Deer Creek Station serves members with distributed generation

At Deer Creek Station, the team is always working to determine the most cost-effective way to supply Basin Electric members with power.

Located in Brookings County, South Dakota, Deer Creek Station is a combined-cycle power plant that features two turbine-generator sets: one turbine fired by natural gas; the other is driven by steam. The plant’s natural gas, often purchased from Dakota Gasification Company, is delivered via the Northern Border Pipeline and a 14-mile underground pipeline to the plant.

But activities at the plant go beyond power generation. The plant is also the hub for dispatching power from most of the cooperative’s distributed generation fleet, an essential component to keeping reliable, affordable power flowing to the cooperative’s member systems.

To learn about the process of remote operations, how operators at Deer Creek Station keep things running efficiently, and see what makes Deer Creek critical to Basin Electric, read How we serve: with distributed generation in the Summer 2022 issue of Basin Today.