Photo Taken by Patrick Calahan

Volume 7Issue 6June, 2017

Hometown

Pierre

Volume 7Issue 6June, 2017

Ryan Grant gave me fairly good directions to find the Pierre Municipal Electric office. I still continued to drive right past it on the way to visit. It didn’t take long to realize that I was now at the Pierre Regional Airport and needed to turn around. It was very reassuring when I decided to turn south and saw transformer after transformer behind a building. I had found it, although, I did feel foolish for driving right by the first time.

I met ES Ryan Grant for the first time at the Superintendent/Foreman conference and he has made a point to send me pictures of electrical improvements that have been taking place. Including new lighting at the causeway and neat pictures taken from an airplane at night that revealed new LED lighting scattered throughout the city.

Photo taken by Patrick Calahan

Picture: Pierre Causeway lights.

Pierre Municipal Electric is located in a 30,000 square foot building that looks like it could field an arena football team. Bucket trucks, vac machines, skid loaders, and anything else an electrical department could dream of sits inside the building. The office houses the electrical superintendent’s office (Ryan Grant) and also has a meeting room with 4 desks for each of the crew leaders (two man crews). Each crew has a Diesel four door Ford equipped with a boom and lift gate.

Picture: Yard at the shop.

Picture: Crew changing a pad mount switch.

Picture: Inside of the shop.

Ryan informed me that the City of Pierre is 100% underground and put in a new substation in 2013 and have 2 major upgrades coming in 2017 and 2018. Once completed, 3 of the 4 substations will be upgraded as well as distribution totaling about 10 Million dollars. They will be replacing feeder lines, and pad mount switches from oil to vacuum. The cost of the switches will total about 3 million alone.
Pierre also now replaces light poles with fiberglass poles that are set with a foam mixture to hold the poles in place rather than having to pour concrete.

Picture: Fiberglass street light poles.

The City of Pierre has also converted to AMI and has replaced 7500 Electrical and 6500 water. I asked about resistance from any customers and Ryan told me that 2 of the 7500 did have issues with the city putting in AMI. Currently the water and wastewater system uses SCADA and electrical will be upgrading in the next couple of years to monitor load.

The Pierre Electrical Department is also responsible for maintaining the 1MW solar farm that is owned by Pierre Solar and has a power purchase agreement with Missouri River Energy Services. The solar farm produces about 1,932 MWh which provides enough energy to power over 200 homes. The farm sits on 8.5 acres with the 4,284 multi-crystalline panels covering roughly 5 of the 8.5 acres. There is an interconnection to the City of Pierre Distribution System and there are 42-24kW String Inverters.

I enjoyed visiting with Ryan and appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the Pierre Municipal Electric Department. Ryan and his crew have much to be proud of in their department and it was easy to see what makes their HOMETOWN great!

Back row L to R: Jon Petrick, Landon Starks, Rex Newling, Devin Harris, Ryan Grant. Front row L to R: Matt Scott, Steve Kuiper, Cory Schwartz, Dave Kietzmann, Steve Valland.

Questions? Comments? Email me at all Chris: 605-770-6299