Energy Keepers’ director: hydropower business is booming
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POLSON — The Seliš Ksanka Qĺispe Dam is bustling with business.
That’s the word from Travis Togo, director of power management at Energy Keepers, which operates the dam for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
Energy Keepers, Inc., which took over operations in September 2015 after CSKT purchased the former Kerr Dam for $18.28 million from NorthWestern Energy, and the tribes “have really put Polson on the map,” Togo said May 3 at the Polson Chamber of Commerce’s monthly luncheon at KwaTaqNuk Resort.
He said that the two entities “have really turned Polson into a hot spot of interstate commerce.”
The hydroelectric operations at the dam provide energy for eight or nine of the state’s top 21 companies, Togo said. Some examples include the Phillips 66 Refinery in Billings, Cenex, Benefits Health System of Great Falls and Project Spokane, a data center at the former Bonner mill in Milltown east of Missoula.
“There are a lot of energy producers in Montana,” Togo said, noting that Energy Keepers is an independent power provider that transmits power over high-voltage lines.
Some of that energy goes to out-of-state customers, including the MGM Resort in Las Vegas and other places in the Southwest.
“The whole American West is the size of the market,” he said.“The commercial side of our business is really going well. We hope to have all of the large customers in Montana when Colstrip shuts down.” (Talen Energy’s Colstrip Power Plant east of Billings operates four coal-fired generating units, but two are slated to shut down by July 2022.)
Energy in Montana was provided by Montana Power Co., Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL Corp.), Talen and Riverstone prior to deregulation in the late 1990s, Togo said. Now energy is bought and sold on the open market, and there are a lot of players in the market in Montana, he said.
Energy Keepers is a buyer and seller of electricity “every hour of every day,” he said, adding that wind has a huge impact on the price of electricity.
Some recent prices per megawatt hour ranged from $21 to $22, although it was at $17.50 at one point last year, he said.
The dam, which was built in 1938 on the Lower Flathead River and named after Montana Power Co.’s then-president Frank Kerr, has three units that are “in good condition,” Togo said.
He noted that the company makes a substantial capital investment in maintenance each year, including bearings and spill gates, for example, but declined to say how much was budgeted currently for such.
He said the dam could have “many decades” of life left.
However, he noted that any infestation of zebra or quagga mussels in Flathead Lake would lead to all types of problems with the dam’s operations.
Energy Keepers gets a lot of phone calls from the public with concerns about the lake’s water level being too low or too high, but the company pretty much keeps it near seasonal averages most of the time, he said. This comes in spite of dramatic seasonal climate changes as seen in the spring of 2015, when almost no recorded rainfall fell in the area, and in the “pretty epic” rainfall received in the fall of 2016. Some places registered up to a 300-percent increase in rain last October and November, he said.
In addition, it rained for nearly 60 days straight in March and April this year, Togo said, but the lake was at 2,888 feet on the last day of April, which he
