Today is National Hydropower Day! The Tulsa District has eight hydroelectric dams in its inventory. Seven of those dams – Keystone, Fort Gibson, Webbers Falls, Tenkiller, Eufaula, Broken Bow, and Robert S. Kerr – are located in Oklahoma. The powerhouse at Denison Dam, which straddles the Red River, is on the Texas bank.
Tulsa District’s hydroelectric production is marketed and sold by the Southwestern Power Administration to rural municipalities and electric cooperative in several states.
Jeffrey Miller, power plant manager at Fort Gibson Powerhouse explains how power generated by the Corps of Engineers reaches customers.
Hydroelectric Dams are excellent sources of ‘peak power’, power generated during the hours of highest electricity usage, because they can be quickly activated to generate electricity for the grid.
We spoke with Chris Meyers, the General Manager and CEO of the OAEC – Oklahoma Association of Electric Cooperatives, about the cost benefit of hydroelectric power for rural Oklahomans. Electric cooperatives operate in all 77 counties in Oklahoma.
The hydroelectric mission of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was made possible by the Rural Electrification Act, which allowed the federal government to provide low-cost power to rural communities and municipalities. Additional legislation authorized the Corps of Engineers to install hydroelectric generators in flood control structures.
Due to limited investment in rural areas in the decades preceding the REA, small, rural communities trailed far behind large cities in access to electric infrastructure.
Video by Brannen Parrish
Transcript
The power that we generate here from the plant here at Fort Gibson and also the other plants in the Tulsa district are delivered through the Southwestern Power Administration through fixed contracts that they have with preferred customers and that all goes back to the Rural Electrification Act that was passed back in the ’30s that identified those nonprofit entities as preferred customers for federal power.
Not until 1936 that electric cooperatives came to be through the ERA. Prior to that, people who lived in rural areas of Oklahoma or anywhere in the country were not going to get electric service because the investor-owned utilities could not affordably, couldn’t make a profit and they were not gonna go serve those areas so it was not until 1936 that the Electric Cooperative Program began and so at that time, that point in time, co-ops all across the country were created, were formed, the federal government provided the business model and the capital to get these electric cooperatives started. So through a period of 10 to 15 years, a lot of infrastructure was built in rural America to finally bring electricity to rural consumers who were probably 30 years after the urban areas had electricity. So it was quite a long delay in getting the services. In the late ’30s and the early ’40s was when there was a lot of flood control acts passed which built these flood control dams that the Corp manages and while we were building infrastructure out in these rural areas, we didn’t have a lot of sources of power at that time. So the decision was made when these dams were built to put these hydro units in place, those hydro units and the power they generated was dedicated to rural electric cooperatives who needed the source of power and also public power entities, ESP systems and so that’s where the relationship and the connection with federal hydropower and the electric cooperatives began. And it’s been that way ever since. And that hydropower is a very important piece of our portfolio. It’s low cost, the consumers, the rural electric and the public power consumers of that hydropower do pay for that power, they pay all the costs associated with generating, with maintaining those units but it’s an important piece of our portfolio because it’s affordable. Rural electric cooperatives serve in all 77 counties of Oklahoma. We have more miles of infrastructure in mind than the investor owns in public power combined. We’ll average about seven meters per mile where an investor-owned would be between 30 and 40 meters per mile and municipal, 60 plus. So we have a high infrastructure cost and not a lot of members to spread that over, so having a piece of our power supply be affordable, hydro is very important in our ability to keep electric rates affordable to rural consumers.
That was good vision by people back then to say we need to do this because it recognized the importance of electrifying the nation for productivity and for security reasons as well. So that was a very beneficial thing that happened way back then and that comes as a responsibility to us now to make sure that we operate and maintain these plants so that they are reliable and can provide that power to our customers when they need it.