Tim Cusick:I was just interested always people always talk about the energy industry, and you don't really know what it entails. After being in it now, that's what kind of drove me to it, is I don't really know anything about it. You turn on the light switch, and you have power. And being in it now, I see there's all these behind the scenes aspects that are going on. And just to turn that light on, that's already been planned based on what my team has done.
Elizabeth Schilling:You got that look behind the curtain. You get to see how the magic actually happens. I like that.
Julia Perry:How do you even get into a role in energy markets? What degree even translates to that?
Tim Cusick:I studied supply chain management. You get a lot of people that have studied engineering. We have people that were accountants. We have just business, economics, engineers, a wide variety of people. It's just sticking your head into it and figuring out what it's gonna all be about.
Elizabeth Schilling:So you're solving for that problem every day. Tell me how that ties back to Tri-State's mission and how you're looking for the best solution.
Tim Cusick:We're very lucky in our group that we get to live the mission every single day. We come in the morning and you run your software, and you say, alright, can I reliably serve my demand? Can I affordably serve it? And can I responsibly serve it? And once you've met all those requirements, then you can look at it and say, oh, now I'm gonna go out and I can sell some in the market.
Tim Cusick:I can buy some. I can raise my generation in this market and lower it in this market so that I can gain more margin. And it's figuring out how it all fits together, ultimately just to make our members' rates lower and really serve the bottom line and try to make the membership happy.
Elizabeth Schilling:What are you guys looking at for that time ahead that you're planning for? What are you making sure happens for this organization?
Tim Cusick:Our department really follows the core principle of the company, which is we want to reliably, affordably, and responsibly serve our member load. In order to do that, we take generation forecasts, demand forecasts, and we run it through an optimization system. After that, we get a result, and then we decide if we have any excess power to sell or if we need to buy power to serve our demand. How can we optimize our market position while participating in the different markets that we participate in?
Julia Perry:What are energy markets?
Tim Cusick:Energy markets consists of the day ahead team, the real time team, and our market analytics team. Real time team focuses on hour by hour, minute by minute, how are we matching our supply and demand, and how can we effectively maximize our market position. As I was stating day ahead, we focus on forecasts, and we plan. We're pre-active, where real time tends to be more reactive when it comes to dealing with situations. And then the market analytics team takes all the results and looks at the broader trends of what's going on, and they see how we can do better, or where areas that we are excelling.
Tim Cusick:We take all three of those, and they're all tied together to just drive our core mission and make sure that we're accomplishing our goals.
Julia Perry:When you say matching supply and demand, you're talking about which Tri-State resources are currently being used and then buying and selling on the market. Can you talk a little bit about that too?
Tim Cusick:We look at our market mix. We have a very diverse set of generators at Tri-State. We have coal generation, wind generation, solar, hydro. We're making advances and good moving towards battery. And then we also look at the market, and there's a market for power just like there's a market for pretty much any commodity.
Tim Cusick:There's prices that are driven, and we look at that each day, and we see, okay, once we've run our solution, what resources have been dispatched? Do we have any excess that we can look to sell? What is if we are to sell, what is the market cost for that? We're talking to counterparties back and forth. We're really just trying to see how can we lower member rates by doing what we're doing.
Julia Perry:You're right. Everyone has an electric bill. We all know about oil and gas prices. How come I really haven't heard of energy markets in terms of solar and coal and that kind of thing?
Tim Cusick:I think energy markets is one of those extreme behind the scene things that people don't really think of. People turn on a light switch, and you have power. But it really comes down to I like to put it as what we do as supply chain. How is the power generated? How is it going to get from point A to B?
Tim Cusick:And where is it delivered? There's so many different aspects that go into each one of those. And it's just constantly analyzing trends, and figuring out what is going to be the most effective way while navigating the diverse system that we operate in.
Elizabeth Schilling:So you're looking at everything from weather, time of day, and what resources are available at different times of day. What different factors go into what you're gonna be dispatching at any given point?
Tim Cusick:It all comes down to forecasts. We rely super heavily on forecasts, and that's why lucky for us, we have a real time team that is able to correct anything that doesn't come in according to plan. You have to look at trends and weather trends, and a lot of it comes down to being a best guess. You use the best information, the best forecasting that we have, and we make our decisions based on that. We know that at nighttime, solar's going to be ramping off.
Tim Cusick:We know that when it's super hot the wind doesn't blow. We plan our units accordingly based on just knowledge that we've gained and seeing overall trends in the market. That's something that you have to consider on a daily. It's very fluid, very dynamic, and we just have to figure out how we can maximize what we can.
Julia Perry:When they say there's a 70% chance of rain in the area, you actually know what that means.
Tim Cusick:Hopefully. The biggest thing is we see our biggest changes in forecasts mainly from our renewables, in particular wind. If you find someone that can predict when the wind blows, please point them my direction, because that's mainly what everyone's always looking for. There's no right recipe. It's all about what are you comfortable leveraging in the market and realizing, if this doesn't come in, I have this unit in my back pocket that we're going to dispatch to help replace all that power.
Julia Perry:I don't know if you've heard of this little trick. You actually lick your finger, and then you stick it in the air, and the metal tell you where the wind's coming from. Maybe you guys should try that.
Tim Cusick:Yep. Sometimes it feels like that's what we're doing, but just work through it.
Julia Perry:Yep. Don't worry. I'm on it.
Elizabeth Schilling:I was thinking of the predictions that your team is doing and then what the real time team is doing in real time. And I keep picturing going to a buffet and making a plate for somebody else. You don't know how hungry they are, or maybe they're not that hungry at all. You're putting on the plate what you predict they're gonna want, and then you serve it to them. And they're like, actually, I was a little more hungry than that, and they gotta figure something out or go to the vending machine and grab a snack.
Elizabeth Schilling:I keep making this comparison of like, you're taking what you know, making your best guess, and then they have to supplement or take away or all of that in the moment.
Tim Cusick:Yep. I like to say we make real times bed, and they decide if they wanna sleep in it. It's finding that balance, and we have very open communication between our groups. We're always talking, and that's the easiest way that we find that we can be successful, is just making sure we're in constant contact, and they know it's always changing, and we're not gonna be right. Things are going to evolve, and a unit accidentally trips offline, or gas becomes super cheap, and we find ways that we can sell into the market.
Tim Cusick:There's so many factors that goes into it. It's just finding that balance and have a good team that works in cohesion, all going towards the mission, it makes everything successful.
Julia Perry:It does kind of sound like an energy stock market. When you say buy and sell energy, do we make profit?
Tim Cusick:The word I like to use is margin. Every decision that we make goes to making member rates lower. When we make a sale, everything we do that we can lower the cost to serve load makes it easier for our members who are down the line, who are actually working in rural America and providing for us. We always have that mentality in the day ahead and real time groups. How can we drive member rates?
Tim Cusick:If I can make a margin which lower the overall rates for everyone, that's something that we're gonna do on a daily basis.
Julia Perry:I think it makes sense too because weather and even sunlight is differing regionally, and you can be long or short on generation and how much energy you have. If you're having an excellent solar day and there's a bunch of clouds over in California, makes a ton of sense to take that extra solar, and maybe you've made more than you actually need for the system. And then selling that over to Californians, like, otherwise, it's just going to waste. Right?
Tim Cusick:That's the importance of the markets and why you need a marketing group. There's always gonna be times when you have excess or when you're looking. And if you can communicate and work with people around the area or within the markets that we already operate in, that's how you can be successful and raise margin for everyone in the company, and try to keep all rates low as possible, and really just be reliable, responsible, and affordable.
Elizabeth Schilling:You talked about having systems that help forecast. It sounds like there's a lot of different elements. You've got the market prices. You've got availability of our resources. You have weather and reliability.
Elizabeth Schilling:What how does that all come together into a system that makes some sort of sense of it?
Tim Cusick:We use a software called Web SmartBid. Essentially, it's a gen planner software, so it takes all of your inputs. It takes your forecasts, what expected loads are going to be, what resources are available to be dispatched, and it plugs into a system and outputs a perfect solution. My team then takes that solution and looks at it and goes, Can I beat that? Do I have excess?
Tim Cusick:Can I go out and can I turn on a gas unit and buy natural gas and look at the market trends and sell that unit into the market and leave extra room for real time? Or vice versa, we're a little short. I need to go out and buy some energy. This software gives you a starting place and then we use our market expertise amongst the group to then capitalize on the markets and figure out what really is the most economical way to maximize our fleet.
Julia Perry:Off the top of your head, how many generation resources does Tri-State have to work with on our system?
Tim Cusick:I'm pretty sure we have just over 30 units that we're managing on a daily basis. Not all get dispatched. A lot of them, majority are renewable at this time. So those resources are take it. You don't have a choice.
Tim Cusick:I'm not gonna choose to shut off a wind resource or solar. You take your forecast, and those automatically get baked in. And then we use our dispatchable resources, so our coal and gas, and we figure out how those can help fill the position and where there would be gaps with our renewable forecasts.
Julia Perry:That seems like a ton to me. How often are we buying versus just using what we already have?
Tim Cusick:That's the glory of the imbalanced markets that we operate in. You go in and you say, here is my demand or load. Here is our generation. The market then looks at it and says, Tri-State's playing ball. They have their generation.
Tim Cusick:They have their load. Now the imbalance market's going to solve the least cost way to serve your demand. If we had cost, I'm making up a number here, of $20 per generation unit for the entire fleet. The market says you have your generation, you have your load. There's a ton of wind on the system today.
Tim Cusick:Prices are actually coming in at $1 What we do is then our units dispatch at the bottom, and then you are buying back all these megawatts for $1 and making our cost to serve the members exponentially cheaper.
Julia Perry:I might have this wrong, but are you also having to work with how much energy you can actually send down transmission lines? Because they're only rated for a certain voltage and a certain amount power. So is that something you also have to factor in when you're figuring out, oh, I need wind and stuff from here. It needs to go over here, but we're maxed down on however much stuff can go on this line?
Tim Cusick:That's a huge aspect of our job is managing transmission limitations and transmission outages. I'll take it back to what I was saying earlier where we look at it as like a supply chain. We figure out point A, which is where the generation's coming from. Then we're looking at point B, and it's how do we get there. We have a million paths that can get you from point A to B, but this line's only good for 300 megawatts.
Tim Cusick:This one's only good for 200 megawatts. You have to find out how can you really maximize that transmission system to serve your member load. We deal with it all the time. We see transmission outages are gonna happen. There's extreme weather.
Tim Cusick:Maintenance needs to occur. When that happens it can drastically change how you operate your units. Where you would be maximizing a unit in Wyoming, you no longer have the transmission to move it out. You might have to figure out, alright, I'm gonna move these megawatts. Instead of going A to B, I'm gonna go A to A point five to A point five to B, and just finding these extra legs and being very familiar with our system. Tri-State is very unique with the size of our system, and we have such a complex transmission system and generation fleet that there's a lot of ways to maximize it. And we work with Transmission Group every day to try and make sure that we can stay on top of that and maximize what we need to.
Julia Perry:That's a ton of factors. We got weather. We have I just wanna call it transmission congestion, essentially, maintenance on certain things, and then just overall leveraging prices on the market. That is a ton of stuff to juggle with all the time.
Elizabeth Schilling:And then throw in extreme weather, like you said, if it's impacting maybe a transmission line is down, but also maybe it's really spiked the prices of energy on the market. And then we were talking about winter storm Uri and how you really see that volatility. How do we manage for those extremes?
Tim Cusick:It's all about calculated risk. No storm is ever the same. No heat wave is ever the same. Is it localized or is it in a broader region? When do I need to save the energy for ourselves and play it safe?
Tim Cusick:If I'm seeing extreme market prices, can I take a little bit of a risk and not sell the farm, but sell a piece of it to try to get some margin out of it? Communication is the key. Everyone has specialties and knows how to move power about the system. Having a dedicated team that knows what they're doing, they work well with others, we work across departments in the organization, it really just helps you prepare for these situations. Make sure that when we do have extreme weather, we're talking to the natural gas fleet, making sure they're ready to go in an emergency, seeing how many days of water we have at the units, if we are going to potentially have to run fuel oil.
Tim Cusick:We're lucky with our resource mix that we have a couple units that are dual fuel. So we have the Burlington units, which are completely fuel oil. We use those mainly for reserve purposes. Then we have our Lyman units and Knutson units and Pyramid units, which are all dual fuel and can run on either gas or fuel oil in a emergency situation.
Julia Perry:That was a huge factor in storm Uri. Right? It was like, oh, natural gas prices skyrocketed. It's like, oh, wait. We have these fuel oil systems that we can burn kind of thing.
Julia Perry:Right? At that point, was fuel oil cheaper than natural gas?
Tim Cusick:Yep. Fuel oil that's why it's such an awesome thing to have in your back pocket. It is just like an ace up your sleeve. If gas hits anywhere in the $20 region or even in the upper teens, you're looking at a pretty close break even to fuel oil cost. If I can run fuel oil and not have to buy $20 gas, which can make our units $300 $400 that's something that we can do.
Tim Cusick:It gives us flexibility. It makes our resource mix super diverse. It's definitely, when you have these extreme weather events, something that is awesome to have.
Julia Perry:And in regards to reliability and staying on top of it, you guys also have dedicated staff that's working, like, twenty four seven, three sixty five. You always have somebody monitoring and watching everything, right?
Tim Cusick:Yep, correct. My team is the day ahead group. We're the lucky ones. We get to work relatively normal hours. But we have the real time team that is twenty four seven, three sixty five supporting, always there.
Tim Cusick:The caveat to that is my team covers all natural gas for both real time and day ahead. We have someone that's on call for gas to make sure that we can support the needs of real time.
Elizabeth Schilling:Have all these different sources of electricity, and you're balancing how they can all work at different times and balance each other out. I know Tri-State's adding batteries to our system. How will that affect the planning your team's doing and how we look at that?
Tim Cusick:Yeah. I believe batteries will be a huge asset in the future going forward. As the grid continues to evolve with more renewables, especially solar, every day you start to see what's called the bell curve, which is overnight, there's no sun. During the middle of the day, it's up and running and producing a ton of megawatts, and then right around the time everyone goes home from work and turns on their air conditioning and starts making dinner and watching TV, you see these vast drop offs in power supply. And that's where batteries are really going to be able to come into play and kind of assist us in those situations because we can plan to dispatch that right when solar comes off.
Tim Cusick:We don't see these massive drop offs in generation, and it helps avoid these price spikes when solar comes offline. It helps avoid real time from having to go out and buy super expensive power when I can just dispatch a battery and make that up. And then overnight or during the middle of the day, can recharge that battery when prices are cheap, and then dispatch it again following that to try to avoid and offset these huge bell curves that we see.
Julia Perry:That's a really good point, though, because renewable energy, the cost effectiveness can be awesome, but it's a use it or lose it kind of thing. Awesome sun shining during the middle of the day, but that's also when energy is the cheapest because you have the most resources available. So batteries really open up a window to where, okay, if there is excess generation or, like you were saying, save it for later when prices go up because you have less availability of stuff going on.
Tim Cusick:It makes it easy because before, every megawatt of power that is generated, it doesn't just dissipate. That's the hard thing about power is it's not a physical commodity that you can touch. Before batteries, I can't generate it and store it. It just disperses to the system. Now when it is super windy, I can charge up that battery and take advantage of the cheap prices and then dispatch it to help serve our member load over the high demand hours.
Julia Perry:How much energy are batteries typically able to store these large scale utility ones?
Tim Cusick:It depends on the physical battery, but most of them have a four hour dispatch window. We'll say four to eight hours is probably pretty common. Not a 100%, some last longer, and sometimes it's usually double the time to charge. It's like almost a two to one relationship to charge, like maybe eight hours for a four hour dispatch. And that's not always the case.
Tim Cusick:It just depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of the battery.
Julia Perry:In your planning for when they come online, are you expecting to be using them every day same day, or do you think you'll probably save it for later kind of thing?
Tim Cusick:A lot of batteries will come with some sort of, I guess the word would be like a dispatch limit. They'll give you a number of times you can dispatch in a certain period. So it's really going to be looking at it like when are those times that we can use it. Some of them, you can dispatch them once a day, and then they can recharge. And those are obviously awesome and more beneficial, because if you need it, you can dispatch it.
Tim Cusick:If not, you can hold on to it. Some of them have long term, like you can only dispatch it once in however long of a period. It's just gonna be finding that balance and figuring out when is the best time to use it.
Elizabeth Schilling:So batteries are adding in a whole other element for your team to manage. Another big thing we know is coming is joining a regional transmission organization or RTO.
Julia Perry:Can you give an overview of RTOs, which ones we have in The US, and a little bit of background on them?
Tim Cusick:There is four interconnects in North America. You have the Western interconnect, then you have the Eastern interconnect. Texas has their own power interconnect, and then there's one for Canada. Within that, the whole Western grid does not have an active RTO, and that's why it's such a growing period. There's a lot of options of what's going on.
Tim Cusick:There's a push legislation wise to be in an organized market by 2030. It's finding out what markets are going to be beneficial for you. We are working through where we're gonna fit, and we're moving forward with the SPP RTO expansion, or the RTO West. That's where we're joining. We're also going to be joining the Kaiso E Dam in our southern position, most likely.
Tim Cusick:Simultaneously, there's also the SPP Markets Plus, which is just the day ahead portion. Then the East, they have I'm not sure on the exact number, but there's a couple of RTOs that are already in place. SPP has its Eastern RTO footprint. There's the MISO, PJM. There's a couple in the East.
Julia Perry:When we think about it like a map, you have this big gap where Tri-State is that's going from Wyoming down through New Mexico. And that's currently not in an RTO, but about to be. And then right to the West, that whole chunk around California's the one RTO. Then you got Texas. They're doing their own thing per usual.
Julia Perry:And right to the east of us parallel is SPP. It makes sense to join with an RTO that's physically near you. Then you have the rest of the Eastern RTOs that kind of take up the rest of the pockets over there. That's kinda what it looks like right now.
Tim Cusick:Yep. Pretty much. And not everywhere in The US participates in RTOs.
Julia Perry:Only the coolest companies.
Tim Cusick:Yeah. Only the cool guys. You know? It's just such a growing and exciting time, and that's kind of what drew us to SPP. Our geographic location just makes sense.
Tim Cusick:It already borders the SPP RTO. And so just on the other side of the interconnect is now where it's going to be coming together. And we'll be finding that cohesion between the whole SPP RTO rather than just east and west, eventually.
Elizabeth Schilling:And thinking about that idea of how we work with our neighbors within the region, how does that change the way your team will look at things or how we'll work together with other utilities around us?
Tim Cusick:Being in constant communication with counterparties or other utilities is always beneficial. You get an idea and a feel for what are market prices doing. And there's always gonna be a day when we're sitting great with our system and our neighbor is struggling, and vice versa will happen. Having that relationship and being able to rely on each other and know, hey, we're all in this together. We're all moving towards a reliable grid and making sure that we don't have rolling blackouts.
Tim Cusick:We have a constant power supply to support the bulk electric system, is super beneficial. And joining the RTO, instead of it being my utility and our neighbor's utility and their neighbor's utility, it looks at it as one governing body that's overseeing everything, and it treats everyone as a solid load. That way you don't see these excess spikes in generation and price swings. It makes it so everyone's on the same playing field, and it's one demand and one set of generators versus my utility and your utility.
Julia Perry:In an RTO, are you still maintaining autonomy, and are you still able to be pretty flexible, or does some of that get pulled away as part of a larger group?
Tim Cusick:You still have to show that you are resource adequate. So you have to show you have the generation to meet your demand. Everyone has to follow that. RTO becomes the operator of the units and transmission. They are the ones that are dispatching saying, offer your units into the market, and whatever status you offered you can say this unit's not participating because it's an outage, or this unit's online, needs to run, and it's just they're the ones that are now looking at all of the transmission and all of the rights that everyone has, and figures out how can we most cost effectively serve everyone's demand in the area.
Julia Perry:If the RTO is managing dispatch, it sounds like that changes your job a little bit.
Tim Cusick:Yeah. It definitely does. Where we sit now, we can say, need to turn on this unit, need to run. What happens is when you're offering it in the market, the market now takes over that. We still have to plan.
Tim Cusick:We have to be super accurate with how we're offering and looking at the market. With looking at trends and working with people and really looking at the numbers, responsibilities are shifting from that area to being more of a different focus of analytics and markets, and making sure that we're operating and serving our load.
Julia Perry:Are you excited or are you terrified for that?
Tim Cusick:I am super excited. I think that's where we're going. In order to have a successful power grid, everyone needs to play along. We see it all the time now. It's not windy here, but it's windy in Wyoming, or it's windy through Nebraska.
Tim Cusick:That entire part of the country is wind heavy. If I can't serve my demand now, I have to go out and buy, whereas the market is going to look at that situation, and it will be able to get that gen from point a to b without me having to jump through a bunch of hoops to make sure I have the transmission that's gonna solve and give you the least cost solution for all of your generators.
Julia Perry:I think that is the crux for getting renewables to be a larger part of the energy mix because they are intermittent. Before, you're working with a pretty reliable you can turn it on and off baseload, natural gas, and coal. But if you want more renewable penetration because it is intermittent and weather dependent, unless you do have this big system that can work regionally within all these weather conditions and patterns and sunrise and sunsets, it's really hard to coordinate all that.
Tim Cusick:One of my biggest concerns is reliability going forward with the strong renewable presence, and that shows the importance of these organized markets that we're joining, because with those markets, it gives everyone access to generation wherever it may be, and it can help serve your demand.
Julia Perry:Talking about geography too, it makes sense for us to keep adding renewables just because geographically, we're in a really good spot for wind and we're in a really good spot for solar. If there weren't any there, it wouldn't make sense to build there. But I feel like monitoring the weather patterns and being able to capture all that, we actually are able to take great advantage of natural resources specifically because of the column of The US that we're in.
Tim Cusick:Yeah. We're very lucky, as you said, with our location. Even though it's not in our title, we're one of the sunniest states in The US. So we get a lot of sunshine. We get a lot of wind.
Tim Cusick:We have the plains. You get the wind that whips down off the mountains, which is very good for wind forecasts and for wind reliability. We have Wyoming. It's windy up there. You got the whole Eastern Plains.
Tim Cusick:We are very lucky. And then we also have in the South, solar. We get New Mexico, and we can really take advantage and move all those megawatts to be reliable around the system, and we get to maintain our renewable outlook.
Elizabeth Schilling:So where we've got this great north to south corridor, our market's opening us up more on that east to west sense of, okay, the sun's shining over here, and it's not over here yet, and opening up that window of using renewables.
Tim Cusick:The DC tie is like our biggest limitation that we see a lot of, and it's because transmission goes to it, and then a lot of times it's one way or it's very congested. People own the rights that are going across. It makes access to energy that could be in the East or in the West hard to get. When we join these markets, it will make it easier to access and move energy, and it will help keep prices in the market cheap when it is a super renewable day and there's lots of solar and wind, because it will be easy to move all the way across the RTO.
Julia Perry:What's worse, super hot day
Tim Cusick:or super cold day? From Tri-State's perspective, we are a summer peaking utility, and that's due mainly to our irrigation loads and everything like that. When it's really hot, we see higher demand, but when you get the really cold, you can get aspects of literally the gas pipelines freezing over or coal freezing in the coal trains that are moving, and there's nothing you can do on that aspect. It's kind of a pick your poison situation. I think I would rather operate on a hot day.
Tim Cusick:If it's really cold, the cold has weird effects on power plants. Usually, they can run a little bit better in the heat, but that's just me. The more you know.
Elizabeth Schilling:You're constantly solving puzzles. What do you most enjoy about your job and your role?
Tim Cusick:Most exciting aspect of this job is it's always changing. It's never the same. Every day is a different picture and a different problem that you have to solve. You get to work with some amazing people, and you get experience in both the gas and power world, which is an awesome thing because gas and power, they go hand in hand, but they operate completely different. For example, the gas day goes from 8AM to 8AM, where the power day goes from midnight to midnight.
Tim Cusick:You have to find how things work together and how you can plan around. And it's just exciting. Everyone's dedicated, and we have a great team that supports our mission, and it makes come to work fun.
Elizabeth Schilling:Awesome.
Julia Perry:Do you wanna speak a little bit about the gas portion of your job?
Tim Cusick:Tri-State, we don't serve any residential gas. All of our gas needs go directly to supporting our natural gas power plants. When we're running and dispatching our fleet and figuring out what units we have to do, my team is looking at the predicted runs for the units, and then we're buying our gas based on those needs, and managing our imbalances, making sure there's no operational flow orders or anything, which essentially say, Hey, you can't burn this much gas, or, We need you to burn more gas. Balancing that, we do that from a day ahead perspective. We take the plan, we buy our gas based on what we expect to dispatch, and then when it comes in real time, we have to look and see how are the markets dispatching.
Tim Cusick:Are they dispatching the units up? Do I need to buy more gas? Can I reduce some of the nominations that I have based on what I bought on projections? It's balancing that hourly and daily to make sure that we are maximizing our position.
Julia Perry:With all the changes in innovations in your line of work, what market trends or changes are you watching the closest right now?
Tim Cusick:We are looking a lot into the rapid change in renewables because everyone is adding more and more renewables. We're also tracking who is going where in the West because all of these new markets are emerging. Trying to figure out who's going to be participating in the RTO, who is joining Markets Plus, who is joining CAISO EDAM, and figuring out how is that going to fit into our position. Then one final thing I would say is data center growth. That's a huge aspect that we're looking into.
Tim Cusick:There's definitely benefits, but figuring out how can we supply these massive data centers, whilst keeping our reserve margins and everything that we need to intact, and still serving and trying to lower our rates at the same time.
Julia Perry:Do you have a comparison for the scale of energy consumption that a data center needs?
Tim Cusick:It can be huge. Tri-State's peak demand is around 3,000 megawatts, anywhere between 5,000 megawatts in an hour. Some of these data centers are thousand megawatts an hour. That would be a third of our entire demand in an hour. That's a huge one.
Tim Cusick:Yeah. And that's mixed, but a lot of them are still anywhere from 50 to a couple 100 megawatts an hour that you would have to account for and adjust for. It's a huge thing that you have to take into consideration. Where am I gonna be able to get those megawatts to serve that? And figure out, do I have the transmission to be able to serve that?
Tim Cusick:There's so many aspects. There's lot of regulation and everything going into it and making sure that it would be a viable option, but some of them can be very drastic and huge changes to your load.
Elizabeth Schilling:To go back to the buffet and serving somebody else's plate, that would be like, is there even enough food at the buffet, or is there a plate big enough to hold all this? Can we get it where it needs to go?
Tim Cusick:I know that's a concern for a lot of people around the industry is, can we actually support this? The idea of building a data center and promoting growth is awesome. It's important, and it will help guide our future. Do you want to build a data center at a certain location? Is there even transmission capability to interconnect there?
Tim Cusick:What are other resources that can serve that in the area? There's so many aspects that go into it, and that's why I'm glad there's other teams outside of mine that are looking into the future and figuring out, forecast wise, what resources can we take on and how can we be successful.
Julia Perry:Yeah. Huge collaborative effort and really makes it seem more important to get into an RTO so you can manage huge loads coming on like that too.
Tim Cusick:And the key factor there is just making sure you have enough generation to be able to serve these things. That's how the RTO will function is if you bring what you have to the plate, then the market will actually be able to work for you. And it avoids you from leaning on the market and saying, I can't serve my demand, because ultimately the market is designed so that if everyone's playing along, we can all get along together.
Julia Perry:Also interested, in addition to trends, are there any new technologies coming on board that you're excited for too?
Tim Cusick:I am super excited. From a software standpoint, we're working with software to help maximize our market position, like a one stop shop to make sure that we're operating the system, able to bid into the market and have just a whole software suite that helps support us. From a unit standpoint, I'm super excited for our batteries and potential new gas plants coming online. Those are the things that we're really gonna need in the future. When the wind's not blowing, we have to be able to make up for that somewhere.
Julia Perry:Just out here wheeling and dealing with Tim Cusick.