Letter to Minnesota Legislators
April 16, 2007
During the April 12 Senate Energy hearing, Sen. Ellen Anderson suggested that I was less than truthful in a letter I sent to legislators in rebuttal of a Star Tribune editorial. It should be pointed out that the letter was intended to correct statements in a newspaper editorial, not to create an historical record of the Minnesota Public Utilities hearing process. My letter to legislators was accurate.
In the editorial, the newspaper criticized the seven utilities involved in the Big Stone II project for never considering the costs associated with capturing or trading carbon dioxide. Since the Star Tribune editorial did not refer to the Public Utilities Commission record, there really was no reason for me to refer to it in my rebuttal. Moreover, the Public Utilities Commission's own rules provide that the "environmental cost" value for carbon dioxide be zero for power plants located outside Minnesota. We used this value and all other commission-adopted values for power plant emissions in our integrated resources planning process and in the hearing before the Public Utilities Commission. Given those conditions, there was little need for us to respond to the PUC record, and Sen. Anderson's criticism of my letter was misdirected.
The editorial's contention that the Big Stone II utilities never considered the cost associated with capturing or trading carbon dioxide is simply not true. Had they called to ask us, we could have clarified that the project specifically performed analysis regarding the impact of monetized carbon dioxide costs and presented that information in great detail to the Public Utilities Commissions in both Minnesota and South Dakota. The costs were also discussed publicly and at great length in testimony before the House Energy Committee. This testimony would not have been possible without first conducting in-depth cost studies. What we haven't done, apparently to the consternation of Senator Anderson and the Star Tribune's editorial board, is accept without question the monetized values for carbon dioxide that opponents of the project have proposed both to the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission (and which were rejected) and now the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.
Missouri River Energy Services, and all of the other Big Stone II partners, have exhaustively studied the costs of the project. Even in light of a carbon constrained future, our analysis continues to show that the Big Stone II plant remains the most cost-efficient way of supplying needed baseload energy to our customers.
Sincerely,
Thomas Heller,
Chief Executive Officer,
Missouri River Energy Services
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