Generator test shows Luverne can supply its own power in outages

Brian Remme finally exhaled Sunday night after the new generators carried Luverne’s power on their own during a planned outage.
“That was a big sigh of relief; I can tell you that,” said Remme, Luverne’s electric utility supervisor.
“Everything worked properly and the equipment did what it was supposed to do. That was a big moment.”
He and city engineers have been working for months to prepare for that moment.
Earlier this year the city installed two 50,000-pound generators, 3 megawatts each, to join the city’s existing 1960s 3-megawatt generator in the power plant.
The goal of the $11 million generator project is to have backup power for the city in the event it is cut off from transmission lines that carry power into the city.
“These disaster events are usually caused by ice storms, tornadoes, straight line winds or possibly some type of disaster within the electrical grid system,” City Administrator John Call explained.
“The generators need to be tested in a real time situation to make sure that they are ready when called upon in the case of a real disaster.”
That happened Sunday night.
“It all went very well,” Call reported Tuesday. “They worked with each other … the two new caterpillar generators, and the old gal (the 1965 Allis Chalmers generator) pulled her weight.”
Call said the load for the entire evening was about 6 MW, which was enough to do a test, but not to affect too many businesses and residents.
“It went exactly as the engineers said it would,” he said. “We dropped all the line power coming into town from our transmission lines, and for 40 seconds to about a minute and a half we were out of power from our overhead transmission lines.”
The generators sensed the outage and kicked in, taking a few seconds to get up and running and to balance the load.
“We shut off all of our outside power coming into town, and it simulated to our generators, ‘Hey, we have to kick in and provide power to town,’” Call said.
“We let them run for an hour, and at 8 p.m. we turned line power back on. For 15 minutes they ran parallel (the line power and backup generator power), and then the generators sensed that they weren’t needed anymore and began their five-minute cooldown.”
Representatives from Caterpillar were on site working with Missouri River Energy Services to make sure transition went smoothly. 
The recent $11 million investment in Luverne’s power plant included roughly $8 million for the two new Caterpillar generators and $3 million for power plant building improvements.
MRES has an agreement with Luverne to pay $25,000 per month — $9 million — over the next 30 years to have “dispatchable” power available for the grid if needed.
“So, in the end, we have emergency generation and it’s being paid for over time,” Call said. “It was a great project, and we’re proud of it.”
For Remme’s part, he too, is proud of the outcome.
“It’s a big win for the city,” he said. “We carried the entire town that night on our own, and we were out for under two minutes. That’s a pretty fast response.”