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Doug Bechtel
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As part of the Bonneville Power Administration reinvention process, they have assigned individuals to serve as Account Executives to work very closely with their customer utilities. The Account Executive assigned to work with OPALCO visited our recent board of directors meeting and talked about many of the issues facing BPA and OPALCO.
The particular issue I want to discuss this week is BPA's sub-marine cables connecting OPALCO to the mainland. If you have been following these OPALCOGRAMS, you know that one of the three cables between Anacortes and Lopez failed in November. Each of the remaining two cables has the ability to meet all of OPALCO's current needs giving us the necessary reliability.
At our board meeting, our Account Executive assured the board of directors that BPA was committed to two submarine cables, each capable of meeting our full needs. The smaller of the two cables has a capacity limit of 50mW. (For comparison, 1mW is equal to 10,000 one hundred watt light bulbs). Our all-time peak load so far has been 45mW back in January of 1993. In fact, we only exceeded 40mW for six hours in all of 1994. Of course, OPALCO is one of the more rapidly growing utilities in the region and we expect our loads to increase in the future and it won't be too long before our loads exceed the 50mW capacity of the BPA cable.
BPA and OPALCO have agreed to look at means of reducing our peak loads on their system to extend the period before a new cable must be purchased. We will accomplish this with a Load Manage-ment System. The centerpiece of our Load Management System will be through "direct load control". Under direct load control, each OPALCO member may volunteer to have equipment installed that will allow us to remotely shut off your water heater or your electric heat for a few minutes a few days a month during our peak load periods. These systems are in wide use across the country and the vast majority of electric con-sumers report being unable to notice when their utility controls their loads. Our program would be optional and we will remove our equipment from your home if you later had objections to it.
The big question, of course, is how many members will allow us to install this load management equipment in their homes. For every 1,000 water heaters we control we can reduce our peak load by 1mW, thereby extending the period before BPA would need to replace the submarine cable with the 50mW limit.
If things go right, within the next 60 to 90 days we will have a telephone survey of our members done to find out their attitudes toward the instal-lation of this equipment. If you are one of the members selected for this survey, I urge you to answer these questions and help us to keep the power down by allowing us to install load management equipment in your home when the time comes, probably late in 1995 or early in 1996.
Doug Bechtel
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