**Title**: Energy in the North - Nathan Minnema
**Date**: May 21, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Nathan Minnema

00;00;00;07 - 00;00;10;21 [Nathan Minnema] Wind forecasting and knowing what that plant's going to generate a day in advance is super helpful with looking into the crystal ball of the generation plan for the upcoming day.

00;00;10;21 - 00;00;17;13 [Amanda Byrd This week on energy in the North, I speak with Golden Valley Electric Association chief operating officer Nathan Minnema. When Nathan first started at GVEA in 2011, he was working on building a substation near the now 25 megawatt Eva Creek Wind Farm near Healy. The 12-turbine wind farm came online in 2012. And I started the conversation by asking Nathan about the logistical challenge of building the wind farm.

00;00;37;03 - 00;00;43;17 [Nathan Minnema] Yeah, no, it's quite a challenge because Eva Creek doesn't have direct road access. It's only through the railroad. So all the blades, all the turbine base sections, I mean, and then even going into, my part of the project is a little more of the substation side. So a transformer, I mean, these large heavy pieces of equipment all had to come on the railroad and then be offloaded at a rail siding at the bottom of the hill and then brought up. So, yeah, it was definitely a logistical challenge, you know, not to mention the road that went up there was, you know, basically a glorified four wheeler trail when at the start of the project. And so there was a big investment into getting the road traversable and then large enough to carry all this stuff up the hill. So it was just definitely a logistics challenge.

00;01;22;03 - 00;01;26;12 [Amanda Byrd] Each turbine has its own generator that produces direct current power.

00;01;26;13 - 00;01;38;21 [Nathan Minnema] Yeah. So if you think of like a large power plant where you have one large generator, you know, and we've got multiple large single generators on the system. You know, a wind farm or a solar plant's different in that you've got multiple smaller generators or multiple smaller inverters. Right. So you know, Eva Creek is a 25-megawatt site, but it's made up of 12 two-megawatt turbines. So each turbine is its own generator, which then generates to a little step up transformer at the base of of the turbine, which steps the voltage up a little bit higher, allows us to run the underground cables back to our substation. We have a substation that was built up on top of the hill as part of this project which taps the
intertie. And then we step the voltage up even higher to the 138,000 volts where it gets on to the transmission system and then flows to the load, which is flowing from Eva Creek to Fairbanks, generally speaking. So yeah, everything that's generated there is transmitted up to meet load requirements in Fairbanks and that'd be not unlike we would look at any other plant as far as like dispatching our generation to meet our load requirement. Wind forecasting and knowing what that plant's going to generate a day in advance is super helpful with looking into the crystal ball of the generation plan for the upcoming day. So to the extent that we can utilize wind forecasting, software and information is helpful, we have our algorithms now that will look at the weather profiles and we're trying to utilize that to the extent possible, the forecasting. So we know that, hey, we'd expect so much energy to be produced tomorrow for Eva Creek, and then that helps us plan out our other generation to balance the books, you know, so to speak, on the load generation needs.

00;03;13;26 - 00;03;19;08 [Amanda Byrd] In one way, it's like magic that the power is created by the wind in Healy and travels to Fairbanks. But it also sounds really complicated.

00;03;21;20 - 00;03;31;11 [Nathan Minnema] So behind everything that seems like magic, there's a really complicated spreadsheet that somebody is operating very well. We've got folks who are really good at what they do on the dispatch side and the power analyst side and the, you know, every role that touches that.

00;03;46;26 - 00;03;46;29 [Amanda Byrd] Nathan Minnema is the chief operating officer for Golden Valley Electric Association, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the ³ÉÈËӰƬ Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.