Greeneville Energy Authority reported this week the most power usage of the winter occurred on Groundhog Day Monday, February 2nd when early morning temperatures dropped to around 10 below zero in some parts of the service area.
LARGEST POWER USAGE SINCE 2015
GEA Operations Manager Robert Keller told the GEA Board during their meeting Monday the largest peak usage of the winter since 2015 was 307 megawatts. A month earlier, 291 megawatts had been the largest usage of the season until the February weather.
PEAK USAGE MEANS LARGER CHARGE FROM TVA
While there have been discussions about higher residential bills, GEA President and CEO Dwayne Wells explained residential customers do not pay for peak demand. Industrial customers already pay based on the peak demand each bill while TVA also charges utilities it serves, including GEA, based on their peak demand each month. GEA Chief Financial Officer Paige Mengel says the February 2nd peak demand will result in a charge from TVA to GEA of $3,484,450 for that one hour on that one day alone. You might remember, it was a year ago this month that GEA received a monthly bill of over $11 million from TVA.
NOLACHUCKY SUBSTATION ISSUE
In other news from the GEA meeting this week, Robert Keller also told the board an outage at the Nolachucky Substation on January 16th which affected around 3,200 customers, was the result of a regulator failure. The regulator, in power system terms, was relatively new having only been in service around two years. It was still under warranty and GEA anticipates it will be totally covered by the company which sold it.
BEAD GRANTS
GEA Broadband Director Phil Bradley told the board the state of Tennessee has been approved for BEAD contracts, which are expected to be signed in the spring. Bradley still believes the BEAD projects locally will start this summer, keeping it on schedule a for June, 2027 completion. Initially, the work will affect about 3,000 customers, but will help continue to grow the broadband operations necessary to eventually serve 100% of the county.
