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In the meantime, there are several things that we all can do that will save OPALCO money. We pay the Bonneville Power Administration about 2? cents for every kWh we buy from them except for our peak load hour. During the hour that we place our largest load for the month on the Bonneville system, we pay $4.30 a kWh - two hundred times as much. The problem is that we can't forecast exactly when our peak load will occur. If I had a good crystal ball, and I could forecast exactly when this peak load would come, then we could all use less electricity for that one hour and save OPALCO hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Even though we don't know exactly when this peak load will come, we do know that it happens on a weekday between 9 a.m. and noon. Whether you have a Load Management System installed or not, to the extent you can minimize your use of electricity between 9 a.m. and noon (such as doing your laundry after lunch, baking in the afternoon and so on), it will help reduce OPALCO's peak load on Bonneville and save us money. Years ago (BB, or Before Bechtel), OPALCO had a Peak Watchers Program where we worked with our members to minimize their electric usage during our peak load time. This still applies, and we can still save money by moving our optional consumption away from peak hours. On a different topic, in spite of all of our efforts, the overall number of outages that OPALCO sees has not gone down. There have been significant reductions in the number of our members affected by an outage, so overall, it looks like we are doing better. We still have a lot more that we need to do, and you will see increased efforts form OPALCO in the future as we try to get ahead in replacing our failing underground wires. With the nice weather, our summer construction program is now in full swing. We got a real late start this year because the spring was so wet, keeping us from digging up your roads. Most of this summer's efforts relate to storm abatement projects and replacing bad underground wires. Much of this construction is in the county road right of way (like Horseshoe Highway near Eastsound). I apologize for the inconvenience that we are causing. We need to get this work done before it starts raining again this fall.
Doug Bechtel
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