Harrison and crew keep the power on in Holton

When Holton’s residences and businesses crank up their air condi­tioners in the heat of the summer, the amount of energy used to run hundreds of air conditioners tends to mount up.

Ira Harrison is there to make sure that the City of Holton can handle the power load.

“Typically, when the tempera­ture reaches 85 to 90, we’ll gener­ate when it’s really, really hot, up until about 11 p.m. to midnight,” said Harrison, the city’s electrical production superintendent since the beginning of 2011. “I don’t know how many hours we’ve run this year as far as generating hours, but it’s been pretty consistent with the last three years.”

Harrison is in charge of the city’s power plant, located at the north edge of Holton and in service for more than 100 years. The city pur­chases the majority of its electric power from outside sources, but Harrison and his crew watch over a system of eight dual-fuel power generators that can provide up to 21 megawatts of energy for the city during the summer months.

The city gets most of that pur­chased power from the EMP3 power pool through the Kansas Municipal Energy Agency, along with three megawatts “around the clock” from Oklahoma’s Grand River Dam Authority, Harrison said. The city also gets power al­lotments from the Western Area Power Administration and Kansas City Power and Light, he added.

“With all of that baseload stuff coming in,” Harrison said, “it’s somewhere around 4,600 kilowatts. Anything between that and 8 megawatts is what we purchase from the EMP3 marketplace, which has been a really good place to buy energy.”

Once the load gets over that 8 megawatt mark, the city turns on its own generators, he said — a re­quirement of the city due to inter­connection restrictions. During the summer, he noted, the city has an average daily peak of about 11.5 megawatts, which is less than the average daily peak of about 12.7 megawatts noted when Alamo Group Holton was in operation.

It’s certainly a different type of operation from the way the city was running its power plant when Harrison started working there in 1983, he said. At that time, the city was generating all of its own electric power.

“Back then, we had some cool­ing issues with some of our gen­erators,” he said. “We had five units that we could run. Come summertime, we were stringing garden hoses out for the radiators just to get enough cooling in. We had everything in the plant run­ning.”

Nowadays, the city usually just runs three of its eight generators, unless the plant needs to turn on more generators to handle an in­terruption of power from its outside sources. Harrison said that when the city loses its power, his crew can get the power back up and run­ning in less than an hour in most cases.

“Our guys have a 30-minute re­sponse time, and I think some of our guys pretty much sleep with their eyes open,” he said. “Some­times, it could be 15 minutes. The worst-case scenario might take us two hours, but usually, we’re up and running within the hour.”

So far this year, Harrison said there haven’t been any major out­ages in terms of outside power coming through the city’s “tie transformer,” although there have been times that the city’s genera­tors have had to run to handle scheduled outages from those out­side sources.

Harrison’s department is one of two that gets electric power to the city’s utility customers, the other being Scott Frederickson’s electri­cal distribution department. Harrison said his crew handles dis­patch calls for Frederickson’s crew, and while “they don’t generate, nor do we do line work,” the two crews work closely on making sure Holton doesn’t go dark.

“It’s a real good relationship between us. And you know what? It has to be,” Harrison said with a laugh.

The most important part of Harrison’s job, he said, is “making decisions,” although that’s basi­cally the most important job of anyone working at the power plant. His department employs a total of six full-time employees and three part-time employees, and some of them work at all hours of the night at the plant.

“All the guys are on the same page,” he said. “My newest opera­tor has been here for probably around six months, and the next in line has been here for 14 years. They’re still training them at this point, but everybody’s been here long enough to know what we’ve got going on here.”

What’s most important to them, especially in emergency situations, is keeping a cool head at all times, even when the high temperatures inside the power plant prevent crew members from staying cool in terms of the heat. Still, being mindful of “all the little bits and pieces” that keep the plant in op­eration is of highest importance, Harrison said.

It’s what helped him make the transition from operator to produc­tion superintendent when Gene Williams retired at the end of 2011.

“Gene was just a really good guy to work for, and following in his footsteps just made it easy for me to fill his shoes,” Harrison said of Williams. “His calmness, in any situation, just made it an easy work environment for all of us, because it’s a stressful place, especially in emergency situations.”

Again, Harrison said, rising above the stress is a necessity, par­ticularly in such “emergency situa­tions.” And that’s something he noted his crew is capable of doing.

“We haven’t had any big issues so far this year, but we have in the past,” he said. “Sometimes, you have to go out and work alongside an engine that’s running. You have to run it just to find out what the problem is some­times… Keeping on top of things before it gets to that point is always an is­sue.”