Municipal Electric Utilities

[Bob Weisner]

Hi:

I need some information on how to go about creating a Municipal Electric Utility for my town. The idea was brought up during a town meeting and I was asked to gather the information on it. So far, I have alot of general information, but have not been able to find any information on any federal or State funding for a project like this. Does anyone know of a town that has created their own municipal electric utility recently?

Thanks,

Bob

[Carl Eyman]

This city used to have a municipal utility. When the company I worked for built a plant here our location was such that lines from both the public utility and the municipal ran by our location. We could take our pick. Because the municipality had been so helpful we chose them Wrong move! We endured numerous power outages for maintenance that the utility would not announce, wholly incompetent management, and gross mismanagement of fuel buying. (I'll explain}

When the citizens finally got up in arms, the municipality announced they would hire an "engineer" to fix the problems. A friend of mine who was a graduate electrical engineer (PE) applied. Who got hired? A politician's young son. Things stayed the same.

Finally, There came an energy crunch, The municipality had failed to hedge their bets with long term energy contracts. The price of electricity skyrocketed to the point the city had to sell their service to the public service utility. Since then we have had improving service and competetive prices.

One man's experience. Carl

[Ken Garlock]

Bob, I have no idea as to the part of the country you reside. It might be helpful if people knew at least your state. Public utilities are normally regulated by the state public utilities commission, as I am sure you know.

I live in Collin County, in North Texas, and I have a CO-OP electric company. It is my uneducated opinion that a CO-OP would be much easier to operate, just based upon my CO-OP. My CO-OP had no generating facilities, it buys its electricity wholesale from all over the country. The last I heard, they had a long term contract with a company in Louisville Ky. Louisville puts the electricity into the grid and my CO-OP takes it off. This eliminates a huge investment in generating equipment.

Last year I was having numerous outages from less than a second to 30 minutes. The CO-OP installed a new 20 megawatt substation and ran new high voltage wiring in our neighborhood, and eliminated the problem.

Perhaps a CO-OP would be a better solution for you.

In January I was paying 8.016 cents per KWH.