Break energy problems down to the local level: How might an individual city wean itself from fossil fuel and do so in an economically viable way? The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Shakopee and Prior Lake will demonstrate with three renewable-energy projects underway this year. They’ll more than offset the tribe’s total annual electrical use of 12 megawatts.
The biggest is Koda Energy, a joint venture with Rahr Malting Company to produce heat and electricity by burning agricultural biomass. The tribe is a 51 percent partner. A $55 million power plant near Rahr’s Shakopee facility (photo above), due to fire up by December, will be fueled with byproducts such as grain husks from Rahr’s own operations and from cereal maker General Mills. Also feeding the burner will be native prairie grasses to be grown and harvested on the tribe’s land and elsewhere. The plant’s useful life span will be 60 or 70 years.
The Shakopee tribe’s entire annual electrical load for all residential and commercial uses, including the Mystic Lake and Little Six casinos, is about 12 megawatts, says Stan Ellison, manager of the tribe’s Department of Land and Natural Resources. The Koda plant will produce 20 megawatts. Rahr will buy a third of that, and use heat generated by the process—heat wasted by many power plants—to warm its own buildings. For the first few years, at least, the remaining electricity will be sold into the power grid. Given current prices paid to producers of renewable energy, and the discount the tribe gets as a major purchaser of electricity, selling what it generates makes more financial sense than using it.
Before Koda fires up, installation will begin in September on a 1.5- or 2-megawatt-capacity wind turbine next to the Shakopee Tribe’s Pow Wow Grounds. Studies of wind patterns in the area show that the turbine actually will produce about one-half megawatt of electricity per year—that alone is enough to offset the residential load of the reservation’s 300 households. The surplus juice will be metered back into the power grid by the Minnesota Valley Electrical Coop, says Ellison.
At a cost of about $2.5 million to $3 million to install, the turbine has a design life of 35 to 40 years and should pay for itself in the first 10, he adds.
Meanwhile, in a third project, scheduled to be up and running this summer at a capital cost of only about $60,000, discarded vegetable oil from restaurants at the casinos—28,000 gallons of it each year—will be converted into as much as 18,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel for the tribe’s vehicle fleet. And used motor oil collected in the big fleet maintenance shop will be burned to heat the shop itself, beginning this winter.
