The Washington Electric Utilities Advisory Board, at the request of city officials, will review Washington Electric Utilities’ load-management program with an eye toward making recommendations to change it so more customers will take advantage of it.

City officials are worried that some WEU customer are unaware of the program.

Under the WEU load-management program, devices are installed on some electric appliances such as electric water heaters, heat pumps/central air conditioners and auxiliary heat sources such as heat strips. Those devices, which are radio-controlled, allow the city to turn off those appliances during times when peak demands are expected. That saves the city and its power customers money. WEU customers in the load-management program receive credits each month on their electric bills.
The appliances are controlled for no more than four hours a day for a few days each month.

Thirteen WEU customers such as manufacturers and other large commercial consumers of power operate generators at times of peak power demands to help reduce the need to buy power from wholesale power providers such as the N.C. Eastern Municipal Power Agency, from which the city buys its power at the wholesale level.

City Manager Bobby Roberson told the board, during its informal meeting last week (it could not take action because it lacked a quorum), the city wants to encourage customers who do not participate in the load-management program to do so. That encouragement could come in the form of higher credits on customer’s power bills, he said. Roberson said if all WEU customers participated in the program, it could save the city about $1.3 million annually.

The board and city officials talked about possibly requiring power customers to participate in load management. Alston Tankard, WEU’s transmission and distribution superintendent, said California recently passed a law requiring all new buildings to have load-management devices.

Currently, the city’s load-management program operates on a voluntary basis. The city has been looking at the program for some time.

During a February 2015 council meeting, Councilman Doug Mercer questioned the need for a program that costs more to implement each year than the money it saves each year.

“The $131,000 was what we were saving on the load-management switch program. On the generator program, we’re saving $30,500. On the CDC rate — and I sort of discount the CDC program because those people are operating generators in an effort to reduce our wholesale cost — but if you take just the savings on the load-management switches and the generator program, we’ve saving $161,000. We’re spending, according to this year’s budget, right at $600,000 for that program. That statement I made earlier is we’re looking for every dollar we can find and we’re spending … $600,000 to save $200,000. We’re $400,000 in the hole, gentlemen,” Mercer said. “And we just cannot continue to do that. That means we’ve either got to change the way we are crediting the activities that we’re crediting or we need to get out of that business.”