NRECA Annual Meeting
Jon Brekke is Vice President and Chief Power Supply Officer of Great River Energy.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: What's your role here?
Jon Brekke: I'm Vice President and Chief Power Supply Officer. In that role, I have resource planning responsibilities, market oversight, contracts and rates, and a renewable energy acquisition for the company, which is one of our largest areas of growth.
PUF: How large is your utility?
Jon Brekke: Our utility is about a twenty-six hundred-megawatt peak demand system. We serve twenty-eight-member distribution cooperatives in Minnesota. We have forty-seven hundred miles of transmission in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and parts of North Dakota, and we're a generation and transmission cooperative.
We also serve about two-thirds of the land area of the state of Minnesota, through our member distribution cooperatives. One of those cooperatives serves a small part of northwest Wisconsin as well.
Almost all of our load is in Minnesota. It runs roughly from the northeast corner of Minnesota, all the way down through the St. Cloud area in central Minnesota and down to the southwest part of the state, where it hits the Iowa border.
PUF: Speaking to the renewables, you're in a windy part of the country.
Jon Brekke: We are. We have a lot of wind in our portfolio. We're adding a lot more. Today we have four hundred and seventy megawatts of wind. We'll be over a thousand megawatts of wind in our portfolio by 2021.