With winter weather already here, losing power in a storm means staying around a cold house waiting for it to come back on – which could take a while.

To prevent this scenario, Ames has a plan to create a system of electric transmission lines to neighboring towns.

“It’s important to have enough generation of power to serve the city,” said Donald Kom, director of Ames Electric Services. “Interconnecting to other towns provides reliability and support.”

Brian Trower, associate director of Ames Electric Services, said in 2002 that a study showed Ames would need more power transmission to keep up with demand. At that time, there was a 69-kilovolt line connecting to Boone. The study showed that if the line were upgraded to 161 kV and a similar line was established elsewhere, Ames would have enough power for its people.

“Boone was an obvious upgrade choice – we already had a connection established there,” said Lyndon Cook, electrical engineering manager for Ames. “For the other line, Ankeny rose to the top the pack for towns that could help us.”

The main reason for creating a system like this is redundancy – having one system pick up slack after the failure of another.

“We have to plan for contingencies. With this system, if some equipment goes down here, we can get power from Boone and Ankeny, and vice versa,” Kom said. “People hate to have the lights out for a few minutes. Having them out for hours or days could be life-threatening, depending on the conditions.”

Recent issues with some of Ames’ generators have shown the usefulness of a project like this. One of Ames’ two main generators, Unit 7, experienced several failures over the summer that caused Ames to need to buy power from other grids just to keep up with demand, Cook said.

“The failure of Unit 7 really just highlights a need that has been present for quite some time,” Cook said.

However, there is a chance this project may never come to fruition, Kom said. At a preliminary hearing over the summer, administrative law judges decided not to grant the franchise that would allow the project to continue due to issues over land easements.

Easements are small pieces of land purchased by a city for public works use. In this case, Ames wants to buy small portions of land to set up the poles to string the lines to Ankeny.

“Six landowners have refused to sell us easements, one of which is the city of Huxley,” Kom said. “All the other easements – about 88 percent of the land we need – we have, so I hope we can reach a compromise.”

If not, Ames will have to wait for a franchise before it can get the land. If the franchise is obtained, the city can condemn the small pieces of land and reimburse the owners for them. A date for a reconsideration hearing in front of the Iowa Utilities Board has not yet been scheduled.

“We need this for long-term reliability,” Kom said. “Without this, if a major storm were to come through and knock out the power, the time it would take to respond wouldn’t be hours, but days.”