SECO DISTRICT THREE REPORT
Another season that is here is the Hot Stove Season in Major League Baseball. That is the time of year when teams trade like mad to improve themselves (they hope). Well, did you know that utilities trade too? In fact, SECO just made a big trade with Progress Energy involving 275 customers of both utilities. In this case, it was not to improve anything but supplying energy to the customer. SECO has a long border with Progress Energy and sometimes corrections have to be made for customer benefit.
Electric utilities like every other activity have performance standards. One of them is the ASAI (Average System Availability Index). SECO’s index for the year shows that energy has been accessible to members 99.98% of the time. That is pretty good, I think you would agree. Some examples of why this is true – 1. A new breaker was being installed for the Gospel Island Feeder and one of those dumb insulators failed. Power was out for 4 minutes. 2. Then on November 3rd there was an outage at the Lady Lake substation due to a nearby Progress Energy equipment failure. Took SECO Three minutes to bring that power back!
EPA will enforce new rules on the emissions from coal fired plants. The cost of this nationwide will be $9.6 Billion, and some plants will be shut down. Not only will this cost the consumer more, but the entire grid could be affected in total output thus causing brownouts and in some areas blackouts. Florida is potentially hard hit as the State has no natural resources and must import the fuels to run the plants. Luckily, SECO’s supplier Seminole Co-op has cleaned its coal-fired plants more than some others.
I hope that you all had a great Christmas and will have a terrific New Year.
Barry Evans, SECO Trustee for District Three
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