By Tom Kleckner
Competitive transmission company GridLiance announced Monday it had closed its acquisition of about 410 miles of 69- and 115-kV transmission lines and related substation infrastructure from Tri-County Electric Cooperative (TCEC) in the Oklahoma Panhandle.
GridLiance CEO Ed Rahill called the transmission acquisition — GridLiance’s first —”an important milestone” for its business model to partner with cooperatives and other public power agencies.
GridLiance, which was formed in 2014, acquired Tri-County’s transmission assets and assumed full operational responsibility through its South Central MCN subsidiary, effective April 1. Under the transaction’s terms, GridLiance will represent the co-op and its members’ interest “in planning and development of new transmission projects within” SPP, the company said.
The company announced the deal in September. (See GridLiance Makes First Acquisitions.)
Rahill said his company would assume operations and maintenance responsibility for Tri-County’s assets, with the latter’s “boots on the ground” employees providing some O&M services.
“Over the long term, we can provide TCEC with a clear path to invest in SPP transmission projects that will reduce network congestion, increase service reliability and lower service costs,” Rahill said.
Tri-County CEO Jack Perkins said the move will allow the co-op to focus on its distribution system, with GridLiance upgrading the transmission assets. “Equally as important, we look forward to jointly investing with them in transmission projects that were previously inaccessible to us,” he said in a statement.
Headquartered in Hooker, Okla., the cooperative serves about 23,000 meters in the Oklahoma Panhandle, southwestern Kansas, the northern border of the Texas Panhandle and parts of Colorado and New Mexico.
GridLiance says its planning and development models are focused on providing more reliable transmission to public power customers, “hedging rising costs for regionally planned projects.” In addition to jointly planning, developing, owning and operating new transmission assets, GridLiance says it will work with entities such as Tri-County to identify “existing transmission infrastructure that can be more efficiently and cost-effectively upgraded and integrated into their RTO.”
GridLiance also announced Monday additions to its operations and compliance teams with the appointments of several regional-industry veterans to leadership positions: Kevin Hopper (late of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc.), president of the SPP Region; Neal Chapman (LS Power), vice president of engineering; and Jim Useldinger (Kansas City Power & Light), vice president of operations.
All three will be based in GridLiance’s Kansas City office and directly oversee the newly acquired TCEC transmission assets’ engineering and operations functions. The company said they will work with COO Noman Williams and Trent Carlson, regulatory and compliance vice president, to “build out its platform into other regions.”
GridLiance has also added several former SPP employees in recent months, including Brett Hooton, the RTO’s senior interregional coordinator, and Jody Holland, its manager of steady-state planning.
GridLiance is backed by Blackstone Energy Partners, an affiliate of New York private equity giant Blackstone Group.
