Area’s business energy needs focus at Minden meeting

Chris Reilly, state infrastructure coordinator for the Office of Gov. Joe Lombardo, posed a question to a panel of energy and industry leaders Wednesday.

“So, we’re a transformer recruiting team here, everybody?” he asked to audience laughter. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

Reilly wasn’t referring to the movie franchise but to a discussion about the kind of infrastructure needed to power Northern Nevada’s growing industrial economy, from battery manufacturing to data centers.

Put another way, the discussion revolved around the power grid’s current capacity versus future capacity needed for the region’s overarching economic development vision.

Organized by the Northern Nevada Development Authority, the event was held at Carson Valley Inn in Minden and drew a sizeable crowd. Reilly served as event moderator.

“Think about NV Energy Northern Nevada, which is our old Sierra Pacific footprint,” said Jeff Brigger, director of business development and major accounts for NV Energy. “It goes from Reno east to Elko, south to Tonopah, well over a 100-year-old company that can trace its roots back to the Comstock Lode up in Virginia City. So, a pretty historic past. We’ve been serving the community for a long time. It took us all those years to get to roughly 2 gigawatts of load of hot-summer-day-heat demand in our service territory… 2,000 megawatts.”

Currently, Brigger said, NV Energy has signed contracts with customers that would double that energy need.

“And we’re in the process of studying or developing service options for companies that are requesting load that will be 3 or 4 times what that already is,” he said. “I don’t think anybody could have thought or even foresaw this type of growth.”

Power generation and transmission will be crucial as more companies come online, and Brigger argued a balanced approached is needed.

“There is a lot of risk that we have to mitigate. There is a lot of capital that we will need to deploy. And we want to make sure that it doesn’t impact our existing customer base and drives rates up, and then we’re in the position where we have too expensive rates, and we’re no longer supporting economic development,” he said.

Prompted by Reilly, Brigger described supply-chain issues affecting energy infrastructure.

“Really transformers, transmission breakers… the time frames on acquiring these have gone out sometimes three or four years, so I think that is a great opportunity, right, for the state to maybe start looking at, in partnership with our economic development organizations like NNDA, to find some of these types of companies and on-shore them back to the U.S.,” he said. “We buy a lot of this from overseas suppliers.”

After Reilly’s point about a “transformer recruiting team,” private-public cooperation became a theme of the conversation. Two eager energy customers flanked Brigger on the panel: Dennis Bartlett, vice president of utility development for Tract, and Rick Nelson, senior vice president of Mark IV Capital and a retired U.S. Marine Corps major general.

Tract, which Bartlett described as a data center land development company, is developing areas at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Storey County known as Peru Shelf and South Valley. Bartlett said the “planning horizons” for the projects are long.

“I think the headline (is) we’ve been told the projects are anticipated to consume about 2 gigawatts of power, but we’re not taking any megawatts until early 2027, and we are going to be growing into that over the extent of 10 to 15 years,” he said.

Bartlett added the company is trying to enable NV Energy to plan long term.

“And a lot of that frankly involves putting money down today to support what can be done in the future,” he said.

Mark IV Capital is developing the Victory Logistics District in Fernley for manufacturers, data centers and distributors on the south side of I-80 as well as housing on the north side of the freeway for future employees.

Discussing on-site power generation, Nelson said small modular nuclear power is being explored.

“If we could find a way to break through that and create energy locations, then that changes the dynamic of how power is put out there,” he said.

Nelson also mentioned natural gas generation, geothermal sources, solar power, and a potential tech hub in Fernley.

“You talk about batteries, advanced materials, lithium… all that is swirling around Northern Nevada,” he said. “I’m working with the governor’s office to have that land in Fernley, to make Fernley the center of excellence for advanced matter materials and a technology hub. That’s why the schools are coming. That’s why we’re discussing modular nuclear. There are a lot of different things happening, and we’re trying to make this the new Northern Nevada technical location for all these advanced materials.”

Brigger pointed out the projects represented Wednesday alone would more than double the existing energy demand in Northern Nevada. He mentioned NV Energy’s Greenlink project as a step forward in meeting demand.

“Greenlink is made up of two parts. Greenlink West will be a 525 kV (kilovolt) line that spans approximately 350 miles from Las Vegas to Yerington,” according to the company’s website. “NV Energy anticipates construction on Greenlink to begin in the first quarter of 2025. Greenlink West is expected to be in service by May 2027.

“Greenlink North will be a 525 KV line that spans approximately 235 miles from Ely to Yerington. Greenlink North is expected to be in service by December 2028. The project will also include three 345 kV lines from Yerington to the Reno area.”

Bartlett noted the future of power concerns more than industrial development.

“The power grid has seen this type of growth before, but it’s been a long time, really since the postwar era, and there are so many more hurdles to navigate now than there were back then,” he said. “We have to think about air emissions. We have to think about greenhouse gas emissions. We have to think about water stress. We have to think about habitat and environmental resources.

“And so, the challenges to plan, permit and construct these large infrastructure projects across transmission and generation, they’ve really never been higher, but it’s the time they’re needed the most. Large loads like data centers are grabbing a lot of headlines now, but they really are just one of a first wave of increasing needs on the power system.”

Bartlett said navigating the energy needs of data centers, for example, can be part of a broader solution that “supports economic development, enables load growth across all sectors, and opens up avenues for other industrial customers to be here in Northern Nevada in the future.”

“The things that we do today will really have an impact for the decade to come,” he said.