Co-op board members learn how waste heat is captured.
Highline Electric Association, headquartered in Holyoke, serves consumer-members in Phillips, Logan, Sedgwick, Yuma, Washington, Weld and Morgan counties in Colorado, and members in Chase, Dundy, Deuel and Perkins counties in Nebraska. That’s a lot of counties, but not a lot of consumers. The co-op only has two meters per mile of line and even fewer actual members. The co-op is rural and dependent on its irrigation loads for about half of its sales.
Highline General Manager Mark Farnsworth shared that information and more with the visiting Colorado Rural Electric Association board when it met in Sterling for its annual spring meeting on the road.
Farnsworth also touted the unique waste-heat plant at Trailblazer Pipeline Compressor Station 601 and took the group for a tour of the station as well as the nearby NextEra Energy wind farm. Trailblazer, just south of the Nebraska state line and owned by Tallgrass Energy, compresses natural gas and pushes about 900 million cubic feet of that gas per day along its 436-mile path. Compressing that gas and raising the pressure of the gas in the pipeline takes energy and generates heat.
Originally that heat was exhausted into the sky. But Highline Electric had the idea to convert that waste heat into electricity. A partnership was established and today a heat exchanger captures that heat and, through a complicated process, turns a turbine to generate electricity. About 4.5 megawatts is generated annually. And because this electricity is generated without any fuel, it saves 27,600 tons of carbon dioxide from being pumped into the air each year.
It is a unique and innovative way to generate electricity on the northeastern plains of Colorado.