Missouri River Energy Services
Tom Heller is the CEO of Missouri River Energy Services.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Tell us about the vastness and breadth of Missouri River Energy Services.
Tom Heller: We've got sixty-one member cities in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa. We were formed because the old U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Power was marketed in our region and a lot of these little cities that were never connected to anything shut down their little local power plants and bought hydropower from the Bureau of Reclamation.
That's where our name comes from, Missouri River Energy Services, because even today, our members get an average of about forty percent of their power from the Missouri River.
We were formed because we all had a mutual interest of getting power over and above what the federal government can provide us in hydropower. There are a lot of challenges with that when we have the State of Minnesota that has regulations and rules in how we have to operate, as well as North and South Dakota where they're vastly different in the way they approach things.
PUF: For example, on decarbonization, Minnesota is going one way and North Dakota is going in another direction.