Electric Transmission – Relocation

Utility companies occasionally need to relocate Electric Transmission towers due to the widening of roads, commercial construction and other projects. For several years our Broker managed all electric, gas transmission and distribution relocations for Xcel Energy in MN. This included negotiating with landowners and their representatives for the acquisition of land rights and right-of-way for the relocation of the utility’s assets. Also involved was the preparation and application for construction, highway and Conditional Use Permits from local municipalities, federal, state and local land management agencies.

Wind – Acquisition

We have performed Land lease acquisition and public relations on several large wind turbine farm projects in Northern Michigan and throughout Wisconsin for NextEra Energy and Invenergy.  This included meeting with landowners to negotiate and acquire land use agreements for placement of 2.5 MW wind turbines and 5-6 MW wind turbines as well as collection and transmission easements in this excellent midwest wind resource.

Electric Transmission – Public Relations

American Transmission Company (ATC) – The Badger Coulee transmission line, which electrically connects the Dane County area with La Crosse County area, will help ensure reliable electricity for the region and provide access to lower-cost power and renewable energy. It is part of a portfolio of projects that will help enable the delivery of 25 gigawatts of renewable energy. A 20-mile portion of the project in Dane County was placed in service in 2017.  We performed Public Relations serving as company representative at open houses for ATC across the state of Wisconsin and met with potentially affected landowner’s to address and document questions and explain the project.

Oil & Gas – Permitting

Enbridge Pipelines constructed Southern Access Extension (SAX) pipeline, a $900 million, 168 mile, 24 inch diameter crude oil pipeline from Flanagan, IL to Patoka, IL increasing capacity by 300 Mb/d. Lead Permitting was performed by our agent including negotiation and acquisition of Road Use Agreements, railroad facilities installation and equipment crossing agreements, railroad special use permits, road crossing and driveway permits, right- of-entry permits, valve / pump site and storage site leases, state, county and township road authority permits, water and drainage district permits and agreements and permits from foreign utilities for the 168-mile petroleum transmission pipeline for Enbridge Pipelines in Illinois.  We also obtained the Railroad crossing permits for Enbridge's Line 3 project across North Dakota, Northern Minnesota and into Wisconsin.

Oil & Gas – Database Management

Discovery Midstream is a Dallas based company focused on maximizing value and providing outstanding service. After developing an extensive pipeline network in the DJ Basin, the asset was then sold to Williams Pipelines.  Our land agent created and maintained pipeline route landowner line lists tracking spreadsheets and construction stipulations spreadsheets in Google Sheets.  This required the extraction of data from executed agreements, .kmz line routes and county databases. ELS created financial reports using calculations and functions across all spreadsheets to aggregate data for the reports, then mined data to create project land acquisition progress and financial summaries for upper management. Through both manual input and spreadsheet import tools, this data was then transferred from spreadsheets into the Williams proprietary Flairdocs project database.

Utility Scale Battery Storage - Acquisition

Many utility companies have entered the energy storage space and capacity has grown quickly throughout the US with many new battery energy storage systems in operation.  Excel Land Services has provided acquisition services for energy storage developer NextEra Energy throughout Wisconsin at key POI's to obtain the space needed for large battery storage facilities.