MR. MERTENSOTTO: Good morning. This is Thursday, March 22. And I am Charles Mertensotto, a member of the Mayors Steering Committee. And this gathering hopefully will be our last meeting as the steering committee. And because this meeting is an open meeting and it is being taped by NDC4, it obviously will be shown many times in the future and be available for -- the information will be available to the public through that medium.

The City of Mendota Heights has also retained the services of a court reporter. So the lady to my far right will be taking down the transcript of -- of the proceeding here today, as well as tape-recording that.

Now, by way of introduction, because the meeting is being taped, and it is a public meeting, let me just state that Northern States Power, who is now Xcel Energy, proposed to upgrade its southeast and Twin Cities metropolitan electric transmission line with the addition of a second 115 kV line connecting its Red Rock, Rogers Lake and Wilson substations. That is a 14.7 mile project along the alignment between Red Rock substation and Washington County. Connects through the Rogers Lake substation and the City of Mendota Heights and ends up at the Wilson substation in Hennepin County.

Now, NSP -- NSP proposes to construct a new line by replacing the existing single circuit 115 kV line with a double circuit line. And this will be conducted -- or will be established on the existing right-of-way. And it will be by replacing the existing structures with new single steel pole structures, which typically will be somewhere between 85 to 100 feet, or approximately 25 feet taller than the existing -- existing wooden structures.

Now, this project goes back -- sometime back in 1999, when NSP made an application to the City of Mendota Heights for a conditional use permit to construct the line for that portion of the line that is in the City of Mendota Heights. At that time the proceedings went on to the planning commission, where there was a public hearing. There was a large turnout from the public interested in the -- in the proceeding. And, of course, like anything else NSP proposed and provided the information. And there was a general accusation that, yes, here we are. The utility is handfeeding us. They are providing us the information they want us to know. They are not giving us the opposite or distaff part of it. So, as a result of that, the -- the proceedings at the planning commission -- the planning commission recommendation to the Mendota Heights City Council was to deny the project.

At that time I had discussions with Mr. Pat Kline of Xcel Energy. And he is in the audience here today. And he graciously agreed that possibly the way to do this, because we will also need -- when I say we, I meant Xcel Energy -- a conditional use permit in the City of Sunfish Lake and in the City of South St. Paul. And therefore they would have to go through three different proceedings. And if, in the interest of the disseminating the information to the public, in the public interest, so that -- and for efficiency purposes, it would be better off if we had one particular gathering or means of -- of generating all of the information and then passing it on to the various different communities.

Now, I am one member of the steering committee. With me today is Mayor Frank Tiffany, from the City of Sunfish Lake, and also Mayor Kathleen Gaylord, from the City of South St. Paul. The three of us constitute the steering committee. All of our meetings have been -- been public, as well as this meeting is public. And in order to comply with the open meeting law, each of the cities, to my knowledge, has also established this as a workshop meeting this morning so that we don’t run astray and follow that provision.

Now, let me state the steering committee is only in the -- the process of gathering information for the various different city councils. Each city council will follow its own ordinance or procedural requirements for the granting a conditional use permit. And they obviously will use any information gained through the steering committee’s activities.

And when we met the last time we agreed that we would have one final meeting. And at that time a spokesman for the Citizens Task Force against the power line, through Mr. Roger Conant, has requested would we have an opportunity to present our side of the information to you so that you’re not getting it from one -- one direction. And we graciously agreed to do that in the interest of the public. So let me state that this is where we’re at now.

I might mention that very early in the game, when NSP, now -- then NSP started with the petition, we requested, as well as City of South St. Paul and Sunfish Lake, to the EQB that they conduct and do an environmental impact statement. Well, after we went through that proceeding, that was denied. So therefore the EQS and -- as well as the law requires that it goes back to the local jurisdictions. And we certainly have that authority in conjunction with granting the conditional use permit to set whatever conditions might be necessary.

So let me just state what we’re going to do is -- this morning -- oh, I should mention -- what did the steering committee do? Under the agreement with NSP -- Northern States Power -- everything was put on hold. And we proceeded to request -- we sent out request for proposals to major engineering firms in the United States to see whether or not they would want to come in and conduct this study for us. We don’t call it AIS. We don’t call it -- we call it an ER --information review -- ER. Okay. As long as we’re in an acronym world.

And that the steering committee had responses from, I think, at least four, five or six national firms. And we selected -- I think it was four of those. And four of them came in. We interviewed those. And -- according to the criteria that we had established for the RFP. And we selected the Commonwealth Associates from Jackson, Michigan. So they have been our consultants. And these were totally selected by the steering committee. And these people have taken their direction from us, as a steering committee.

I know there’s been some complaints saying yes, Commonwealth has done work for NSP in the past. They’ve done work on this power line. I 5 guess you’re going to find that just about with every major engineering firm in the United States. But these gentlemen -- we queried them and they promised us that they would stake their professional reputation on providing us with honest answers. We think they have. And they have issued a final report to us which consists of two or three volumes. And no doubt some of that will be referred to.

And this should be our final meeting in which we are also going to take information relative to the magnetic affects of the line and also as it has affect on human beings or, you might say, health affects.

So gentlemen, Mayor, have I stated –

MS. GAYLORD: Very good introduction.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. With that we’ll proceed. And I’m going to call on Mr. Guidinger, who is the project manager for Commonwealth Electric.

And I believe, Mr. Guidinger, you are fully aware that this is going to be your final. And you’re going to give us the updated -- or the updates that we need to report at this point’ in time; is that right?

MR. GUIDINGER: Right. Well, our -- my name is John –

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Would you take the podium there, please.

MR. GUIDINGER: Okay. All right. My name is John Guidinger. And I work for Commonwealth Associates. And I have Dave Shafer here with us, who is our head of the —- of system engineering. I’m the head of environmental section. And we submitted our report last -- at the last meeting. And we have no further updates to the report. We -- we stand by the way that it’s written out.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. You might tell us -- I’m sorry to see what happened to your -- did you slip on some ice or something?

MR. GUIDINGER: Slipped on the ice. Has nothing to do with this project.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. So other states have the same problems we have here in Minnesota.

MR. GUIDINGER: Yeah. We have ice and snow in Michigan, too. Jackson, Michigan is in southern Michigan.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: It’s unusual --or amazing the number of people that have had fall-down accidents with all the icy conditions this year.

MR. GUIDINGER: Right, yeah.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: We do have a portable mic available. We could have used that --

MR. GUIDINGER: With us we have Doctor Peter Valberg, who is our consultant on the electromagnetic fields and health affects of those fields. Commonwealth Associates is not an expert in health affects, so we’re going to refer all our questions to Peter Valberg on health affects.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Well, at the outset we want to get all of the information. You say there are no further additions or updates to the re -— various volumes of the report that you presented to us.

DR. VALBERG: That’s correct, yes. We have an errata sheet and an updated errata sheet. We found other typos in the report. We passed that out. There are four copies of the complete report, which each of the cities has in the city hall. And Doctor Conant has a copy of that. And then there are executive summary -- brief executive summaries,

also. In addition, I think we printed 30 copies of the executive summaries.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. Before we -hear from Doctor Valberg, who is the expert that was retained by Commonwealth in regards to the health affects of the magnetic field associated with the proposed project, let me just state this. I’m going to probably ask Pat Kline, who is here from Xcel, if he has any comments in regards to the proceeding.

MR. KLINE: Should –

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Yes, John, you may -- we’ll use the -- we’ll use the portable mic for you.

MS. GAYLORD: Could we move the chair closer for him?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I feel like I should help him.

MR. KLINE: Good morning, Your Honors. Thanks for the opportunity again to come and try to wrap this up. We have one short presentation today. And that is a response to the consultant’s report that was given on February 14 here. And to do that Rick Gonzalez, who is our principal transmission reliability engineer, would like to comment on the alternatives to our original proposal and what the technical performance would be of those and the deficiencies that they would not solve.

So I’m going to turn it over to Rick. He’s going to give a short presentation. And then we can move from there.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. That’s right. Commonwealth did recommend, I think --there’s about three different alternatives. And as -- is that your intention, Mr. Kline, to respond to those alternatives?

MR. KLINE: Yes. And then we can go into the rest of the agenda. And then if we have any comments after the Power Line Task Force presentation, we’ll make them. They should be brief. And then open to questions from the steering committee.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Well, procedure will then follow allowing you to respond to the different options that have been proposed. And then I think we’ll get to the consultant that was brought in by Commonwealth in regards to the human affects of the magnetic field. And then I think after that we’ll permit the Task Force to give us their response or the information they want to present to us. Why don’t we just follow that procedure? Okay.

With that you may call your representatives.

MR. GONZALEZ: Good morning.

MR. KLINE: Just excuse me, Rick. We do have a handout of Rick -- of what Rick will present here. They were sent to the steering committee. They are available for the public here if they’d like a copy. We’ll do that as he begins.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: We appreciate your position in this. Let me just state that Xcel has taken the open-book stance. You’ve provided and made all the information available to us that we’ve requested and been cooperative. So we certainly appreciate that contract.

MR. KLINE: Thank you.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. ‘With that you may proceed.

MR. GONZALEZ: Is it okay if I do this from here? This side table.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Yes. But I think you will have to use the hand-held mic because this is being taped for later cable transmission.

MR. GONZALEZ: Okay.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: And the sound system is tied with the video.

MR. GONZALEZ: Okay. Is it working? I can’t tell. Is this microphone working here? Okay. Good.

My name is Rick Gonzalez. I’m a planning engineering in the transmission planning area at Xcel Energy. And the purpose of my presentation this morning is to give some comments on our review of the Commonwealth Associates transmission study report and to provide some background information on how we do transmission planning, what our methods and goals are here and then to summarize the performance of the alternatives Commonwealth developed.

As a transmission planner this is pretty much my goal in life. We tried to ensure the transition system is adequate to deliver electricity reliably to all the retail customers in our territory despite failure of any one piece of equipment and in the metro area -- inner metro area. We actually plan for failure of any two pieces of equipment, whether it’s a transmission line, a generator, transformer or any combination of those. And success is measured by being able to stand those contingencies; we call them, without causing overloading -- excessive overloading of other pieces of equipment or low voltage conditions. So that’s the ten-second description of what my job is.

In doing the transmission planning we develop computer models of the power system and then evaluate the power system’s performance under different conditions. These power system models have information on the generating units that exist throughout the system, the electrical characteristics of the transmission lines and the substation equipment that connect the units all together. And forecasts have to be embodied in that of the local consumer electrical demand, how much electrical demand is anticipated at each of the individual neighborhood substations for the year that we’re trying to model here.

Once we develop the power system model, we then go and simulate failure of the equipment. We take each element, each line, transformer, generator out of service one at a time. And you determine whether there are any excessive overloads or low -- or low voltage conditions that result.

So it’s simulate the system, determine what the deficiencies are and then -- this is the interesting part of the job, I feel. You come up with ideas for addressing those problems. Usually there are several alternatives available, several options you can come up with. Then you -- you evaluate how well those options work. And this is, again, going back and adding those new facilities to the model, evaluating their performance, relative —-contingencies that are relevant. You then can compare how effective the different options are. And then you can evaluate the options against each other with respect to their cost, effectiveness, environmental and routing considerations, factors of that sort. And then the ultimate goal is to identify recommended plan for system improvement.

Our overall comments on Commonwealth Associates’ effort here is that they applied their experience and judgment to evaluating the system deficiencies that are coining up and developing alternatives for addressing those deficiencies. The alternatives were of two types; there were system alternatives and route alternatives presented.

The route alternatives were known as Options A and B. And they essentially establish something electrically equivalent to Xcel’s proposal to establish a new circuit between Red Rock substation and the Rogers Lake substation. They just do it by taking a different route, different path between those points.

The system alternatives were described as Option C, D and E. And those try to address the system needs by building something totally 2 different. Instead of a line coming in from the east, from Red Rock, they are alternatives that develop circuits from the south or improve power supply from the west or north -- I believe were the options.

So we think they’ve done a good job at developing conceptual alternatives to the proposed development. Overall we think they’ve come up with alternatives that represent pretty much the spectrum of possible options.

The report they produced, because of the many contingencies they had to evaluate to evaluate performance, has lots of tables and numbers, facts and figures. I have made an effort here to summarize the performance of the proposed plan and the options they developed on this table.

There are two rows shown on this slide. The first shows performance during the peak load condition. And the second row is an off-peak condition. There were models developed for those two load levels.

The first column shows that the existing power system, if no improvements were made to it, would have 20 overload conditions present in the summer of 2,004. And during the off-peak load condition there could be 83 different overload conditions possible. So that’s the existing system, do nothing option. So that establishes the need for addressing upcoming system deficiencies.

The next column shows the performance of Xcel’s proposed Red Rock to Wilson 115 kV upgrade, where there is -- the number of deficiencies on the peak load condition is reduced from 20 to one, and off-peak from 83 down to five.

The next three columns show the performance of the system alternatives, the ones that develop a different electrical configuration. And I’ll get into this a little more in the following slides. But what we see here is that the system alternatives developed address many of the deficiencies, but don’t really quite do the job. They don’t do the job as well as the proposed development.

Now, this is the previous slide with a few footnotes added to it. One question that should come up from the previous slide, as well. The proposed system doesn’t quite eliminate system deficiencies. Why aren’t there zeros there, instead of one and five? And the answer is that the proposed development, the Red Rock to Wilson upgrade, isn’t going to solve all the deficiencies in the Twin Cities area. It addresses the ones that are most germane to this subregion. And there still are a few conditions that aren’t fully covered by a new facility.

However, the on-peak single deficiency remaining is a contingency that’s very improbable to occur based on our experience with equipment failure rates. It involves the failure of both the step-down transformers at the Red Rock 345 and 115 kV substations. And we have technical history and background on that indicating that that contingency is so improbable it’s really not worth doing anything to try to address that. Might take care of it in passing through other projects, but it’s very low on the list of the things to take care of.

On the off-peak condition there are five contingencies shown on the listing. One of the five is that same double transformer failure contingency. The other four contingencies, as described in footnote, are all double contingencies, one part of which is failure of a circuit in St. Paul known as the Terminal to Western 115 kV line. And the answer there or the -- the strategy there is that we do intend to do something about that contingency. The most likely option is going to be rebuilding that circuit as a double circuit or establishing a new Terminal Western circuit through some other route. So if that Terminal Western outage gets addressed, that takes care of the four remaining deficiencies of that five.

We have not taken that project to the point of being able to propose a specific fix for it. Part of it is because this project has taken us so long we haven’t gotten to addressing some other metro projects lately.

It might be a good point to stop if there are questions about that table, the summary data there.

MR. TIFFANY: I have one question for clarification, I think, to back up a little bit here. The whole thrust, I believe, of the CA report was planning for double contingencies, outages where more than one segment of the system was down at any one time. And we were informed in previous meetings of the steering committee that the reason for that is that the system is large and complex as the grid system in the metro area. It’s almost routine to have a simple contingency outage at any one time, that a transmission line might be out of service, a transformer being replaced, a power plant down for service.

Can you quantitate that and tell us to what extent or how -- what percentage of the time a simple contingency situation exists before we talk seriously about evaluating the double contingency scenario.

MR. GONZALEZ: Yes. That’s a good point. There are several reasons we have double contingency planning criteria for the inner part of the Twin Cities. One is because of the number of circuits and transformers here it is nearly always the case that at least one element is out of service either for maintenance, upgrade, repair or replacement.

MR. TIFFANY: Can you quantitate that?

MR. GONZALEZ: Any given day there are usually several chunks of transmission line out for some sort of road move or upgrade, that sort of work. And generating plants -- usually once a year they are out for about a month or so for major overhaul. So we are never operating in a system intact condition. We can try to schedule some of this work for the very low load periods, but even during the summer we have equipment out, either planned or unplanned, due to failure.

Another aspect is that whenever we want to go and upgrade facilities, such as our proposed upgrade of the Red Rock to Wilson circuit, if you don’t plan for double contingency operation, you can never take things out of service to rebuild them because you are -- when you take the facility -- the old facility out of service, you’re creating the first outage, the first contingency. And if anything else should fail during the several months it takes to rebuild the facilities, you don’t have adequate coverage of that condition.

Now, I’d -- to address this question a little more I did put together a -- another version of this table. These are the same numbers here. But of those 20 and 83 outage conditions, I broke it out as to how many of those overloads are caused by single versus double contingencies. This, again, is from the tabulations in the in CAI’s report. I just —aggregated it here.

So the 20 on peak overload conditions –

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Did you say in the manual how the –

MR. GONZALEZ: This is a supplemental handout which will be handed out at this point. The heading has Number 5 on the title.

Of the 20 overload conditions noted for the peak load condition, three of them can be caused just by a single contingency. The other 17 are caused by double contingencies.

Similarly on until the off-peak condition of the 83, it turns out that 33 of those overload conditions represent a single contingency condition.

To summarize, CAI did the analysis looking at double contingencies and single contingencies, also, which there are in their tabulations. And the reason for the double contingency planning is primarily because of the number of facilities involved, the likelihood of something being out of service either due to upgrade, replacement, maintenance or failure. This represents the likelihood of having something out of service at any given time. We consider those -- we call them prior outage conditions. You already have something out. You don’t want the next failure to already get you in trouble.

Were there any other questions at this point?

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Did that answer your question? Did he answer it?

MR. TIFFANY: What?

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Did he answer it?

MR. TIFFANY: I think so, yeah.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay.

MR. GONZALEZ: I can summarize at this point or can offer some conclusions. And three main items here. One is that we believe the analysis by Commonwealth Associates was appropriate and thorough in evaluating deficiencies, developing options to address them and evaluating their performance both for system and all the alternatives. The alternatives Commonwealth developed are not fully capable of addressing all the system needs identified and, in comparison to the Xcel proposal, fall short. They would need additional projects, additional facilities added to get the performance up to that level to address fully all of the deficiencies. So that would be additional facilities, additional impacts somewhere in the system and additional costs involved.

So overall our conclusion is that the Xcel proposal for the Red Rock to Wilson 115 kV upgrade is the superior option that addresses the system needs in order to be able to serve our customers reliably at reasonable costs and using existing rights of way.

MR. TIFFANY: Perhaps you could help us with clarification of terms. One of the terms that’s been used in previous meetings is that incapacity to the system, which I take it to mean, perhaps incorrectly, providing more electric power to the end users. An alternative scenario has been the use of the term redundancy, in which the delivery system is okay, but backup is needed in case of single or double outages. Can you help to clarify, for our purposes, what are your goals to clarify those terms?

MR. GONZALEZ: The goal in our planning of the transmission system is to be —able to deliver the electric power from the various generating resources throughout the region to the local distribution substations that the customers are supplied from in such a way that failure of facilities on a transmission system is not seen by the customer. Our job is done if no one realizes something failed. And we implement that by planning the system to be capable of surviving single and double contingency conditions, failure of any one or two pieces of equipment on the bolt power supply system, whether they are generators, transmission lines, transformers or other related substation equipment.

MR. TIFFANY: So in your long-range planning is it possible to make a distinction between the potential need for additional electric service in, let’s say, the Bloomington, Eagan area versus the need for redundancy providing additional routes in the present system? Are they both part of the same package or can you make that distinction?

MR. GONZALEZ: I’ll try to address that. The challenge is in the prediction of the future electrical demands, where they will be located and how much demands are of the various locations. And I think you got into the network design. We have to look at failure of the facilities and the ability to upgrade them in a timely manner to address those future load demands before they show up.

MR. TIFFANY: Okay. Thank you.

MR. GONZALEZ: That -- that concludes my presentation here, if there are no further questions.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Mr. Kline, do you have anything further?

MR. KLINE: No.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Not at this point? All right. Then -- you got a comment at this point, Mr. Conant?

DR. CONANT: Is this the opportunity where we make our presentations?

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Well, I thought what we’d do is listen to the experts, the epidemiologists -- that’s going to be addressing us this morning. And then probably you could --because we’re talking about the needs assessment here.

DR. CONANT: Sure.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Whether or not NSP is invading, you might say, our area over here to double up their circuitry and putting lines up much higher for the basis of providing -- or supplying additional power at another source, okay, which could probably be furnished or brought in from another area.

DR. CONANT: We have expert testimony to present on the subject, but we’re perfectly willing to wait.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. But we’re also -- one the big factors here, probably one of the foremost things that has really precipitated all of the interest in this tine, is the health affects. Okay.

DR. CONANT: Sure.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: And that I think to that, if I pronounce this gentleman’s name right -- Doctor Valberg.

DR. VALBERG: Yes.

MR. MERTENSOTTO: Okay. You would like to take the stand at this time, please.

DR. VALBERG: Yes. Thank you.

My name is Doctor Peter Valberg. I’m an environmental health consultant at Gradient Corporation.