What We Did This Summer

Now that the hottest summer on record is finally winding down, we have had some time to do some work other that just trying to keep power flowing and the air conditioning running in Glasgow. Part of that work is now visible on the main www.glasgow-ky.com page in the form of a new link to ESPN 3.

About this time every year we are faced with customers that want certain sports programming that is not available in our market, or which is so highly priced that it is out of the community's budget range. This year we have found an affordable solution in ESPN 3. ESPN 3 is a way to deliver just about all sporting events that ESPN covers, from anywhere in the country, to your computer screen. Say you just moved to Glasgow from Texas and want to see the Aggies play -- you can watch the game on your computer via our new deal with ESPN 3! If you want help figuring out how to hook your computer up to your television so it feels the same as watching the event on regular ESPN, just give us a call and we can help you with that as well. Look for the ESPN 3 logo and click on it via the Glasgow home page. After you do, finding the game you want should be pretty self-explanatory.

This service is just another expansion of the high speed internet service operated by your locally owned Glasgow EPB. There have been a lot of rumors and bad information circulating around Glasgow of late regarding our cable and internet services as we distance ourselves from the telephone business. Anyone who tells you that this company, or that company, has bought out the EPB's cable or internet business is simply telling you something that is totally untrue. We are in the midst of massive upgrades to both our cable and internet services, and if you leave our services for a competitor just because of our change in philosophy about the telephone business, you are leaving the very best services available in the 42141 zip code! We invented high speed internet access in Glasgow, and our services will always be the ones where new technology is first delivered to the people of Glasgow. We have no other communities to serve but this one.

A Very Hot Evening for 350 Homes

About 4:00 yesterday afternoon Glasgow was struck by a particularly intense lightning storm. We had lightning strikes that resulted in damaged equipment in many parts of town, but the worst damage and largest group of customers suffering an outage came from a strike to one of our circuits feeding out of Gorin Park Substation. This circuit fed all of the East Main area and a large portion of the central business area of Glasgow.

When that particular strike occurred the circuit opened immediately plunging about 350 customers into sweltering darkness. Normally lightning strike outages are a pretty quick fix, but the time of day and the temperature combined to make it nearly impossible to restore the circuit to normal yesterday.

When temperatures are extreme and electric power usage is very high, restoring power after an outage can be difficult. This comes from us attempting to pick up the starting load of every air conditioner and computer and industrial machine connected to the circuit at one time. This is a bit complicated, but suffice to say that such conditions can result in momentary electric demand being roughly twelve times the normal demand until the air conditioners and motors get back up to speed. That happened to us yesterday evening and then we had to go to extreme, and time consuming measures to cut the circuit down and pick it up in little pieces to get it to hold. This was our first extensive outage caused by the extreme heat this summer, and we certainly hope it will be the last.

You can help prevent these events by paying close attention to the clock, the temperature, and the appliances in your home or business. Until this amazing heat wave breaks, every weekday afternoon from 2:00 until 8:00 p.m. will be critical to the electric system. ANY electric power usage you can defer from those hours will help stabilize the electric grid. More particularly, if your home or business does experience an outage, please turn all possible loads off while we are attempting to restore the power. This will greatly enhance our chances of getting overloaded circuits to hold.

For those of you who suffered nearly five hours of power outage during extreme heat, we sincerely apologize. Also, for those of you who did suffer but continued to call and encourage us, thank you so very much. We truly are all in this together!

Little Storm - Big Power Outage

If you are one of the many who follow our Twitter feed at this link or our Facebook page at this link you already know what happened last night. In fact, if you have our Twitter feed going to your cell phone, you got our updates as the outage unfolded. If you are not taking advantage of these services, then this will give you some information about what happened last night.

About 10:00 p.m. a burst of wind, or a lightning strike, caused a large tree, several dozen feet away from our transmission line just south of town on 31E, to fall toward the transmission line which also carries one of FRECC's distribution circuits. Since we had 90% of the town switched to feed from this line as part of our abnormal configuration during the construction of our new primary substation, when that tree tripped out that transmission line, 90% of our customers were in the dark.

We knew this was a risk when we decided to build the new substation and to reconfigure our network to allow its construction. It is just like major construction on the interstates. We all hate the reduced speed limits and the endless ocean of orange barrels and concrete barriers, but it sure is wonderful when the work is done. Such will be the case after November when East Glasgow Primary is energized and serving our community. But, until then, we are going to be constantly aware that falling trees can wreak havoc on our lives here in Glasgow.

Last night our team found the tree and, in concert with FRECC folks, got it cut up and removed from the transmission line, allowing us to restore all power in about 90 minutes from when the tree fell. Some of our customers were back in service sooner as we found a way to re-route power to about half of the city by about 11:00.

Again, if you will click on the links above and sign up to receive our Facebook and Twitter updates, you will know about these events as they happen! Thanks for your understanding and confidence in us as we work to create an electric power network which will serve our community very well for many years into the future.

UPDATE:
At about noon on Thursday, 3,000 EPB customers experienced another outage when an undetected wiring problem at Front Street Substation resulted in a circuit breaker trip during a maintenance operation. We were doing this during extreme weather, just to make doubly sure that the system would hold after reconfiguring several things during the Wednesday night outage. Hindsight is 20/20 and now we wish we had just left everything alone until early Friday morning, but, we took a chance and it bit 3,000 of our customers as a result. We are very sorry and will learn from this mistake. Everyone was back in service within an hour, but even that was a major inconvenience that we are sorry to have caused.

A Stream of Wind, and Falsehoods Blowing Through Glasgow

There is a lot of buzz in Glasgow these days about telephone, cable, and internet service. A very small amount of that buzz is about something that is actually true. The rest of it is being promoted by out-of-town representatives of a large telephone company that does business in Glasgow, even though they don't care enough about our community to actually keep an office open here.

The true part is that Norlight, Inc. (the company that used to be called Cinergy Communications) has made the decision to leave the Glasgow market by early next year. This is the company that provides telephone service over the Glasgow EPB network, and for whom EPB used to do the billing and perform trouble call work. Norlight recently announced in their monthly billing that all Norlight telephone customers in Glasgow need to begin the process of looking for an alternate telephone provider. We understand this decision since wired telephone service is really on the decline as more and more folks go for cell phones instead.

The false part of the buzz is being created by sales people for the large telephone company. They are reportedly knocking on doors all over town and telling a variety of untruths. They say EPB is leaving the internet business. This is totally untrue as we are in the middle of major upgrades to our internet system. They say EPB is leaving the cable television business. This is totally false as our commitment to providing the best cable television service available anywhere is a main priority for our team.

So, we are pulling out all of the stops with our video advertising, this blog, and even our Facebook pages, to make sure that those of us who actually live and work here know the facts. If someone knocks on your door and tries to continue spreading these lies, please feel free to set them straight for us!

Click Here To View The Video

Internet Road Construction Warning!

While you are sleeping on Tuesday night, we will be working on some of the technology that makes your internet service work. At about 11:00 p.m., we will be dramatically upgrading the main switch that connects Glasgow’s broadband network to the outside world. If everything goes well, everyone’s internet service will be down for only a few minutes. If everything does not go well . . . well, we will get back to you on that.

Keeping Glasgow’s internet service slippery fast and reliable requires constant equipment upgrades and improvements. This one just happens to be one of the biggest ones we have had to tackle in a long time. But, that also means it is likely to be one of the most important and should help prepare us for a long list of future upgrades we already have planned. As always, we will keep you posted as these projects develop.

About this Morning...

Unless you are one of a very small group of EPB customers served by our R.R. Donnelley Substation, you got a surprise this morning around 5:30 when your power went off. Even though this happened on what is going to be the hottest day of 2010 (so far), it really had nothing to do with the heat or the capacity of our network. Rather, like most power outages that are not associated with a storm, it happened because of something really small cascading through our network to become something large, all within a time of less than one second.

For those of you interested in the blow-by-blow account of what happened, here goes. First, a number of birds congregated on a pole near the square in Glasgow and caused a short circuit from a 7200 volt circuit to ground. That fault should have been cleared by the nearby Front Street Substation circuit breaker, which would have opened and closed, clearing the bird issue and causing only a momentary blink to the power of about 300 homes and businesses. This morning, that circuit breaker failed to do its job, so its backup protective device took over. That device is something we really don't like, and we are actually preparing to replace, but today, on June 22 2010, it was still in service. This device, a grounding switch, creates another fault on our 69 kV transmission line so that yet another device at our Haywood Substation operates to clear the fault. That circuit breaker at Haywood did interrupt the circuit and the fault, but that operation created a very large outage affecting nearly everyone in Glasgow.

Once the EPB team got some pants on and got rolling, we were able to diagnose the problem pretty quickly and started getting Glasgow's electric power back on. All but that original circuit at Front Street were back in service an hour later. We finally bypassed the circuit breaker that failed to properly clear the fault initially and our folks are still doing triage on it to ascertain why it failed to perform. Hopefully it will be back in service and all of our assets will be available for duty later in the day when the temperature is supposed to be 100 degrees. This is all in a day's work at the EPB.

This whole event just underscores and validates our decision to add a second power delivery point to Glasgow (which is under construction right now). By the end of the year an event like this would affect a much smaller segment of the community since the transmission circuits will be smaller and more redundant. The ground switches and Front Street Substation and Industrial Drive Substations will be removed and replaced with modern protective devices driven by our ubiquitous fiber optic network. Still, even with all of the new technology that is on its way, strange events relating to birds, squirrels, car accidents, and other odd circumstances will happen. When they do, you can count on the EPB team to jump up and take action. That is what we do!

Glasgow's Chance to Plug the Hole in the Gulf

One out of twenty people on the face of planet earth is an American, but Americans use one out of every four gallons of oil produced on the planet. This obvious imbalance is the underlying reason why an out-of-control oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is fouling the ocean and is going to foul hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of pristine shoreline. This environmental disaster proves that there is really no such thing as cheap energy. There is always a price to be paid which is far greater that the price at the pump or the price at the electric meter. The only way to reduce the price is by reducing our consumption to a level equal to our fair share of the world’s resources. We need to stop using 25% of the world’s energy and move toward that 5% level which is proportionate to our population.

How can we Glaswegians help move our society in this direction? Obviously, even if everyone in Glasgow drastically reduced their fossil fuel footprint, the result would not make a toenail’s worth of difference in that footprint. Still, every move we locals make in the right direction improves Glasgow’s economy and our quality of life. We might not solve our country’s problems, but we can certainly improve our back yard. Let’s talk for a minute about how we can do that.

The most direct route to reducing the need for risky offshore oil drilling is for us to use less oil. Driving less is the best way to accomplish this reduction (also using less plastic would help a lot too), and, as it turns out, fewer miles driven has an immediate impact on the livability of Glasgow. Substituting bicycles or walking shoes for vehicle miles benefits the community as a whole and you personally. Did you know we have a newly formed group that is trying to convince local governments to create better sidewalks, trails, and cycling facilities to make it easier to commute by walking or cycling? The group is a subset of Sustainable Glasgow, Inc., called Bicycles of the Barrens. You can read more about their work, join them, and participate in this movement by clicking here and following them on Facebook.

Reducing the number of miles we drive is not something that will come easily, but, even without the present crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, everyone must recognize that oil supplies (like coal supplies) are finite and sooner or later we will all be driving less because less cheap energy is going to be available. Does it not make sense for us to prepare for this now instead of being caught off guard some time in the future?

Of course, for us to be able to enjoy a pedestrian lifestyle and save on the amount of gasoline we use, we need to have plenty of local shops and restaurants open within easy reach of folks walking or cycling from their homes. How can we bring this about? We can commit to spending more of our dollars within our own zip code! If we want more local restaurants that we can walk to, then we need to go to local restaurants more. If we want more local clothing stores, bakeries, bookstores, coffee shops, hardware stores, and appliance stores, then we need to stop wasting the gas going to another town to spend local dollars in their stores and restaurants. We can save our community and help plug the hole in the Gulf with simple, enjoyable acts like walking to a locally owned restaurant and eating there. This is not an act of sacrifice! It is an opportunity to have a vacation experience right here in Glasgow and do something to plug that hole in the Gulf.

All forms of energy, oil, electricity, natural gas, suffer from the same risks and environmental costs that are never accounted for until a disaster like the TVA coal ash spill or BP’s present oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico strikes. So, we should talk about what we can do to reduce our energy demands on the planet through electric power as well. For many months we have been using this blog to talk about the need to reshape the way we use electric power during the day. Not only have we been talking with you about it, but for the last twenty years we have been preparing for a world where electric power would be priced according to the time of day in which the energy is used. There is a reason for this.

We purchase our power from TVA and TVA mostly burns coal to produce that power. For about twenty years TVA has sold that power at very low rates which sent the signal for folks to use all of the power they wanted, no matter what time of day they might want to use it. This signal has worked so well that, today, on a hot summer afternoon from 2:00 until about 8:00, TVA no longer has the capacity to generate all of the power we are using. To keep the system stable, TVA calls up it neighbors and purchases power from them. Of late, even the neighbors do not always have enough reserves to satisfy our spiraling demand for electric power. So, TVA finally decided to face reality and announced that they would join nearly every other electric utility in the nation and start charging for electricity based upon the time of day. We are fine with that as we have the technology to do that, but, a majority of the other TVA distributors feel they are not ready and have steadfastly opposed any move toward this imminently sane solution to a real problem. As a result, Glasgow’s readiness to help with our nation’s energy problems is still moot because our energy supplier will not sell us energy in a way which allows us to utilize our technology. Meanwhile, our coal plant smokestacks keep belching CO2 into the atmosphere much like BP’s gusher is sending oil and natural gas into the Gulf.

Glaswegians can make some headway on this problem as well. On weekdays this summer, start thinking about what you could do to reduce the energy consumed by your home or business between 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Delay washing clothes until later or do them on the weekends. Start thinking about these peak hours and how you might actually reduce the money we send out of Glasgow to TVA by proving how you can respond to price signals like these. Then, when TVA finally allows this system to be implemented, you and we will be ready and able to exploit these new rates. We will reduce Glasgow’s energy footprint and, hopefully, spend those dollars saved in local businesses which will, in turn, continue to enrich our lives in Glasgow. This vision of a perpetual circle of economic vitality is what we are talking about when we talk about creating a sustainable local economy. This is what we call localism. Localism might be the only fabric strong enough to patch the hole at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and we can start weaving it right now.

Want to help solve our energy mess? Live Local.