**Title**: Energy in the North - Nathan Minnema
**Date**: March 5, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Nathan Minnema


00;00;00;09 - 00;00;01;19 [Nathan Minnema] you plan out the day of how you're going to dispatch generation to meet your expected load.

00;00;06;10 - 00;00;12;29 [Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, I speak with Golden Valley Electric Association Chief Operating Officer Nathan Minnema.  The Fairbanks utility is a member owned cooperative with an elected board of directors. Oversee the running of the utility,
 which is in the business of delivering the cheapest power to its members. The utility operates a 563 kilowatt solar farm in Fairbanks, a 25 megawatt wind farm near Healy. Diesel generators in Fairbanks and Delta and coal fired power plants in Healy. Additionally, they purchased coal generated power from Aurora Energy in Fairbanks and GVEA has a 16.9% ownership stake in the Bradley Lake Hydro project in Homer. I started the conversation with Nathan by asking him if that energy portfolio has changed much over the years.

00;00;48;24 - 00;01;01;26 [Nathan Minnema] You know, when I first started here, we had the intertie going south to Anchorage, loaded to 80 megawatts all the time, and that was all gas fired generation from Cook Inlet that we were buying from the other utilities in South Central. But that gas has dried up. We don't have access to any gas fired generation anymore. So really the only energy coming up from Anchorage or South Central is the hydropower from Bradley Lake. 

00;01;10;07 - 00;01;20;14 [Amanda Byrd] As the temperatures and seasons change throughout the year, the energy portfolio changes.

00;01;20;07 - 00;02;54;11 [Nathan Minnema] It does so well. We would call ourselves a winter peaking load. So, you know, unlike maybe, say, an Arizona load profile, we'd be opposite of that, right? So in the desert where they're running AC units in the summer and they have a summer peak load, we have a winter peak load, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise, right? That's what everybody's plugging in their vehicles. And, you know, we've got more electric heaters going on, right? Just the load increase from lighting heat, all the above goes up in the winter. You know, we go from, say, a 200 megawatt demand in the wintertime to could be 150 megawatts or lower in the summer. So a summer valley and then a winter peak is our seasonality of how the load changes with temperature and how does GVA manage the purchase and distribution of that power. So it's an intricate process, but our dispatchers and our power supply department division, they do look ahead for the day ahead. So they're able to get it with our large loads, our mines and see what their projected load will be for the day. We'll know where our plants will be at for the day, what plants may be down or offline for scheduled outages, right. So you have an idea of what plants you're going to be able to call upon to meet that load, what purchases you may be able to make from other groups that's not Golden Valley generation. And then you have that day look ahead where you plan out the day of how you're going to dispatch generation to meet your expected load. And, there, of course, will be surprises and things will happen in the day that you don't anticipate, but that's how you plan out your upcoming days. 

00;02;54;11 - 00;03;13;07 [Amanda Byrd] So it's interesting that you mentioned the mines. When I speak to people in remote communities, the largest user in the community is generally the school. I didn't even think about the mines here as being the largest user, and that would be a massive amount of energy to turn those on.

00;03;13;07 - 00;03;34;29 [Nathan Minnema] Absolutely no. So we have Fort Knox Kinross, Pogo mine as well. So those two mines take up a very large percentage of the energy and generation needs. So we have to closely coordinate with them on their needs for the upcoming day. You know, we need to be aware of their maintenance schedules and when they start their large motors. So we definitely that goes hand in hand, really having to coordinate with those mines so we can make sure that we have the generation needed for them.

00;03;42;09 - 00;03;46;18 [Amanda Byrd] Nathan Minnema is a chief operating officer for Golden Valley Electric Association. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the ÀÖ»¢Ö±²¥ Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.