Legalectric

It’s been old home week, errrrrr, month, for Xcel Energy at the Red Wing City Council. The February 6th meeting was pretty wild, Xcel “decommissioning” the emergency warning sirens and transferring costs to us (!) and their Emergency Plan. Here’s the poop on that meeting. But now, we’ve got more Xcel news. At the February 26th meeting, Xcel dropped in for a presentation on the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) and their application for additional casks at Prairie Island filed at the same time with the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). I’d given the Council a heads up on both a month ago so they had some time to get acquainted with the subjects.

More Nuclear Waste Casks at PINGP?

February 7th, 2024

Xcel’s new Integrated Resource Plan

February 5th, 2024

Ross Lexvold presented for Xcel, starting with the IRP, going on and on about the process and how “stakeholders” participated. Next time, how about sending the staff a pdf for the packet? They never do it until the last minute, and it’d be helpful.

To watch the meeting, go HERE — he starts ~7.:22

He walked them through a compressed version of the process. And interesting point is that they plan to extend the garbage burner’s permit for 20 years when it expires in 2027 (now, about that air permit?!?!). He also admitted they’d be using natural gas to back up wind and solar, discussed batters more a bit later. Yawn, nothing really exciting. Lexvold expects public meeting on the IRP to be in mid-June, and that our area was going to get a hearing (so we’d best pack the room, eh?).

It’s been accepted as Complete and referred to Office of Administrative Hearings. Comments are open now and there’s a lot of time to get through that pile o’ papers:

Note that he gave them the wrong url to get to the PUC dockets.

To get into a docket, go to the PUC’s eDockets page HERE, and redundantly click on “eDockets” at the bottom, and you’ll get here, as above, and under “search” and “year” plug in “24” and under “Number” plug in “67” and you’ll get all the documents. To view them, click on the number on the far left side:

Refer to this to get into the Prairie Island cask docket, that’s “24” and “68” – easy to remember.

And that’s a little more exciting. Xcel Energy has applied for additional casks for Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plan, E002/CN-24-68, filed just moments after the IRP. You can find the REVISED application here:

More Nuclear Waste Casks at PINGP?

It’s a weird application, seems to have been written by committee. The first 7 chapters really SUCK, and then starting with Chapter 8, it’s written more clearly (though there are focus problems in Chapter 9 again). Anyway, here’s what I’d filed Friday around 4p on behalf of Communities United for Responsible Energy:

That was the Initial round of Comments, and there are two more whacks at the apple:

Check the docket to see what all’s been filed, and get to it, there’s only a week!! What to write about? It’s to be a reply in response to the Initial Comments filed in answer to these questions — lots of wiggle room in that last one:

What’s most notable in this application is that they have sufficient storage capacity to last at least to 2033. WHY APPLY NOW? IT’S PREMATURE! They say they’re going to be relicensing for 20 years, the licenses expire in 2033/2034. That’s a decade away. Things are changing dramatically in the energy world, and who knows what will be happening then, what new ideas will be found for generation, how we can better conserve, etc. So that’s important to look at. Now is NOT the time for this.

And on that happy note, I’m done for the day!