____________________________________________________________________________________________ Black Hills Energy
operating at around 3,400 feet in elevation where a lot of other combustion turbines will be de-rated.”
Assessing the market
Building on these performance and efficiency advantages, the RICE units’ dualfuel capabilities also offer great operational flexibility and resilience in the face of fuel supply uncertainties. Beyond rapid response and low resource consumption, their design allows operators to adapt to changing conditions on both the grid and the fuel market, ensuring continuity of service even during disruptions.
“ As we were developing the site, we began analyzing how much fuel we should store on site for resilience in a major storm or outage,”
Derek elaborates.“ During Storm Uri, Texas experienced a four-day period where they had issues with natural gas availability, so we piggybacked on that analysis and decided that it would be beneficial to have four days of fuel storage on site in the event that we didn’ t have sufficient natural gas. The design includes 600,000 gallons of diesel stored in tanks, which means that we could run these units on diesel for four days should natural gas become unavailable. It also means that we can assess market availability as diesel prices fluctuate to keep our customers’ costs as low as possible.”
With planning and design considerations firmly in place, Black Hills Energy officially broke ground on Lange II in August 2025. Derek provides some insight into the project’ s
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