ENERGY & NATURAL RESCOURCES ROUNDTABLE.

PositionSpecial Report: Roundtable - Discussion

Every month, Utah Business Magazine partners with Holland & Hart and Big-D Construction to host roundtable events with industry insiders. This month we invited the top minds to discuss energy and natural resources. Moderated by Rob Simmons, Deputy Director at the Governor's Office of Energy Development, here are a few highlights from the event.

With some representation from different parts of the energy and mining sectors, what's the overall outlook for your industry?

Ryan Creamer | CEO at Sustainable Power Group

Things across the country are good. We had some turmoil last year, uncertainty caused by tax reform, tariffs put on solar panels, but I think we've weathered the storms pretty good. From a standpoint of growth, sPower was one of the fastest-growing IPPs in the country and will continue to be. We'll actually double the size of our company in the next 20 months.

Josh Brown | Government Relations Manager at Rio Tinto The last couple of years have been a pretty trying time for the mining industry. We are now seeing an uptick in price. What we've seen industry-wide is good. You look at the wind-type projects and there's four to six times more copper involved in the production of wind power versus traditional fossil fuels. So we're very much focused on copper production, as well as copper's use in the technological growth of the nation and the world.

Jared Jackson | Mine Manager at Simplot

For the phosphate industry, the outlook appears to be stable for us. A lot of what we do goes into crop nutrients. So, the outlook is positive in the fact that, with the growing population we have, the amount of people that need to get fed in the world, and reduced acreage of farming that goes on, it becomes an increase in demand for the crop nutrients, making sure you can maximize your yield out of the farmers' crops. So that's positive. The issue that we're facing currently is we're starting to see some foreign pressure in the phosphate industry. We've got a lot of phosphate being produced overseas in countries that have very low labor costs, low regulatory costs. And with the low costs associated with ocean freight, we're starting to see a lot of those phosphates starting to come into the US and starting to work their way from the east towards the west.

John Cox | Vice President of Government Affairs at Rocky Mountain Power

For Utah families and Utah businesses, a key input is cost of energy and electricity. In Utah, we're fortunate to have very affordable electricity, approximately 20 percent less than the national average, despite the fact that we're one of the ten least dense states as it relates to population, and we believe that's important. We've been through a period of significant infrastructure build-out. We've made a rate pledge to our customers that we would not raise rates through 2020. And it's a priority for our organization to find ways in which we can continue to keep rates low. We believe that's important to continue Utah's economic development.

Christine Watson Mikell | Principal at Enyo Renewable Energy The future is bright. Thanks to sPower, we had a couple of projects that we developed under our previous company, Wasatch Wind. Those are the two only operating wind projects that have been...

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