Letter to the Editor: A response to Mike Wagner of Alliant Energy

(The following Letter to the Editor is a response from Warren McKenna from Farmers Electric Cooperative of Kalona to a previous Letter to the Editor (https://www.decorahnews.com/news-stories/2018/04/19043.html) that was published with a comment from Mike Wagner of Alliant Energy):

"Farmers Electric Cooperative is in the same area and connected to an ITC-managed transmission line as Wellman, Iowa. However, a transmission outage of this type would have been resolved for our customers in 10 minutes or less, due to our local generation capacity. While it takes forethought for electric companies to implement fail-safe resources, many have done so. These actions are even more accountable when the community owns its own electric distribution grid.

My example of Wellman is especially relevant to the current Decorah situation because Wellman did attempt to municipalize in 2006. If they had been successful, they would likely have connected to our FEC system for backup, in which case the recent 10+ hour outage would have been 10 minutes or less. The point is not whether the outage was due to Alliant lines or someone else's lines, but rather that if Wellman had municipalized, they could have avoided the impact through local priorities and decisions."