1.    Tiered Customer Charge Based Upon Usage. This is the toughest one of the recommendations for us to make progress on, but we did discuss it enough to target a $5 reduction in the customer charge for the lowest usage “tier,” as recommended by the Advisory Council. I’m afraid that this decision has been misinterpreted by some as a promise to lower all customer charges by $5. The Council asked for a tiered customer charge with reduction for the lower kWh usage customers. That is the job we are working on as directed to my team at the August Board meeting. Additionally, TVA is going to start charging us a new wholesale customer charge, and since our present rate architecture collects all of the money we need to operate the grid from the customer charge, the base customer charge will have to cover this new expense. That is not even recognizing the possible $400,000 annual cost increase that Kentucky Retirement might saddle us with. A $5 credit would soften those increases and provide the gradualism, as we slowly reduce that credit over the next few years, but that credit will have to be funded by an increase somewhere else. Please remember, the EPB is a non-profit corporation which does not have the financial resources to simply reduce any charge without offsetting that reduction with an increase to another charge to balance the ledger. As discussed extensively above, we are about to address this item.

2.         Revisions to Variable Rate. The requested revisions have already been implemented, effective August 1. The council asked us to limit our peak predictions to a maximum of 4 days per month. Accepting that recommendation causes us to move away from the technically elegant architecture of the former infotricity rate, wherein everyone pays their pro-rata share of the monthly peak hour, no matter when it occurs. The new limitations we accepted create risk of paying TVA for a peak hour which is not properly predicted and shared among all customers. That risk is monetary and we must create a fund balance to use when those missed predictions occur, because TVA must be paid regardless of the accuracy of our predictions.

3.         Alternative Rate Considerations. This is one of the most unusual recommendations from the Council. The suggestion here is that we poll our customers (we assume just those actually using the Alternative Rate - TRS and TGSA1) to ascertain their interest in modifying the rate to introduce time-of-use elements to the rate. This feels odd because everyone we know that went to the Alternative Rate, did so because they sought the solace and simplicity of an old-style kWh rate with fixed kWh charges. Still, we agreed to pursue each of the recommendations, so we sent out first class mail survey to about 1,500 folks on the alternative rate. We got the forms back from 14 customers. Most of those responses asked for the alternative, or “flat” rate, to be altered by adding a time-of-use element to the rate. As a result of this response, I believe we can count this recommendation as satisfied and that the rate design, as it stands, is preferable to an overwhelming majority of those using it.

4.         Improvement to RoundUp Product. The recommendation here was quite simple. We were asked to modify the product such that anyone interested in participating could choose a fixed amount to be automatically added to their monthly bill and then donated to Community Relief. The objective here seems to have been to gather more funds for the use of Community Relief, by increasing the amount donated by a participant beyond the sub-one dollar amount achieved by simple rounding up of the bill to the next highest even dollar. We found that the software could easily be adapted to do this and we have already accomplished this change. We still need to create marketing to better inform the customers of this change, and that is in process.

5.         Annual Rate Review. The recommendation was that we conduct an annual review of the effectiveness of all retail rates, and recommend changes based upon that review. This is a great suggestion that is already on-going. This month we will have a presentation on rate effectiveness based upon data from 2017 consumption and billing.

            6.         Expand Education Initiatives. This recommendation is the one which surprised us the most. The Council recommended that we use multiple media outlets and create a speaker bureau which would allow us to provide energy usage and savings advice to a wide variety of meetings and groups throughout Glasgow. Honestly, we felt we were already doing that, and, a lot of the feedback we have been getting has been negative as many folks feel they do not need to be educated. However, since we accepted this recommendation, and since you instructed me to redouble our efforts to educate our customers, we are on the case. We have already conducted, two full blown educational sessions lead by Jeff Christian, a former director from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and someone considered to be an expert in the energy efficiency field. The event was heavily advertised with special arrangements for transportation via city bus and individual transport for those with transportation needs. Mr. Christian did a fantastic job speaking at the two forums on August 31, however, less than 30 total customers attended. Other educational efforts will continue.

Insurance Package Rate Stabilization Offer

We have been buying our Workers’ Compensation and General Liability insurance coverage from Kentucky League of Cities for several years. Every so often we have solicited competitive bids for our coverage, but we have never gotten a competing offer that was attractive compared to the coverage and the service we get from KLC (they are represented locally by Pedigo-Lessenberry).

Recently they made an offer to effectively freeze our rates until 2020 if we enter into an agreement with them to stay with them for two more years. We are inclined to recommend that we accept this offer. The down side would be that if you decided to direct me to write specs and solicit competitive bids again, we would not be able to do that until 2020. I look forward to your thoughts on this matter at the meeting.

Conclusion

Well, that ought to be more than enough to set your head to spinning for this month. Let me know if you have any questions before the meeting. 

We have just given EPB internet customers a New Year’s gift! The 12 MB internet service was just upgraded to 15 MB and the 40 MB service just got kicked up to 50 MB! These improvements will improve all your internet activities, and the really cool part is that there is no additional charge.

In order enjoy this upgrade, all you must do is reboot your cable modem.  Just unplug the power, wait 30 seconds, and plug it back up. Once the modem comes back on-line you will have the newly upgraded speeds. That’s it!

Enjoy this latest upgrade from Glasgow EPB, as we continue our tradition of bringing you the future…faster!

In a Special Meeting on Thursday, January 4, 2018, Glasgow EPB board members met to again consider the matter of paying the rate increase demanded by WHAS, or, in the alternative, dropping the channel. The Board had already decided to drop WSMV and WTVF on January 1, but was still considering the final offer from WHAS until the Special Meeting.

This was a very difficult decision to make. The Board was faced with a necessary rate increase of $2.95 per month if all three broadcast channels (likely to take effect in April) were removed, or an increase of about $6.20 per month if WHAS’s offer were accepted. The Board was evenly split on the question, with half of the Board feeling that keeping access to a Kentucky based broadcast station like WHAS, essential for EPB customers to keep fully abreast of Kentucky news, weather, and sports. The other half of the Board was more focused on the need to keep the cable rate increases smaller by dropping some channels who have asked for the largest rate increases, leaving customers the option of getting the Louisville news programming from streaming video sources. Eventually, the tie was broken by the Board Chairperson, who voted to drop WHAS in favor of lower rates.

This decision will become effective Monday, Jan. 8th, when the cable lineup will be altered as follows: