SDMEA Hometown Power – Pierre

By Chris Hill, SDMEA Director of Municipal Electric Services

HOMETOWN - Pierre

Ryan Grant gave me fairly good directions to find the Pierre Municipal Electric office. I still continued to drive 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

Aerial view of the city at night. Photo by Patrick Callahan. building. I had found it, although, I did feel foolish for driving by the first time.

I met Electrical Superintendent (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.

Inside of the Pierre Municipal Electric Shop.

Pierre Causeway lights. Pierre Municipal Electric Shop Yard.

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

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 four desks for each of the crew leaders (two man crews). Each crew has a diesel four door Ford equipped with a boom and a lift gate.

Ryan informed me that the City of Pierre is 100% underground and put in a new substation in 2013 and two 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. They will be replacing feeder lines, and pad mount switches from oil to vacuum. The cost of the switches will total $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.

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 only two of the 7,500 customers had an issue with the conversion to AMI. Currently the water and wastewater system uses SCADA and electrical will be upgrading in the next couple of years to monitor the 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 4,24 multicrystalline panels covering roughly five of the 8.5 acres. There is 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 to be proud of in their department and it was easy to see what makes their HOMETOWN great!

Questions? Comments?

Email: Chris@sdmunicipalleague.org Call: 605-770-6299

Pierre Municipal Electric crew members changing a pad mount switch.

Fiberglass street light poles.