NPPD seeing high interest in renewable projects for Monolith

 


Interest has been high on a request for proposal (RFP) to provide nearly two million megawatt hours of renewable electricity by Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) to support Monolith Materials for its green hydrogen and carbon black operations in Hallam.

The RFP proposal, issued earlier this year, received bids for wind, solar and energy storage projects. The utility is in the midst of developing a short list of proposals from the bids received. Projects could be located physically within the Southwest Power Pool footprint with preference to those projects located within Nebraska.

Announced in January, in order to facilitate Monolith Materials’ proposed $1 billion expansion of its Olive Creek facility (OC2) near Hallam, NPPD and Monolith signed a letter-of-intent outlining the companies’ intentions to procure enough renewable energy resources to generate two million megawatt-hours annually.

“The approximately two million megawatt-hours of generation would create a sufficient number of renewable energy certificates (RECs) to meet 100 percent of Monolith’s average annual energy usage and meet their environmental and sustainability goals,” said Tom Kent, NPPD president and CEO. “While we are adding additional generation resources, NPPD will continue to maintain our highly competitive rates, which was one of the reasons Monolith moved its operations to Nebraska. We are interested in pursuing locations where the local community welcomes these types of investments in wind and solar projects.”

That short list is expected to be completed later this summer with successful respondents being notified this fall, followed by contract negotiations and eventual Board approval. Kent indicated expectations are that all operations would be in place by Dec. 31, 2025.

A total of 28 different companies provided responses for a mix of wind, solar, storage and clean energy products. This included 21 wind projects totaling nearly 4,000 megawatts, 33 projects for solar amounting to approximately 5,800 megawatts and electric storage projects amounting to 2,200 megawatts.

The majority of proposals provided locations within Nebraska.

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