A Day at the North Dakota Public Service Commission

摘要

The North Dakota Public Service Commission has its home within the State Capitol building, the tallest in Bismarck, at twenty-one stories. The PUF team landed there in August, missing by a day, temperatures well over one-hundred degrees. Everyone knows about North Dakota's thirty degrees below in February, but not that some of the highest summer temperatures in the nation often are recorded there too. The State is energy rich, and many places in the nation would like to tap into that excess. North Dakota has long been a lignite coal producer and is the second largest producer of oil in the country. But it is graced with geology allowing for carbon capture and storage, recently permitted by the Commission. It's also a nation-leading producer of wind power in the Great Plains, making transmission of utmost importance, as the State sits within MISO and SPP.