Disclaimer:
00:00
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.
Pete Rusin:
00:23
To me, my most rewarding thing is, like, on the energy side, seeing people's utility bills go down because they've insulated. They added a heat pump, or seeing their lives expand because they only had wood. And now they can go out, can leave their house, they can go explore and do other things.
Melissa Swinehart:
00:36
Welcome to Western Watts. As a cooperative, Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West. Join us as we 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, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska. I'm Melissa Swinehart with Tri-State and I'm Julia Perry.
Melissa Swinehart:
01:03
And today, we're here with Pete Rusin, Senior Electrification Manager at Tri-State. Pete, what does that even mean?
Pete Rusin:
01:10
I work in the energy service department. It's a group of 12 of us total here at Tri-State, and what we aim to do is to really help our members find different ways for their members to utilize electricity to improve their lives. We have different parts. I work on the beneficial electrification team, the electrification team, which we'll talk about. We have a demand response team, and we have member relations team, which are folks that get out there and go promote our programs on the ground.
Pete Rusin:
01:35
In terms of beneficial electrification, what we really like to do and what we try and do is we wanna improve people's lives through electricity. Similar to back to 1936 and the original act that created the cooperative world and moving power to farms, we're obviously not gonna make that big of an impact on people's lives, but what we can do is find ways to help people reduce their energy bills through electrification. We can help our members that are facing regulatory pressure, find better ways to electrify their equipment, especially out on an oil field, to really help find solutions for our member consumers to implement. And then we wrap all that up in the beneficial electrification area. We hand it off to our demand response team to be able to control.
Pete Rusin:
02:13
That really helps Tri-State as a whole and helps have downward rate pressure.
Julia Perry:
02:17
That was all in one tag. Clearly, you've had to explain this a couple times.
Pete Rusin:
02:21
A little bit because that's the kind of elevator speech that we rehearse in practice when we go to annual meetings. But the bottom line is what we're really trying to do is improve people's lives as a service that we offer to our members.
Julia Perry:
02:31
Is that kinda what you mean by beneficial electrification?
Pete Rusin:
02:34
Yeah. Beneficial electrification. You know, there's kind of some tenants that we've talked about in the past when we've been out with the public, whether that's reducing your energy bill, improving your indoor air quality through electrification, having positive impact on your life. It's always some sort of fossil fuel that we're changing to electric. There has to be some sort of benefit.
Pete Rusin:
02:52
We don't wanna just put in something that's gonna cost the consumer a lot of money. If you just put in a bunch of space heaters in someone's home, that's not gonna really be beneficial for them because their power bill is gonna go skyrocket. But the beneficial part is we encourage them to put in a air source heat pump. This technology has exploded over the last five to six years that can actually really reduce their power bills, especially in the West where we have a lot of propane. It's not just electric baseboard heat, but if you're on propane, you can pretty much save between $600 and $2,000 a year by switching your air source heat pump.
Pete Rusin:
03:21
It's pretty much the part that most people wanna know, right, that they're gonna save money. That's the biggest benefit that we try and promote.
Julia Perry:
03:27
But how does that compare to switching my auto insurance over to GEICO?
Pete Rusin:
03:30
Yeah. I don't know if we're gonna save it. Was it 35%? I forget what they say on their commercials, but we definitely have the systems in place to help our members make that decision and help them understand. If I do switch to a heat pump and I have natural gas, maybe it might not be the best case if I'm on the front range and I'm a Poudre Valley member.
Pete Rusin:
03:46
But if I'm down in San Isabel, let's give them the right information so they can make that GEICO type choice and provide them the resources. It's brand new technology. There's a lot of factors that go into it, and our job really is to try and make it as easy as possible for our members to get that information in their member consumer hands.
Julia Perry:
04:01
Let's circle back. Energy services is residential and commercial that's gonna work for the suburban and rural setting.
Pete Rusin:
04:12
I get so excited about this topic. Just jump right in and give examples, but I don't really step back and actually answer the question that you asked. What is energy services? Yes. We provide services, everything from a homeowner in a house to a mom and pop shop on Main Street in rural America to an industrial plant or to oil and gas fields.
Pete Rusin:
04:31
We cover the gamut of our members. We're as a co-op, we're democratically principled, and we treat all our members the same. We have a program for our homeowner. We wanna have a program for our oil workers. We have one have a program for our industrials.
Pete Rusin:
04:41
We have programs for all of our members to find ways to electrify.
Melissa Swinehart:
04:45
I also just going back to people understanding how people are currently getting their energies. In the rural West, you said a lot of those members are more on propane or bay maybe baseboard electric. And for the Front Range, that might look differently. Being that we're a cooperative that serves mainly the rural West, why is that important to get people electrified in that kind of region?
Pete Rusin:
05:06
It's important because it can really improve people's lives and their quality of life. We have a lot of people on propane, a lot of people on baseboard, electric heat, as well as people still burning wood. It's hard to believe, but, yes, we still have about 7% of our homes that burn wood. We actually still have people that burn coal in their homes. When you look at a quality of life standpoint, the first thing from us is, okay.
Pete Rusin:
05:25
We wanna insulate their home, make sure it's nice and comfortable, but then we wanna provide a heat pump in that home. And the reason is if you burn wood or even if you the few that burn coal, you have to be there. You have to be at your house to make sure it's heated. It really limits what you can do in the wintertime by providing an alternative. And it doesn't have to be for every single day, but, you know, as long as they have a heat pump so they can go out and do things, they can improve their quality of life and still rely on their wood stove when it gets to negative 10 or negative 15 or just for their everyday life.
Pete Rusin:
05:53
And with propane, propane hasn't been below $2 except for one blip during COVID in the last six years. For our members that are on propane, to be cost competitive, even with our members with the highest electric prices, propane would have to be a dollar 56. If you have a propane furnace that goes out, it doesn't make sense to put another propane furnace. We always wanna be resilient. That's why most of our members probably have a second fridge, or they have food stocked in the basement because they're outside the city centers.
Pete Rusin:
06:20
Keep that propane furnace and think of it from that mindset, but add this heat pump that can come in there, work in cold weather, save you money, and be there and operate in normal times. But if something happens and you have your propane backup when it's really cold out and you have that resilient system, we serve some areas that are economically challenged. Can we find that edge to help people reduce their overall utility spend and have a little bit more more money to spend at the local coffee shop, at the restaurant, or buy books for their kids, whatever it may be. But that's why it's important to us. It really means an impactful thing to our members' lives.
Julia Perry:
06:51
Sidebar, how does a normal person get ahold of coal to burn in their house?
Pete Rusin:
06:56
That is really interesting. Usually, it's just that there's been a leftover coal pile that they found or had. There's still coal piles that are just left over from old coal mining. People go grab it. You know where it is, and you go grab it, and you bring it back, and you burn it.
Pete Rusin:
07:09
It's just like, well, how people chop wood. They'll cut it, and they'll cord it, and they'll go. It's a crazy thing, but people are resilient. They're resourceful.
Julia Perry:
07:16
And bonus, you can cosplay as Santa and give all the kids coal for Christmas.
Melissa Swinehart:
07:20
You can. I know that as Tri-State, we've offered energy efficiency rebates for years since around the eighties. And I guess I'm just curious. That program, I feel like, in the last few years has really taken off, and and we've been offering more rebates and been marketing that more to members. Why has that kind of transformed?
Melissa Swinehart:
07:38
What's the goal with offering these rebates?
Pete Rusin:
07:40
Yeah. And and maybe this goes to Julia's question before, why do we exist as energy services here? Our big thing is that we became a regulated utility. And, yes, we've talked about FERC, but people don't understand also at the state level. Through the electric resource planning, we actually now have energy efficiency targets in Colorado we have to hit.
Pete Rusin:
07:56
What it meant is that we had to develop programs to help meet that target. Otherwise, we'd risk further penalties from the the regulatory body here in Colorado. The other thing is we're actually in this great era of technology explosion that we would be wanting to promote just because we know the benefit of it based on the makeup of who our members are and what they power their homes with. Where it does help us is where we have some members, specifically oil and gas or large industrial in Colorado that are facing some regulatory pressure. Okay.
Pete Rusin:
08:24
You need to electrify. Let's do it in a way that benefits both of us. So we're not taxing the grid. The neat thing about it is that we've created a positive impact both in terms of goodwill with our members and most importantly, fiscally. Because we've been able to set up programs like that, now we're able to take those to New Mexico, to Wyoming, to Nebraska, and offer them knowing that it's just not a throwaway program we've heard, but really a program that's helping build load, improving our members' load factor, and being a positive overall in the system.
Julia Perry:
08:52
How are we doing on those efficiency targets?
Pete Rusin:
08:55
We had efficiency targets officially in 2023 and 2024. We just by the skin of our teeth met our 2023 efficiency target. It was our first year that we had to do it. You talk about gigawatt hours and everything else, and no one's gonna understand. Let's just say that.
Pete Rusin:
09:11
We are hanging on. Last year, we almost doubled our goal that we were required to meet. We did really well. Again, our programs are designed to have a positive impact, just for our members, but also Tri-State and their member consumers. When you have this win, people wanna start adopting your technology or the programs you're implementing.
Pete Rusin:
09:27
We are on track this year to meet our goal for this year, and we have goals all the way up to 2,030 at this time.
Melissa Swinehart:
09:33
Pete, going into 2025 and beyond, what are you most excited about?
Pete Rusin:
09:38
We have a trial going on with four oil and gas members, but it is actually a low growth opportunity, and we are getting some energy efficiency credit out of it. I'm excited. If this works, it's a new technology or new way to process. It really hasn't been widely adopted in the industry. We could set the standard for that in not just in our area, but throughout the country.
Julia Perry:
09:59
That's awesome. Of all these technologies that you've talked about, which one gives you the biggest bang for your buck for efficiency targets?
Pete Rusin:
10:06
It's this great new technology. It's unbelievable. It's so exciting. It's called insulation. Just insulate your house.
Pete Rusin:
10:12
I know. It's not exciting, but it's still it works. If you look at our program, we always say insulate first and then get a heat pump or change your water to electric or get a heat pump for your space and conditioning. And from that, you're setting up the house really well because then you have a smaller system, which costs less, then you're more comfortable over a longer period of time because your house doesn't have big temperature variables. Insulation is still the building block.
Pete Rusin:
10:35
And we haven't really talked about this, but in the West, in our territory, we have a lot of older homes. And with that, it means there's a lot of under insulated homes. If you were, say, in in along the front range of Colorado, you probably have a home built most likely after 2003 when the big energy code started coming in. They might need a little bit of insulation, but pretty much they're well insulated. Our members' houses are probably built prior to that, kind of an average age or in the early eighties.
Pete Rusin:
11:04
Definitely need more insulation in those attics. But the funny thing about insulation is if you go to an oil field, best bang for our buck is actually insulating oil separation tank. We get lots of value out of that. It's actually our number one projected incentive going forward. I think the bottom line is the message is still to conserve what you can prior to electrifying.
Julia Perry:
11:26
What are we insulating oil pumps with? Is that just spray foam? What is that?
Pete Rusin:
11:32
There's a few different techniques, but, yeah, the best way to think about it is a heavy type spray foam or big fire resistant blanket. Think about it essentially as instead of having a 40 gallon water heater, if you ever gone down downstairs and some are a little bit thicker because there's that foam insulation or someone puts a pad around it, think about that, but, like, a thousand times bigger.
Julia Perry:
11:52
You tuck the oil in at night, and
Pete Rusin:
11:53
it Yeah. It's stuck in, it stays nice and warm, and you don't have to heat it up as much to keep that temperature.
Julia Perry:
11:59
Just because you've mentioned it a couple times, can you explain just really high level what Demand Response is?
Pete Rusin:
12:05
Demand Response is a new program offering out of Tri-State. It's not a new concept. Demand Response programs have been around since the nineteen eighties. What it is, it's a way that we can communicate with devices in homes. From Tri-State or from a platform, our members can talk to an air conditioner or compressor at an industrial facility.
Pete Rusin:
12:25
Maybe it's a really warm summer day or it's really cold, and we need to tell that piece of equipment to stop because we need to save our power on the grid. The member has agreed that this is okay to do, to shut it off for a couple hours. In some cases, this is where the propane furnace comes in great. If you're in New Mexico and you can run on your electric heat pump, but you have a propane backup, we can actually kick that over to propane if you participate and wanna participate in the program, and then let that propane run until the grid emergency is over. So it's both short term, just a couple hours, even just maybe two hours or a few minutes, all the way up to long duration where we're flipping fuels basically in in everything from a furnace in a home, a compressor on top of a industrial building or small commercial, we talked a little bit about to a oil and gas pipeline.
Pete Rusin:
13:11
It's just a way to help us all work together. We're cooperative. We're all in this together. If we can save a little bit of power had a grid emergency, we don't have to shut off power.
Melissa Swinehart:
13:20
I know that also applies to irrigation, so that's a huge piece of it. Correct?
Pete Rusin:
13:25
Yeah. We haven't talked about irrigation yet. We have some great members out there. I'm gonna miss a bunch of them, so please forgive me. But especially Midwest and Highline and Y-W, they have really great demand control programs already installed with their members, and they've been going on for at least, in some cases, over twenty years.
Pete Rusin:
13:39
I think it's not a new concept. It's actually demand response starts with our farmers, starts with our irrigators. We're just taking that concept from the farm and putting it into a house or into an industrial building. Our farmers understand if you give them enough warning and they know they have enough moisture in the ground that, yeah, they can shut off their center pivot for a day or for eight hours to help out their neighbors. And that's really what it is all about.
Pete Rusin:
14:01
Our irrigators understand that whether it's demand response, becoming more energy efficient, it's about helping our their fellow neighbor. If you go back to 1936 and the first act that created the co-ops, it was aimed at rural America. There's no one to serve rural America. And our farmers get it. Our irrigators get it.
Pete Rusin:
14:20
We're just taking their knowledge and taking it into homes.
Julia Perry:
14:24
Ballpark, do you know what percentage of our members' load is irrigators?
Pete Rusin:
14:30
I will tell you this. We have 16 members who we would say are irrigators. What that means is that their peak their their energy use is driven by their irrigators in the summertime. And so they're all Eastern Wyoming, Eastern Colorado, Western Nebraska. If you look at their load profile, it's very flat in the wintertime, and then it more than quadruples in the summertime from June through August.
Pete Rusin:
14:55
We have about 25,000 irrigation pivots on our system. You put that in perspective, we have about 450,000 residential meters. It's not that they make up a huge percentage of our actual membership, but in some instances, they make up a very significant and very important part of our members' makeup. In some cases out in Nebraska, we have more center pivots than we do residential meters. This varies by co-op.
Pete Rusin:
15:20
But the neat thing about that, their ability to use power in the summer really works well, and it gets offset by SMPA or Empire who are winter peakers. Their demand's just opposite, and then you start to pair them up. They look really good where we start to have more normal kind of straight load shape.
Melissa Swinehart:
15:35
So I think overall, what I'm hearing is that Tri-State has worked on designing programs for every type of member consumer that our members serve, and we have programs for everybody.
Pete Rusin:
15:47
We really did strive to have programs for every single one of our members. We feel like over the last three years, as you mentioned, we've had this explosive growth, In the program, it's changed up a little bit. We have been finding ways to meet each and one of our members, and not just each one of our members in Colorado, but in all four states.
Melissa Swinehart:
16:04
As we go into diving a little bit deeper into what programs Tri-State offers, I know that we have what's now called an on bill repayment program. Can you explain a little bit about that program and what that is?
Pete Rusin:
16:14
Yeah. On bill repayments, it's exactly what it sounds like. We offer this program for our members to adopt that allows their consumers, right now limited to residential homeowners, to implement energy efficiency or beneficial electrification measures and pay for that upgrade through their utility bill. It could be for a water heater or windows or insulation or heat pump, or ideally, what we've seen is insulation plus a heat pump. What people don't realize is that a lot of times that incremental cost is covered by rebates or by tax credits.
Pete Rusin:
16:46
The problem is people usually have to wait for that money to come in. With Onbill, we can front the rebate. We can help provide that funding, and it's not going on a credit card. We find our low to moderate income members struggle the most in this category, so it really helps them out, and then it's a way that they can finance these deals. On bill repayment, the this current state of it right now is that it's offered with four members in Mountain View, GCEA, and we have San Luis Valley, which is our first member that adopted it in Sangre De Cristo.
Pete Rusin:
17:15
Now we have three more members that are onboarding right now. Our goal is to have 12 more members lined up and and signed up this year, and we will have a big push in New Mexico this year with our 11 New Mexico members. We will hope to kick that campaign off somewhere between April and May depending on what we get in front of the statewide down there.
Julia Perry:
17:30
Eric Erickson too at San Luis Valley, he also had an on bill program in Alaska that he had up and running. And in my opinion, if it can work for Alaska, can work for anywhere.
Pete Rusin:
17:45
Yeah. People complain about lack of contractors in, say, Gunnison, Colorado or Ridgeway or LaHunt. Go to Alaska. There's a little bit of a different lack of contractors up there, and we were very lucky with Eric Erickson. We could have not asked for a better place to start with San Luis Valley.
Pete Rusin:
18:00
The patience that our members showed with us on the program that were in this together was really the cooperative spirit, and we're very lucky that Eric and the San Luis Valley board allowed us to go forward on that.
Julia Perry:
18:11
Looking at your background, you worked at the Colorado Energy Office, Energy Smart Colorado, and Northeast Denver Housing Center. How have you take the lessons you've learned working at those places and used it to inform how you built the on bill repayment program?
Pete Rusin:
18:26
I'll just kinda go in in sequential order. At Northeast Denver Housing Center, I was a lead risk assessor. One of the first things I did was to help people understand in Denver proper, like, where there was lead in the homes and help make sure their kids were safe and get remediated if it didn't it take those proper steps. And when you look at on bill repayment, we also do have an older building stock throughout the West that we serve. And for me, it was really important to understand that if we're gonna be doing window replacements, that we have protocols around lead based paint, making sure we have contractors that understand that are testing the house beforehand.
Pete Rusin:
18:55
Because, yes, we want energy efficiency in that home, but more importantly, we don't want kids to get sick. We want kids to be safe. I took that knowledge about, one, working with contractors, how to recruit contractors, but really it's really the lead work that was most important. And then with the Colorado Energy Office, I was working mainly with rural co-ops at that time. That's actually how I met a lot of people here at Tri-State I was based out of Denver.
Pete Rusin:
19:15
That's where the Colorado Energy Office was, but I was going out to a lot of our same members, going out to Cortez, going out to Ridgeway, going down to Gunnison. It was always the same thing. People are really smart out there. What do you think about it? And just really being more conversational about programs unless top down or heavy handed.
Pete Rusin:
19:31
And then EnergySmart, everything that we do and how we work sets up from the experience at EnergySmart where we're bringing in optimizer. It's a great tool for our members and both Tri-State employees as well to understand how they might be able to save without having a full energy audit, but how they might be able to save by switching from propane to an air source heat pump or dual fuel system. And you just take all these little bits like everyone. Right? You build on your crew.
Pete Rusin:
19:52
You take all these little things. Basically, be open about how you talk about stuff and then find ways to get people information so they can make good choices.
Julia Perry:
19:59
It sounds like we poached you.
Pete Rusin:
20:02
I wanted to come here for a long time. I will say I applied for a lot of jobs at Tri-State, and I'm very lucky I've got hired.
Melissa Swinehart:
20:08
You broke them down.
Pete Rusin:
20:09
Yes.
Melissa Swinehart:
20:09
Wore them down. We broke them down.
Pete Rusin:
20:11
But the reason why this is such a great place to work is, like, who we serve. Like, at the projects that we do, you can see the future of how good it's gonna be in terms of people's re-reduction in bills and quality of life. You can see it. And the best way to do it and serve people is to be an organization like Tri-State, where you have a wider net to offer that and have that opportunity.
Julia Perry:
20:29
Yeah. Like, when you said it was a win, it's Tri-State's able to meet our efficiency goals and improve people's lives, and members are able to offer their end consumers something that will genuinely benefit them and as best as we can at cost.
Pete Rusin:
20:47
The little secret that we have on our team is that, yes, we talk about energy efficiency, and we're meeting our statewide goals. But what we're doing at the same time is we're adding insulation in people's homes and ENERGY STAR appliances as we're getting all that energy efficiency. At the same time, we're actually coming in behind it and growing load. Basically, whatever we put in for energy efficiency, we're able to add as much electricity plus another 50% onto the system in terms of new load growth. We're always a net positive in terms of load growth at Tri-State, where it's efficient electrification is the best way to look at it.
Julia Perry:
21:19
That's a great point. For some people, they probably think it's an oxymoron where energy efficiency means you're using less energy. Therefore, you're losing out on sales. But the way Tri-State's doing electrification is you're growing load, you're making sure that the technology that's helping you do that is not driving peak up. So you're growing stable load with also a potential for Doctor, which just makes the grid more stable and reliable overall.
Pete Rusin:
21:48
Correct.
Melissa Swinehart:
21:49
Yep. I know as we've worked on some various projects, like Mammoth Farms down in San Luis Valley, they were getting more efficient by electrifying, but it also grew the load. So I think, you know, as we're talking to members and having them also support these programs, they're not necessarily losing load. I think that's a key point to me is members don't need to be scared of energy efficiency.
Julia Perry:
22:10
What's your pitch to get members to sign on for these programs?
Pete Rusin:
22:13
Do you like to sell electricity? Really? That's what it is. We are electric co-ops. We're electric generation transmission.
Pete Rusin:
22:18
We are in the business of supplying and selling electricity. If you like doing that, our programs are meant to help you sell more electricity. Yes. We're doing things more efficiently, but at the end of the day, we are trying to make you have low growth, therefore, have greater revenues. We wanna do it in an efficient manner so we don't have impact on the class a rate, the charges that you would get on the demand, and we just wanna grow as much revenue as we can for our members.
Julia Perry:
22:43
Melissa, you brought up a really good point. We don't have this in the questions here, but an example of one of these electrification projects was Mammoth Farms, which I think was an awesome project. Do you wanna just give us a high level of what that was?
Pete Rusin:
22:57
Mammoth Farms actually helped us meet 15% of our goal last year. The interesting thing about it, though, it was new construction. It wasn't like the member was losing load. This is just new construction. We helped them work on their process.
Pete Rusin:
23:08
We actually worked with the Colorado Energy Office and Resource Innovations as part of the crop program here available in Colorado. And they evaluated the Mammoth Farms. They were able to find a new way to process their product and get it all the way from when it comes off the field through distributed into their process and into their centrifuges. They looked at every way possible to make it more energy efficient. And so instead of needing maybe nine gigawatt hours a year, they only need one gigawatt.
Pete Rusin:
23:35
Basically, they're able to save almost 90% of the energy that new process would require. Again, that would be new low growth. Yes. Our member maybe lost out on some of that low growth that they would've had, but they also didn't have to upgrade a feeder into that area. They didn't have to upgrade a substation.
Pete Rusin:
23:49
They can have more power for other residents on that line. While Mammoth Farms is a great success story in terms of just overall efficiency, it's just not in a vacuum. It helps the grid in general in that area, and it also is a huge economic driver. They actually contribute, over $2,000,000 a year in taxes at the local level. Their expansion was not only a win in terms of additional low growth.
Pete Rusin:
24:14
It was a really big win in terms of local economic development and local taxes being paid for literally bridges in schools.
Julia Perry:
24:20
I think the business too, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they're able to process more product and longer now too. Right? You worked with the the energy office to get some high-tech tech in there?
Pete Rusin:
24:34
There's osmosis. There's membranes. There's all sorts of crazy stuff that I have no idea about, but you rely on good partners. And that's why I brought in the Colorado Energy Office Resource Innovations engineers that understand this process and embed it. But, yeah, we brought in a lot of high-tech process, which really expanded from basically, like, 60,000 pounds that they could process, close to a million pounds that they'll be able to process just in the same facility.
Pete Rusin:
24:55
And, they went in, they looked at not just the energy use of each equipment, but how they were moving the the product around their their facilities. If you are a large industrial user, if you're an agriculture, we provide energy assessments with partners that understand your business to look at not just the equipment, but also the process of your business to find ways to make it more efficient.
Julia Perry:
25:17
We've got On Bill Repayment. We have demand response coming down the line, and then we have oil and gas. Can you just give us a list of all of the programs your department has?
Pete Rusin:
25:29
Yep. We can do that. For residential homeowners and small commercial, we have rebates. We have the On Bill program right now for residential homes that's expanding both in terms of geographic scope and then probably next year into small commercial. And then we have the assessments for the midsize and large commercial with some incentives at the kinda the distributor level or the manufacturer level.
Pete Rusin:
25:49
And then with irrigators, we have programs for assessments, and then we do have incentives for VSDs, motors. We're adding new incentives for renozzling sprinklers or a new n gun on a sprinkler.
Julia Perry:
26:00
I didn't know renozzle was a word.
Pete Rusin:
26:01
I just learned that. It is a word. Unfortunately, Word doesn't think it's a word. When you are in all of our documents trying to email or anything else, it always gets highlighted red, but it is a word. And it is actually one of the most cost effective things that we have seen in our irrigation program.
Pete Rusin:
26:14
And then oil and gas is our biggest program, and that one is we start out with an assessment through Cascade Energy, and then we offer them custom incentives based on the energy reports. And those are so big. We do need a dedicated engineer on those and really more a tailored approach because they are large road impacts. EVs are there too. We don't really have incentives beyond chargers.
Pete Rusin:
26:35
We don't have incentives for cars. But it's as crazy you think five years ago, it's all about the EVs and what are they gonna do. In the meantime, all this other technology has come in that's blown EVs out of the water that are more tangible to people, like a heat pump for your water heating or a heat pump for your house that works at five degrees Fahrenheit. Like, all these technologies happen and displace this low growth that we thought might come with EVs. Low growth is still coming.
Pete Rusin:
26:57
We have just so much other low growth in front of it right now that it's an exciting time to be in an electric industry.
Julia Perry:
27:02
We joke on our team that the issue with all these new technologies is that they're so completely unsexy. They're all things you That's true. Stick on a roof for in a closet.
Pete Rusin:
27:13
Yeah. Yeah. People love to see windows. Right? You can see windows.
Pete Rusin:
27:16
People love windows. No one's going around to the side of their house and looking at a compressor that's about the size of a refrigerator or anything like that.
Julia Perry:
27:22
Except for you.
Pete Rusin:
27:23
Except for me. I'm very excited about that. Like, when I travel down I-76 and I look out, I look at oil rigs that don't have insulation or the separation vessels that don't have insulation on them, or I see center pivots that we could be doing something on. And that's what energy service actually kinda is. We're sort of behind the scenes.
Pete Rusin:
27:39
We don't ever really touch the end use consumer or the customer. We build the programs behind the scenes for our members to offer to their members. And that's like a lot of the technology, unfortunately, that we implement right now. Yeah. The new Rivian in the driveway or the Mustang Mach E, that looks really good.
Pete Rusin:
27:55
We can actually have just as much oil growth out of a heat pump that is, yes, is in someone's basement, an outdoor unit, and that's it. It isn't really visible work, but if you have a heart to serve people, it's impactful because we see the difference of what that does to people's energy bills and how that can improve people's lives. And that's why we we promote it. That's why we have a great communications team that takes all this stuff and puts it into words that the consumer can understand out of our heads and get people to act. I think that's one of the great things that if we do have on our website is that you can see some of the great videos that we have that have been developed.
Pete Rusin:
28:29
On the commercial side, we offer commercial assessments. We offer commercial rebates. The commercial sector's hard to to reach. One thing that we have done, we've moved rebates. It's called midstream, and so we actually provide the incentive right at the distributor levels.
Pete Rusin:
28:41
If you're getting a carrier unit or a trained rooftop unit, we actually provide that incentive right to the manufacturer. It gets taken off your bill. The reason why you guys probably have eight different designers involved in that project, and at the end of it, no one's responsible for the energy efficiency or the electrification rebates. We go work with the manufacturers directly on that. Then we have the oil and gas program.
Julia Perry:
29:03
Wait. What do you mean by commercial assessments just for Layman?
Pete Rusin:
29:07
Yeah. So Layman, it's an engineering team that goes in. It could be one person or multiple people. They'll go into anything from a fifth square foot retail space that's selling shirts or a restaurant and evaluate the equipment and evaluate if there's opportunities to become more energy efficient. Mammoth Farms that we talked about, there was an engineering team that went in there and looked at everything from the equipment to the process and then giving them options at the end.
Pete Rusin:
29:30
Route a is very cost effective. Route b, maybe a little bit more, but maybe longer payback. A route c, hey. If you wanna go full electric, here's what it's gonna look like.
Julia Perry:
29:37
These commercial assessments also include agriculture assessments and stuff too.
Pete Rusin:
29:42
Yep. Our biggest kind of program that we have operating in Wyoming, Nebraska right now is our irrigation program where they'll go, they'll evaluate a center pivot. They actually get a pivot watch with it, which is a device that stays with the farmer. They can watch how much water and and record how much water they're actually putting on their field. And the irrigation program assessments basically help our farmers reduce their water usage.
Pete Rusin:
30:02
In that way, we think it's more of an economic development, and keeping that farmer in business is more important than maybe reducing a little electricity use. It's really the water use that we're after on that one, and no one doesn't wanna use water efficiently. It's such
Melissa Swinehart:
30:15
a gold resource here
Julia Perry:
30:17
in the West.
Pete Rusin:
30:18
But the problem is it's also expensive to get an irrigation audit. That's why we've partnered with USTA and others to write free no cost assessments to our irrigators. They might be irrigating fine. They might have all the best practices, but it's good to know to have an engineer on-site just to validate that because you might be doing that on one pivot, and they might be like, here, if you do it here, yeah, you have 20 pivots that you own. Take all these practices of these other pivots.
Pete Rusin:
30:42
We can extend out that water resource underneath our feet.
Julia Perry:
30:44
Going on shoots, I didn't realize that, A, all of your fields might not be next to each other. So if all of a sudden you need to go turn off one of your pivots and it's an hour away, that's when you see people, like, racing down through their fields trying to get to their pivot to turn it off. So all the smart technologies and the Wi Fi enabled stuff, it's really such a huge boon, especially when you have to cover all of these distances and you're working on such a large scale and everything's so expensive.
Pete Rusin:
31:11
Yep. And that's part two of the irrigation plan. It's, I guess, for assessing, but then next step is adding the equipment so they can remote control their pivots. But what's funny though, you talk about an hour. Like, when you're in rural America, an hour's not a big deal.
Pete Rusin:
31:21
Within a course of a day, they might drive three or four hours. And so when you think of things like EVs and the adoption rate, like, what we're excited about is that the next set of trucks from Chevy or the trucks that are out from Chevy, the next ones coming out from Ram and from Ford are able to go 400 plus miles. You can get to multiple pivots. You can get to the hospital and back to your house and then back out to the hour drive down to the town to get your medicine and back to your medicine all in one charge. We finally are starting to have the vehicles that will impact their lives in a positive manner in terms of being able to to run a full day without worrying about a charge.
Julia Perry:
31:54
You just listed 9,000,000 things.
Pete Rusin:
31:56
Yeah.
Julia Perry:
31:56
That's a lot of stuff that you're juggling right now. Why are you doing so much? What's the drive behind that?
Pete Rusin:
32:02
There's two reasons. One, we had a target the regulatory target. If you look at what we did in 2022 in terms of rebates and energy efficiency savings for our target, for this year, we'd have to grow our programs over five times. We pulled on every single string. Like, what can we do?
Pete Rusin:
32:21
Where can we find any bit of savings? And then we looked at, okay, what has the most best cost benefit? Yes. There's a lot going on, but we needed to have a lot going on because there is no way that we're gonna meet our regulatory goals with having programs for all of our members. And the other thing that's behind it being the cooperative world.
Pete Rusin:
32:36
It's important to have programs for all of our members. And we really haven't talked about the cooperative ecosystem, but by working together in all these different homes and businesses, you mentioned a little bit that we can grow all these electrical sales as much as we can without having a huge impact on the overall system demand. And what we do in one spot, you know, what we do on the Eastern Plains and reducing some efficiency load there might also help their neighbor add some oil and gas load without affecting the overall demand of the system.
Julia Perry:
33:05
Reg Rudolph has a dream that one day, all of the co-ops will be vertically integrated and will be so efficient, will ascend. You know?
Pete Rusin:
33:14
Yeah. No. It is. That's that's the idea. I remember four or five years ago, people talked about the cooperative business model is broken.
Pete Rusin:
33:20
It can't serve. And if you look at the world today, it's actually the best business model. The money, the profits go back to the members. It goes back to the people on the street. We are driven to ride electricity at the lowest cost possible.
Pete Rusin:
33:33
All our choices are built around reliability and affordability, and the best way to do that is make sure money flows back to our members and not to a shareholder. The future's bright.
Julia Perry:
33:41
What do you find the most rewarding about working at Tri-State?
Pete Rusin:
33:45
The most rewarding thing that I find is our, basically, insulation heat pumps that we're doing in rural areas through our weatherization agencies and or through the on bill program. Going back to your question about, like, where I started Northeast Denver housing, that was basically poor areas of Denver and helping families become healthier homes and their kids seeing them have reduced levels of lead and that, it to me, my most rewarding thing is, like, on the energy side, seeing people's utility bills go down because they've insulated. They added a heat pump or seeing their lives expand because they only had wood, and now they can go out. They can leave their house. They can go explore and do other things.
Pete Rusin:
34:23
The most rewarding thing is I can see the impact of their lives and how it can be approved through just two simple things, insulation and heat pump.
Julia Perry:
34:31
I've tried using a wood pellet stove. I couldn't get it lit the second time before we were going to sleep, so and I couldn't tell if I turned the gas off successfully. And it was still cold, but we cracked one of the windows because I was like, I think we're gonna die inhaling gas overnight because I couldn't get this started.
Pete Rusin:
34:51
That's the great thing. As you start to electrify, for the most part, you are living in a safer home. If you have a big one we do see is induction cooktops. They're much safer. If you have kids out there, especially, your kids can touch the top of the stove.
Pete Rusin:
35:04
They won't get burned. It's electric, you don't have any fumes coming off. You don't have any worry about any carbon monoxide poisoning off of that. It is one of the safest appliances that you can put in your home, but it's got education that to give people like, if you're building a new home, if you're replacing your stove, get an induction cooktop. That's why it's important to us.
Pete Rusin:
35:22
It really means an impactful thing to our members' lives.
Speaker 5:
35:25
Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.
00:00
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.
Pete Rusin:
00:23
To me, my most rewarding thing is, like, on the energy side, seeing people's utility bills go down because they've insulated. They added a heat pump, or seeing their lives expand because they only had wood. And now they can go out, can leave their house, they can go explore and do other things.
Melissa Swinehart:
00:36
Welcome to Western Watts. As a cooperative, Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West. Join us as we 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, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska. I'm Melissa Swinehart with Tri-State and I'm Julia Perry.
Melissa Swinehart:
01:03
And today, we're here with Pete Rusin, Senior Electrification Manager at Tri-State. Pete, what does that even mean?
Pete Rusin:
01:10
I work in the energy service department. It's a group of 12 of us total here at Tri-State, and what we aim to do is to really help our members find different ways for their members to utilize electricity to improve their lives. We have different parts. I work on the beneficial electrification team, the electrification team, which we'll talk about. We have a demand response team, and we have member relations team, which are folks that get out there and go promote our programs on the ground.
Pete Rusin:
01:35
In terms of beneficial electrification, what we really like to do and what we try and do is we wanna improve people's lives through electricity. Similar to back to 1936 and the original act that created the cooperative world and moving power to farms, we're obviously not gonna make that big of an impact on people's lives, but what we can do is find ways to help people reduce their energy bills through electrification. We can help our members that are facing regulatory pressure, find better ways to electrify their equipment, especially out on an oil field, to really help find solutions for our member consumers to implement. And then we wrap all that up in the beneficial electrification area. We hand it off to our demand response team to be able to control.
Pete Rusin:
02:13
That really helps Tri-State as a whole and helps have downward rate pressure.
Julia Perry:
02:17
That was all in one tag. Clearly, you've had to explain this a couple times.
Pete Rusin:
02:21
A little bit because that's the kind of elevator speech that we rehearse in practice when we go to annual meetings. But the bottom line is what we're really trying to do is improve people's lives as a service that we offer to our members.
Julia Perry:
02:31
Is that kinda what you mean by beneficial electrification?
Pete Rusin:
02:34
Yeah. Beneficial electrification. You know, there's kind of some tenants that we've talked about in the past when we've been out with the public, whether that's reducing your energy bill, improving your indoor air quality through electrification, having positive impact on your life. It's always some sort of fossil fuel that we're changing to electric. There has to be some sort of benefit.
Pete Rusin:
02:52
We don't wanna just put in something that's gonna cost the consumer a lot of money. If you just put in a bunch of space heaters in someone's home, that's not gonna really be beneficial for them because their power bill is gonna go skyrocket. But the beneficial part is we encourage them to put in a air source heat pump. This technology has exploded over the last five to six years that can actually really reduce their power bills, especially in the West where we have a lot of propane. It's not just electric baseboard heat, but if you're on propane, you can pretty much save between $600 and $2,000 a year by switching your air source heat pump.
Pete Rusin:
03:21
It's pretty much the part that most people wanna know, right, that they're gonna save money. That's the biggest benefit that we try and promote.
Julia Perry:
03:27
But how does that compare to switching my auto insurance over to GEICO?
Pete Rusin:
03:30
Yeah. I don't know if we're gonna save it. Was it 35%? I forget what they say on their commercials, but we definitely have the systems in place to help our members make that decision and help them understand. If I do switch to a heat pump and I have natural gas, maybe it might not be the best case if I'm on the front range and I'm a Poudre Valley member.
Pete Rusin:
03:46
But if I'm down in San Isabel, let's give them the right information so they can make that GEICO type choice and provide them the resources. It's brand new technology. There's a lot of factors that go into it, and our job really is to try and make it as easy as possible for our members to get that information in their member consumer hands.
Julia Perry:
04:01
Let's circle back. Energy services is residential and commercial that's gonna work for the suburban and rural setting.
Pete Rusin:
04:12
I get so excited about this topic. Just jump right in and give examples, but I don't really step back and actually answer the question that you asked. What is energy services? Yes. We provide services, everything from a homeowner in a house to a mom and pop shop on Main Street in rural America to an industrial plant or to oil and gas fields.
Pete Rusin:
04:31
We cover the gamut of our members. We're as a co-op, we're democratically principled, and we treat all our members the same. We have a program for our homeowner. We wanna have a program for our oil workers. We have one have a program for our industrials.
Pete Rusin:
04:41
We have programs for all of our members to find ways to electrify.
Melissa Swinehart:
04:45
I also just going back to people understanding how people are currently getting their energies. In the rural West, you said a lot of those members are more on propane or bay maybe baseboard electric. And for the Front Range, that might look differently. Being that we're a cooperative that serves mainly the rural West, why is that important to get people electrified in that kind of region?
Pete Rusin:
05:06
It's important because it can really improve people's lives and their quality of life. We have a lot of people on propane, a lot of people on baseboard, electric heat, as well as people still burning wood. It's hard to believe, but, yes, we still have about 7% of our homes that burn wood. We actually still have people that burn coal in their homes. When you look at a quality of life standpoint, the first thing from us is, okay.
Pete Rusin:
05:25
We wanna insulate their home, make sure it's nice and comfortable, but then we wanna provide a heat pump in that home. And the reason is if you burn wood or even if you the few that burn coal, you have to be there. You have to be at your house to make sure it's heated. It really limits what you can do in the wintertime by providing an alternative. And it doesn't have to be for every single day, but, you know, as long as they have a heat pump so they can go out and do things, they can improve their quality of life and still rely on their wood stove when it gets to negative 10 or negative 15 or just for their everyday life.
Pete Rusin:
05:53
And with propane, propane hasn't been below $2 except for one blip during COVID in the last six years. For our members that are on propane, to be cost competitive, even with our members with the highest electric prices, propane would have to be a dollar 56. If you have a propane furnace that goes out, it doesn't make sense to put another propane furnace. We always wanna be resilient. That's why most of our members probably have a second fridge, or they have food stocked in the basement because they're outside the city centers.
Pete Rusin:
06:20
Keep that propane furnace and think of it from that mindset, but add this heat pump that can come in there, work in cold weather, save you money, and be there and operate in normal times. But if something happens and you have your propane backup when it's really cold out and you have that resilient system, we serve some areas that are economically challenged. Can we find that edge to help people reduce their overall utility spend and have a little bit more more money to spend at the local coffee shop, at the restaurant, or buy books for their kids, whatever it may be. But that's why it's important to us. It really means an impactful thing to our members' lives.
Julia Perry:
06:51
Sidebar, how does a normal person get ahold of coal to burn in their house?
Pete Rusin:
06:56
That is really interesting. Usually, it's just that there's been a leftover coal pile that they found or had. There's still coal piles that are just left over from old coal mining. People go grab it. You know where it is, and you go grab it, and you bring it back, and you burn it.
Pete Rusin:
07:09
It's just like, well, how people chop wood. They'll cut it, and they'll cord it, and they'll go. It's a crazy thing, but people are resilient. They're resourceful.
Julia Perry:
07:16
And bonus, you can cosplay as Santa and give all the kids coal for Christmas.
Melissa Swinehart:
07:20
You can. I know that as Tri-State, we've offered energy efficiency rebates for years since around the eighties. And I guess I'm just curious. That program, I feel like, in the last few years has really taken off, and and we've been offering more rebates and been marketing that more to members. Why has that kind of transformed?
Melissa Swinehart:
07:38
What's the goal with offering these rebates?
Pete Rusin:
07:40
Yeah. And and maybe this goes to Julia's question before, why do we exist as energy services here? Our big thing is that we became a regulated utility. And, yes, we've talked about FERC, but people don't understand also at the state level. Through the electric resource planning, we actually now have energy efficiency targets in Colorado we have to hit.
Pete Rusin:
07:56
What it meant is that we had to develop programs to help meet that target. Otherwise, we'd risk further penalties from the the regulatory body here in Colorado. The other thing is we're actually in this great era of technology explosion that we would be wanting to promote just because we know the benefit of it based on the makeup of who our members are and what they power their homes with. Where it does help us is where we have some members, specifically oil and gas or large industrial in Colorado that are facing some regulatory pressure. Okay.
Pete Rusin:
08:24
You need to electrify. Let's do it in a way that benefits both of us. So we're not taxing the grid. The neat thing about it is that we've created a positive impact both in terms of goodwill with our members and most importantly, fiscally. Because we've been able to set up programs like that, now we're able to take those to New Mexico, to Wyoming, to Nebraska, and offer them knowing that it's just not a throwaway program we've heard, but really a program that's helping build load, improving our members' load factor, and being a positive overall in the system.
Julia Perry:
08:52
How are we doing on those efficiency targets?
Pete Rusin:
08:55
We had efficiency targets officially in 2023 and 2024. We just by the skin of our teeth met our 2023 efficiency target. It was our first year that we had to do it. You talk about gigawatt hours and everything else, and no one's gonna understand. Let's just say that.
Pete Rusin:
09:11
We are hanging on. Last year, we almost doubled our goal that we were required to meet. We did really well. Again, our programs are designed to have a positive impact, just for our members, but also Tri-State and their member consumers. When you have this win, people wanna start adopting your technology or the programs you're implementing.
Pete Rusin:
09:27
We are on track this year to meet our goal for this year, and we have goals all the way up to 2,030 at this time.
Melissa Swinehart:
09:33
Pete, going into 2025 and beyond, what are you most excited about?
Pete Rusin:
09:38
We have a trial going on with four oil and gas members, but it is actually a low growth opportunity, and we are getting some energy efficiency credit out of it. I'm excited. If this works, it's a new technology or new way to process. It really hasn't been widely adopted in the industry. We could set the standard for that in not just in our area, but throughout the country.
Julia Perry:
09:59
That's awesome. Of all these technologies that you've talked about, which one gives you the biggest bang for your buck for efficiency targets?
Pete Rusin:
10:06
It's this great new technology. It's unbelievable. It's so exciting. It's called insulation. Just insulate your house.
Pete Rusin:
10:12
I know. It's not exciting, but it's still it works. If you look at our program, we always say insulate first and then get a heat pump or change your water to electric or get a heat pump for your space and conditioning. And from that, you're setting up the house really well because then you have a smaller system, which costs less, then you're more comfortable over a longer period of time because your house doesn't have big temperature variables. Insulation is still the building block.
Pete Rusin:
10:35
And we haven't really talked about this, but in the West, in our territory, we have a lot of older homes. And with that, it means there's a lot of under insulated homes. If you were, say, in in along the front range of Colorado, you probably have a home built most likely after 2003 when the big energy code started coming in. They might need a little bit of insulation, but pretty much they're well insulated. Our members' houses are probably built prior to that, kind of an average age or in the early eighties.
Pete Rusin:
11:04
Definitely need more insulation in those attics. But the funny thing about insulation is if you go to an oil field, best bang for our buck is actually insulating oil separation tank. We get lots of value out of that. It's actually our number one projected incentive going forward. I think the bottom line is the message is still to conserve what you can prior to electrifying.
Julia Perry:
11:26
What are we insulating oil pumps with? Is that just spray foam? What is that?
Pete Rusin:
11:32
There's a few different techniques, but, yeah, the best way to think about it is a heavy type spray foam or big fire resistant blanket. Think about it essentially as instead of having a 40 gallon water heater, if you ever gone down downstairs and some are a little bit thicker because there's that foam insulation or someone puts a pad around it, think about that, but, like, a thousand times bigger.
Julia Perry:
11:52
You tuck the oil in at night, and
Pete Rusin:
11:53
it Yeah. It's stuck in, it stays nice and warm, and you don't have to heat it up as much to keep that temperature.
Julia Perry:
11:59
Just because you've mentioned it a couple times, can you explain just really high level what Demand Response is?
Pete Rusin:
12:05
Demand Response is a new program offering out of Tri-State. It's not a new concept. Demand Response programs have been around since the nineteen eighties. What it is, it's a way that we can communicate with devices in homes. From Tri-State or from a platform, our members can talk to an air conditioner or compressor at an industrial facility.
Pete Rusin:
12:25
Maybe it's a really warm summer day or it's really cold, and we need to tell that piece of equipment to stop because we need to save our power on the grid. The member has agreed that this is okay to do, to shut it off for a couple hours. In some cases, this is where the propane furnace comes in great. If you're in New Mexico and you can run on your electric heat pump, but you have a propane backup, we can actually kick that over to propane if you participate and wanna participate in the program, and then let that propane run until the grid emergency is over. So it's both short term, just a couple hours, even just maybe two hours or a few minutes, all the way up to long duration where we're flipping fuels basically in in everything from a furnace in a home, a compressor on top of a industrial building or small commercial, we talked a little bit about to a oil and gas pipeline.
Pete Rusin:
13:11
It's just a way to help us all work together. We're cooperative. We're all in this together. If we can save a little bit of power had a grid emergency, we don't have to shut off power.
Melissa Swinehart:
13:20
I know that also applies to irrigation, so that's a huge piece of it. Correct?
Pete Rusin:
13:25
Yeah. We haven't talked about irrigation yet. We have some great members out there. I'm gonna miss a bunch of them, so please forgive me. But especially Midwest and Highline and Y-W, they have really great demand control programs already installed with their members, and they've been going on for at least, in some cases, over twenty years.
Pete Rusin:
13:39
I think it's not a new concept. It's actually demand response starts with our farmers, starts with our irrigators. We're just taking that concept from the farm and putting it into a house or into an industrial building. Our farmers understand if you give them enough warning and they know they have enough moisture in the ground that, yeah, they can shut off their center pivot for a day or for eight hours to help out their neighbors. And that's really what it is all about.
Pete Rusin:
14:01
Our irrigators understand that whether it's demand response, becoming more energy efficient, it's about helping our their fellow neighbor. If you go back to 1936 and the first act that created the co-ops, it was aimed at rural America. There's no one to serve rural America. And our farmers get it. Our irrigators get it.
Pete Rusin:
14:20
We're just taking their knowledge and taking it into homes.
Julia Perry:
14:24
Ballpark, do you know what percentage of our members' load is irrigators?
Pete Rusin:
14:30
I will tell you this. We have 16 members who we would say are irrigators. What that means is that their peak their their energy use is driven by their irrigators in the summertime. And so they're all Eastern Wyoming, Eastern Colorado, Western Nebraska. If you look at their load profile, it's very flat in the wintertime, and then it more than quadruples in the summertime from June through August.
Pete Rusin:
14:55
We have about 25,000 irrigation pivots on our system. You put that in perspective, we have about 450,000 residential meters. It's not that they make up a huge percentage of our actual membership, but in some instances, they make up a very significant and very important part of our members' makeup. In some cases out in Nebraska, we have more center pivots than we do residential meters. This varies by co-op.
Pete Rusin:
15:20
But the neat thing about that, their ability to use power in the summer really works well, and it gets offset by SMPA or Empire who are winter peakers. Their demand's just opposite, and then you start to pair them up. They look really good where we start to have more normal kind of straight load shape.
Melissa Swinehart:
15:35
So I think overall, what I'm hearing is that Tri-State has worked on designing programs for every type of member consumer that our members serve, and we have programs for everybody.
Pete Rusin:
15:47
We really did strive to have programs for every single one of our members. We feel like over the last three years, as you mentioned, we've had this explosive growth, In the program, it's changed up a little bit. We have been finding ways to meet each and one of our members, and not just each one of our members in Colorado, but in all four states.
Melissa Swinehart:
16:04
As we go into diving a little bit deeper into what programs Tri-State offers, I know that we have what's now called an on bill repayment program. Can you explain a little bit about that program and what that is?
Pete Rusin:
16:14
Yeah. On bill repayments, it's exactly what it sounds like. We offer this program for our members to adopt that allows their consumers, right now limited to residential homeowners, to implement energy efficiency or beneficial electrification measures and pay for that upgrade through their utility bill. It could be for a water heater or windows or insulation or heat pump, or ideally, what we've seen is insulation plus a heat pump. What people don't realize is that a lot of times that incremental cost is covered by rebates or by tax credits.
Pete Rusin:
16:46
The problem is people usually have to wait for that money to come in. With Onbill, we can front the rebate. We can help provide that funding, and it's not going on a credit card. We find our low to moderate income members struggle the most in this category, so it really helps them out, and then it's a way that they can finance these deals. On bill repayment, the this current state of it right now is that it's offered with four members in Mountain View, GCEA, and we have San Luis Valley, which is our first member that adopted it in Sangre De Cristo.
Pete Rusin:
17:15
Now we have three more members that are onboarding right now. Our goal is to have 12 more members lined up and and signed up this year, and we will have a big push in New Mexico this year with our 11 New Mexico members. We will hope to kick that campaign off somewhere between April and May depending on what we get in front of the statewide down there.
Julia Perry:
17:30
Eric Erickson too at San Luis Valley, he also had an on bill program in Alaska that he had up and running. And in my opinion, if it can work for Alaska, can work for anywhere.
Pete Rusin:
17:45
Yeah. People complain about lack of contractors in, say, Gunnison, Colorado or Ridgeway or LaHunt. Go to Alaska. There's a little bit of a different lack of contractors up there, and we were very lucky with Eric Erickson. We could have not asked for a better place to start with San Luis Valley.
Pete Rusin:
18:00
The patience that our members showed with us on the program that were in this together was really the cooperative spirit, and we're very lucky that Eric and the San Luis Valley board allowed us to go forward on that.
Julia Perry:
18:11
Looking at your background, you worked at the Colorado Energy Office, Energy Smart Colorado, and Northeast Denver Housing Center. How have you take the lessons you've learned working at those places and used it to inform how you built the on bill repayment program?
Pete Rusin:
18:26
I'll just kinda go in in sequential order. At Northeast Denver Housing Center, I was a lead risk assessor. One of the first things I did was to help people understand in Denver proper, like, where there was lead in the homes and help make sure their kids were safe and get remediated if it didn't it take those proper steps. And when you look at on bill repayment, we also do have an older building stock throughout the West that we serve. And for me, it was really important to understand that if we're gonna be doing window replacements, that we have protocols around lead based paint, making sure we have contractors that understand that are testing the house beforehand.
Pete Rusin:
18:55
Because, yes, we want energy efficiency in that home, but more importantly, we don't want kids to get sick. We want kids to be safe. I took that knowledge about, one, working with contractors, how to recruit contractors, but really it's really the lead work that was most important. And then with the Colorado Energy Office, I was working mainly with rural co-ops at that time. That's actually how I met a lot of people here at Tri-State I was based out of Denver.
Pete Rusin:
19:15
That's where the Colorado Energy Office was, but I was going out to a lot of our same members, going out to Cortez, going out to Ridgeway, going down to Gunnison. It was always the same thing. People are really smart out there. What do you think about it? And just really being more conversational about programs unless top down or heavy handed.
Pete Rusin:
19:31
And then EnergySmart, everything that we do and how we work sets up from the experience at EnergySmart where we're bringing in optimizer. It's a great tool for our members and both Tri-State employees as well to understand how they might be able to save without having a full energy audit, but how they might be able to save by switching from propane to an air source heat pump or dual fuel system. And you just take all these little bits like everyone. Right? You build on your crew.
Pete Rusin:
19:52
You take all these little things. Basically, be open about how you talk about stuff and then find ways to get people information so they can make good choices.
Julia Perry:
19:59
It sounds like we poached you.
Pete Rusin:
20:02
I wanted to come here for a long time. I will say I applied for a lot of jobs at Tri-State, and I'm very lucky I've got hired.
Melissa Swinehart:
20:08
You broke them down.
Pete Rusin:
20:09
Yes.
Melissa Swinehart:
20:09
Wore them down. We broke them down.
Pete Rusin:
20:11
But the reason why this is such a great place to work is, like, who we serve. Like, at the projects that we do, you can see the future of how good it's gonna be in terms of people's re-reduction in bills and quality of life. You can see it. And the best way to do it and serve people is to be an organization like Tri-State, where you have a wider net to offer that and have that opportunity.
Julia Perry:
20:29
Yeah. Like, when you said it was a win, it's Tri-State's able to meet our efficiency goals and improve people's lives, and members are able to offer their end consumers something that will genuinely benefit them and as best as we can at cost.
Pete Rusin:
20:47
The little secret that we have on our team is that, yes, we talk about energy efficiency, and we're meeting our statewide goals. But what we're doing at the same time is we're adding insulation in people's homes and ENERGY STAR appliances as we're getting all that energy efficiency. At the same time, we're actually coming in behind it and growing load. Basically, whatever we put in for energy efficiency, we're able to add as much electricity plus another 50% onto the system in terms of new load growth. We're always a net positive in terms of load growth at Tri-State, where it's efficient electrification is the best way to look at it.
Julia Perry:
21:19
That's a great point. For some people, they probably think it's an oxymoron where energy efficiency means you're using less energy. Therefore, you're losing out on sales. But the way Tri-State's doing electrification is you're growing load, you're making sure that the technology that's helping you do that is not driving peak up. So you're growing stable load with also a potential for Doctor, which just makes the grid more stable and reliable overall.
Pete Rusin:
21:48
Correct.
Melissa Swinehart:
21:49
Yep. I know as we've worked on some various projects, like Mammoth Farms down in San Luis Valley, they were getting more efficient by electrifying, but it also grew the load. So I think, you know, as we're talking to members and having them also support these programs, they're not necessarily losing load. I think that's a key point to me is members don't need to be scared of energy efficiency.
Julia Perry:
22:10
What's your pitch to get members to sign on for these programs?
Pete Rusin:
22:13
Do you like to sell electricity? Really? That's what it is. We are electric co-ops. We're electric generation transmission.
Pete Rusin:
22:18
We are in the business of supplying and selling electricity. If you like doing that, our programs are meant to help you sell more electricity. Yes. We're doing things more efficiently, but at the end of the day, we are trying to make you have low growth, therefore, have greater revenues. We wanna do it in an efficient manner so we don't have impact on the class a rate, the charges that you would get on the demand, and we just wanna grow as much revenue as we can for our members.
Julia Perry:
22:43
Melissa, you brought up a really good point. We don't have this in the questions here, but an example of one of these electrification projects was Mammoth Farms, which I think was an awesome project. Do you wanna just give us a high level of what that was?
Pete Rusin:
22:57
Mammoth Farms actually helped us meet 15% of our goal last year. The interesting thing about it, though, it was new construction. It wasn't like the member was losing load. This is just new construction. We helped them work on their process.
Pete Rusin:
23:08
We actually worked with the Colorado Energy Office and Resource Innovations as part of the crop program here available in Colorado. And they evaluated the Mammoth Farms. They were able to find a new way to process their product and get it all the way from when it comes off the field through distributed into their process and into their centrifuges. They looked at every way possible to make it more energy efficient. And so instead of needing maybe nine gigawatt hours a year, they only need one gigawatt.
Pete Rusin:
23:35
Basically, they're able to save almost 90% of the energy that new process would require. Again, that would be new low growth. Yes. Our member maybe lost out on some of that low growth that they would've had, but they also didn't have to upgrade a feeder into that area. They didn't have to upgrade a substation.
Pete Rusin:
23:49
They can have more power for other residents on that line. While Mammoth Farms is a great success story in terms of just overall efficiency, it's just not in a vacuum. It helps the grid in general in that area, and it also is a huge economic driver. They actually contribute, over $2,000,000 a year in taxes at the local level. Their expansion was not only a win in terms of additional low growth.
Pete Rusin:
24:14
It was a really big win in terms of local economic development and local taxes being paid for literally bridges in schools.
Julia Perry:
24:20
I think the business too, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they're able to process more product and longer now too. Right? You worked with the the energy office to get some high-tech tech in there?
Pete Rusin:
24:34
There's osmosis. There's membranes. There's all sorts of crazy stuff that I have no idea about, but you rely on good partners. And that's why I brought in the Colorado Energy Office Resource Innovations engineers that understand this process and embed it. But, yeah, we brought in a lot of high-tech process, which really expanded from basically, like, 60,000 pounds that they could process, close to a million pounds that they'll be able to process just in the same facility.
Pete Rusin:
24:55
And, they went in, they looked at not just the energy use of each equipment, but how they were moving the the product around their their facilities. If you are a large industrial user, if you're an agriculture, we provide energy assessments with partners that understand your business to look at not just the equipment, but also the process of your business to find ways to make it more efficient.
Julia Perry:
25:17
We've got On Bill Repayment. We have demand response coming down the line, and then we have oil and gas. Can you just give us a list of all of the programs your department has?
Pete Rusin:
25:29
Yep. We can do that. For residential homeowners and small commercial, we have rebates. We have the On Bill program right now for residential homes that's expanding both in terms of geographic scope and then probably next year into small commercial. And then we have the assessments for the midsize and large commercial with some incentives at the kinda the distributor level or the manufacturer level.
Pete Rusin:
25:49
And then with irrigators, we have programs for assessments, and then we do have incentives for VSDs, motors. We're adding new incentives for renozzling sprinklers or a new n gun on a sprinkler.
Julia Perry:
26:00
I didn't know renozzle was a word.
Pete Rusin:
26:01
I just learned that. It is a word. Unfortunately, Word doesn't think it's a word. When you are in all of our documents trying to email or anything else, it always gets highlighted red, but it is a word. And it is actually one of the most cost effective things that we have seen in our irrigation program.
Pete Rusin:
26:14
And then oil and gas is our biggest program, and that one is we start out with an assessment through Cascade Energy, and then we offer them custom incentives based on the energy reports. And those are so big. We do need a dedicated engineer on those and really more a tailored approach because they are large road impacts. EVs are there too. We don't really have incentives beyond chargers.
Pete Rusin:
26:35
We don't have incentives for cars. But it's as crazy you think five years ago, it's all about the EVs and what are they gonna do. In the meantime, all this other technology has come in that's blown EVs out of the water that are more tangible to people, like a heat pump for your water heating or a heat pump for your house that works at five degrees Fahrenheit. Like, all these technologies happen and displace this low growth that we thought might come with EVs. Low growth is still coming.
Pete Rusin:
26:57
We have just so much other low growth in front of it right now that it's an exciting time to be in an electric industry.
Julia Perry:
27:02
We joke on our team that the issue with all these new technologies is that they're so completely unsexy. They're all things you That's true. Stick on a roof for in a closet.
Pete Rusin:
27:13
Yeah. Yeah. People love to see windows. Right? You can see windows.
Pete Rusin:
27:16
People love windows. No one's going around to the side of their house and looking at a compressor that's about the size of a refrigerator or anything like that.
Julia Perry:
27:22
Except for you.
Pete Rusin:
27:23
Except for me. I'm very excited about that. Like, when I travel down I-76 and I look out, I look at oil rigs that don't have insulation or the separation vessels that don't have insulation on them, or I see center pivots that we could be doing something on. And that's what energy service actually kinda is. We're sort of behind the scenes.
Pete Rusin:
27:39
We don't ever really touch the end use consumer or the customer. We build the programs behind the scenes for our members to offer to their members. And that's like a lot of the technology, unfortunately, that we implement right now. Yeah. The new Rivian in the driveway or the Mustang Mach E, that looks really good.
Pete Rusin:
27:55
We can actually have just as much oil growth out of a heat pump that is, yes, is in someone's basement, an outdoor unit, and that's it. It isn't really visible work, but if you have a heart to serve people, it's impactful because we see the difference of what that does to people's energy bills and how that can improve people's lives. And that's why we we promote it. That's why we have a great communications team that takes all this stuff and puts it into words that the consumer can understand out of our heads and get people to act. I think that's one of the great things that if we do have on our website is that you can see some of the great videos that we have that have been developed.
Pete Rusin:
28:29
On the commercial side, we offer commercial assessments. We offer commercial rebates. The commercial sector's hard to to reach. One thing that we have done, we've moved rebates. It's called midstream, and so we actually provide the incentive right at the distributor levels.
Pete Rusin:
28:41
If you're getting a carrier unit or a trained rooftop unit, we actually provide that incentive right to the manufacturer. It gets taken off your bill. The reason why you guys probably have eight different designers involved in that project, and at the end of it, no one's responsible for the energy efficiency or the electrification rebates. We go work with the manufacturers directly on that. Then we have the oil and gas program.
Julia Perry:
29:03
Wait. What do you mean by commercial assessments just for Layman?
Pete Rusin:
29:07
Yeah. So Layman, it's an engineering team that goes in. It could be one person or multiple people. They'll go into anything from a fifth square foot retail space that's selling shirts or a restaurant and evaluate the equipment and evaluate if there's opportunities to become more energy efficient. Mammoth Farms that we talked about, there was an engineering team that went in there and looked at everything from the equipment to the process and then giving them options at the end.
Pete Rusin:
29:30
Route a is very cost effective. Route b, maybe a little bit more, but maybe longer payback. A route c, hey. If you wanna go full electric, here's what it's gonna look like.
Julia Perry:
29:37
These commercial assessments also include agriculture assessments and stuff too.
Pete Rusin:
29:42
Yep. Our biggest kind of program that we have operating in Wyoming, Nebraska right now is our irrigation program where they'll go, they'll evaluate a center pivot. They actually get a pivot watch with it, which is a device that stays with the farmer. They can watch how much water and and record how much water they're actually putting on their field. And the irrigation program assessments basically help our farmers reduce their water usage.
Pete Rusin:
30:02
In that way, we think it's more of an economic development, and keeping that farmer in business is more important than maybe reducing a little electricity use. It's really the water use that we're after on that one, and no one doesn't wanna use water efficiently. It's such
Melissa Swinehart:
30:15
a gold resource here
Julia Perry:
30:17
in the West.
Pete Rusin:
30:18
But the problem is it's also expensive to get an irrigation audit. That's why we've partnered with USTA and others to write free no cost assessments to our irrigators. They might be irrigating fine. They might have all the best practices, but it's good to know to have an engineer on-site just to validate that because you might be doing that on one pivot, and they might be like, here, if you do it here, yeah, you have 20 pivots that you own. Take all these practices of these other pivots.
Pete Rusin:
30:42
We can extend out that water resource underneath our feet.
Julia Perry:
30:44
Going on shoots, I didn't realize that, A, all of your fields might not be next to each other. So if all of a sudden you need to go turn off one of your pivots and it's an hour away, that's when you see people, like, racing down through their fields trying to get to their pivot to turn it off. So all the smart technologies and the Wi Fi enabled stuff, it's really such a huge boon, especially when you have to cover all of these distances and you're working on such a large scale and everything's so expensive.
Pete Rusin:
31:11
Yep. And that's part two of the irrigation plan. It's, I guess, for assessing, but then next step is adding the equipment so they can remote control their pivots. But what's funny though, you talk about an hour. Like, when you're in rural America, an hour's not a big deal.
Pete Rusin:
31:21
Within a course of a day, they might drive three or four hours. And so when you think of things like EVs and the adoption rate, like, what we're excited about is that the next set of trucks from Chevy or the trucks that are out from Chevy, the next ones coming out from Ram and from Ford are able to go 400 plus miles. You can get to multiple pivots. You can get to the hospital and back to your house and then back out to the hour drive down to the town to get your medicine and back to your medicine all in one charge. We finally are starting to have the vehicles that will impact their lives in a positive manner in terms of being able to to run a full day without worrying about a charge.
Julia Perry:
31:54
You just listed 9,000,000 things.
Pete Rusin:
31:56
Yeah.
Julia Perry:
31:56
That's a lot of stuff that you're juggling right now. Why are you doing so much? What's the drive behind that?
Pete Rusin:
32:02
There's two reasons. One, we had a target the regulatory target. If you look at what we did in 2022 in terms of rebates and energy efficiency savings for our target, for this year, we'd have to grow our programs over five times. We pulled on every single string. Like, what can we do?
Pete Rusin:
32:21
Where can we find any bit of savings? And then we looked at, okay, what has the most best cost benefit? Yes. There's a lot going on, but we needed to have a lot going on because there is no way that we're gonna meet our regulatory goals with having programs for all of our members. And the other thing that's behind it being the cooperative world.
Pete Rusin:
32:36
It's important to have programs for all of our members. And we really haven't talked about the cooperative ecosystem, but by working together in all these different homes and businesses, you mentioned a little bit that we can grow all these electrical sales as much as we can without having a huge impact on the overall system demand. And what we do in one spot, you know, what we do on the Eastern Plains and reducing some efficiency load there might also help their neighbor add some oil and gas load without affecting the overall demand of the system.
Julia Perry:
33:05
Reg Rudolph has a dream that one day, all of the co-ops will be vertically integrated and will be so efficient, will ascend. You know?
Pete Rusin:
33:14
Yeah. No. It is. That's that's the idea. I remember four or five years ago, people talked about the cooperative business model is broken.
Pete Rusin:
33:20
It can't serve. And if you look at the world today, it's actually the best business model. The money, the profits go back to the members. It goes back to the people on the street. We are driven to ride electricity at the lowest cost possible.
Pete Rusin:
33:33
All our choices are built around reliability and affordability, and the best way to do that is make sure money flows back to our members and not to a shareholder. The future's bright.
Julia Perry:
33:41
What do you find the most rewarding about working at Tri-State?
Pete Rusin:
33:45
The most rewarding thing that I find is our, basically, insulation heat pumps that we're doing in rural areas through our weatherization agencies and or through the on bill program. Going back to your question about, like, where I started Northeast Denver housing, that was basically poor areas of Denver and helping families become healthier homes and their kids seeing them have reduced levels of lead and that, it to me, my most rewarding thing is, like, on the energy side, seeing people's utility bills go down because they've insulated. They added a heat pump or seeing their lives expand because they only had wood, and now they can go out. They can leave their house. They can go explore and do other things.
Pete Rusin:
34:23
The most rewarding thing is I can see the impact of their lives and how it can be approved through just two simple things, insulation and heat pump.
Julia Perry:
34:31
I've tried using a wood pellet stove. I couldn't get it lit the second time before we were going to sleep, so and I couldn't tell if I turned the gas off successfully. And it was still cold, but we cracked one of the windows because I was like, I think we're gonna die inhaling gas overnight because I couldn't get this started.
Pete Rusin:
34:51
That's the great thing. As you start to electrify, for the most part, you are living in a safer home. If you have a big one we do see is induction cooktops. They're much safer. If you have kids out there, especially, your kids can touch the top of the stove.
Pete Rusin:
35:04
They won't get burned. It's electric, you don't have any fumes coming off. You don't have any worry about any carbon monoxide poisoning off of that. It is one of the safest appliances that you can put in your home, but it's got education that to give people like, if you're building a new home, if you're replacing your stove, get an induction cooktop. That's why it's important to us.
Pete Rusin:
35:22
It really means an impactful thing to our members' lives.
Speaker 5:
35:25
Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.
