Imagine you’re a local power company, and you have to supply electricity to a population that keeps growing like gangbusters. As the moving vans keep coming, you’re expected to keep pumping out more and more juice. How do you do that? Do you just build a new power plant and string up a bunch of power lines?
It turns out it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Take just one growing city, for example — St. Cloud, located on the southern edge of the Orlando metro area. Its population ballooned from 35,000 in 2010 to 59,000 in 2020 to more than 66,000 now, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That kind of growth is forcing the Orlando Utilities Commission to reach deep into its bag of tricks in order to supply enough electricity — especially given OUC’s increasing emphasis on renewable power. The relatively small municipal utility, which provides power and water to roughly a quarter-million customers in Orlando, St. Cloud and unincorporated Orange County, has committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, as well as interim targets of 50% reduction by 2030 and 75% by 2040.
“It’s an interesting and exciting time in the utility industry. The industry is literally pivoting” to renewable energy sources, says Michael Murtagh, who’s billed as OUC’s chief transformation and technology officer. “It’s in a very disruptive era, which is good.”
Among OUC’s strategies for St. Cloud:
It recently opened what it calls Florida’s first net-zero campus there, a $67-million, 24-acre facility with a fleet maintenance center, a warehouse, and room for future offices and a power substation. State-of-the-art technology enables the facility to use 50% less energy and 40% less water than conventional ones of similar size. It even has rainwater cisterns.
The utility is building two 75-megawatt solar plants in Osceola County, each comprised of nearly 300,000 panels that will track the sun during the day for maximum power generation. Once these are finished near the end of the year, OUC’s collective solar energy capacity will reach 274 megawatts, enough to power about 50,000 homes. “From a cost standpoint, solar continues to become more and more affordable. That’s very important,” Murtagh says. “We want to provide reliability, resiliency and sustainability — but also affordability.”
To help carry all that solar power to customers, OUC is building a 21-mile major transmission line extending from unincorporated Osceola County to unincorporated Orange County. This is a lynchpin of an effort to expand electric infrastructure as demand grows.
In June, OUC installed a $5-million battery energy storage system, by far the largest battery the utility has ever built, at a substation in east St. Cloud.
Why build a 4-megawatt energy storage battery? They did it because solar power is by its nature intermittent, so the battery stores solar energy to be used when the solar plants aren’t operating.
“Florida is called the Sunshine State, but we really have almost 280 cloudy days per year. So you may only have solar generation that runs at full power for five to eight hours a day. But people expect to have reliable, resilient power,” Murtagh says. “We’ve had batteries before, but this is on a larger scale. This is the first, not the last, that we’ll be doing.”