The delivery of cable television programming bounced off of an orbiting satellite is an amazingly useful and reliable way to get a wide variety of entertainment, but, twice a year, it has some hiccups. Over the next several days those hiccups will affect your television viewing for ten to fifteen minutes per day. Then it will happen again in late spring as we look forward to summer again.

During the equinoxes, as the apparent path of the sun across our sky moves from the northern latitudes toward the southern ones (bringing with it Autumn), our satellite dish has trouble picking up the signals from the satellites out in space which are transmitting the cable programming. Anyone who has driven by our offices, and observed the giant dish looking at the southern sky, has seen the technology we use to deliver most of the cable channels you see in your homes. Except for about eighteen days per year, that dish easily receives those signals from a number of satellites parked out about 22,000 miles in the sky. Of course this applies only to the cable channels delivered via satellite. The ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and other network channels come in over the air to a conventional antenna and that transmission is not seasonally affected.

On those other days, the sun actually moves directly into a line stretching from the sun, to the satellites and then to our dish behind 100 Mallory Drive in Glasgow, Kentucky. For the time that those three elements line up (normally about 20 minutes per day), the satellite dish is blinded by the sun and cannot "see" the satellite. That results in your cable programming getting sparkles in it, then progressively getting worse until it actually falls apart for a few minutes. Then, as the earth rotates and the satellite reappears from the glare, the programming starts returning to normal gradually.

So, over the next few days, anytime between 10:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. you might see this happening. Do not be alarmed. It just means that Fall is arriving in Glasgow!

Where do you like to go for a little vacation? Of the 15,000 folks living in Glasgow, there might also be thousands of different answers to that question, but I am going to guess that most of those places have something in common. I am guessing that those places have beautiful vistas, and shopping, and cool locally owned restaurants. I am also going to guess that those features are somehow connected by pedestrian friendly sidewalks and trails. I bet there are a lot of bicycles around as well.

There is a move afoot to plan similar facilities for us to use when we are at home, right here in Glasgow. If that idea interests you at all, positively or negatively, you need to get involved. The professionals at our Joint City-County Planning Commission are working on a master plan for alternative transportation (often called a “greenway”) in and around Glasgow. As this process continues, they are asking (begging) the public to get involved by coming to some meetings to discuss the plan. The first meeting is on August 2 at 6:30 p.m. at Glasgow City Council Chambers.

The work ongoing right now is in the development of a long-range plan. No plans are actually being drawn to begin physical construction of anything. Rather, the group is working to identify goals and objectives, and gather input from the community on just what forms of alternate transportation plans they would like the local governments to be considering. You can click on this link http://www.glasgow-ky.com/planning/ to go the information already gathered by Kevin Myatt and his team. They would also love for you to click on the link to the survey on the same page and take a few minutes to answer some questions about how you might interact with a Glasgow Greenway.

Thanks for your attention to this very important project.

We want all of our customers to be aware that there is an on-line utility bill payment scam that is spreading across the country.  Thieves are convincing victims that a special federal government assistance program is now available to help pay utility bills through credits or payments to consumer utility accounts. This is total bunk! If you ever have any questions about information being requested by someone claiming to represent us, please contact our customer service department at 651-8341.

Thank you for your continued support of your locally owned and operated electric power, cable television, and internet service utility. We only exist to make your life better in Glasgow!

Glasgow EPB belongs to you. There are about fifty folks that run the EPB for you, and we know that one of the main things you want us to do in running the business is to constantly look for ways to cut expenses. This is one of our central goals and we work hard to achieve it, but we have one single expense that represents about 80% of all of our costs, and we cannot control it. That expense is our power bill from TVA.

One June 1, the TVA wholesale rate goes into its summer mode wherein the energy we purchase from TVA on weekdays, between noon and 8:00 p.m., is more expensive. That means we need your help to achieve the goal of reducing this expense. We need for you to recognize this Time Of Use rate and respond by changing the way your home or business uses electricity.

You will, again, start hearing and seeing reminders from us. There will be commercials on cable television and other media outlets. The main Glasgow Homepage will feature a graph in the upper right hand side of the community’s total energy consumption for the present day. We will do all of these things throughout the summer peak months of June, July, August, and September in our attempt to enlist your help in accomplishing the goal of reducing expenses. This is a job we cannot do on our own.

You can help in many ways. If you install a programmable thermostat you can pre-cool your home or business in the mornings on weekdays by driving the temperature down to 69 degrees or lower. At noon you can tell your thermostat to allow the temperature to drift up to 77 or 78. This will make a huge difference in our energy costs. Additionally, you can avoid the use of the big appliances like the dishwasher, clothes washer, clothes dryer, range, and oven on weekday afternoons before 8:00 p.m.

Remember, starting June 1, we need your help in reducing electric usage between noon and 8:00 p.m. for the rest of the summer months.

The Glasgow EPB wants to recognize the local artists in our area, by offering an opportunity to be seen by over 7,000 people each day! The website www.glasgow-ky.com has come to be known as the homepage for the entire city of Glasgow, and with it so has the iconic Glasgow banner logo. For years, the duty of designing and updating the logo has been handled by the EPB, but now we want to use this banner to showcase the talent of our local artists from preschool to senior citizens. Let us see your interpretation of the Glasgow logo in whatever medium you prefer – paint, crayon, chalk, pen and ink, or computer design. The only requirement is that the word “Glasgow” be incorporated in your design – use your imagination!

We hope to have enough entries so that a new design is featured frequently with the name and brief information about the artist. So, pull out those paint brushes, crayons and pencils and turn Glasgow into art!

To download an official entry form click here and to download a template which you can draw on, click here.

A few months ago we kicked off an AMI (Automated Meter Infrastructure) project to replace all of our old electric meters with new automated meters that have much more technology, memory, and the ability to communicate via the internet. We already have nearly 2,000 of the new electric meters in place at homes and businesses around Glasgow and the project is on schedule to be totally complete in three more years. The really exciting thing is that we are already learning how to help our customers save money using this new technology, and, we started learning that at my house!

The new meters allow the individual customers to monitor their energy consumption in real time via any device that supports web browsing, at any location. The graphic shown above is just one of the many ways we are going to be presenting this information to all EPB customers as the AMI project progresses. Very soon, each time we install another new meter, we will be furnishing the customer with a link to a web portal that will allow the customer to see this information on their home or business.

A week ago, when the portal was being developed by Daniel Mooney and Josh Francis, they noticed the information coming in from my home seemed to show energy usage which was far greater than what is normal at my home. You can see what they saw on the graphic from my own meter at my home. The green line represents the energy which was being consumed at my home on February 13, 2012. The regular and cyclical demand spikes approaching 20 kW could only mean one thing – that my heat pump was malfunctioning and the electric resistance heat was coming on instead of the heat pump compressor to warm my home. This information alerted me to the problem and I immediately called a local HVAC maintenance firm to check out the situation at my house.

On Monday, February 20 the technician arrived at my home and found that the blower motor on my heat pump had failed, just like we predicted from reviewing the meter data. The graphic below shows that they repaired my problem about noon that day and that my energy consumption immediately returned to normal.

This event really opened our eyes to just how powerful this realtime power consumption information can be. This information just saved me about $400 worth of energy which would have been consumed at my home before I knew there was a problem using the old methods of being in the dark on my home’s energy usage until the monthly bill arrived. That gives us a number of new ideas.

As we continue to roll out the new meters as part of our AMI project, we are now also working on software that may be able to recognize equipment failures like mine and inform our customers within minutes. This monitoring could be another service we can offer our customers and another way for our customers to benefit from Glasgow EPB’s work to reinvent itself as an “infotricity” utility instead of just a power company. For many years we have been certain that the combination of broadband communications and electric power (creating the new version of electric power that we call infotricity) would allow all of us to save money on our energy bills while we enjoy broadband services which are vastly superior to any offering in any other small community in our country. This latest development seems to, again, confirm that vision.

Stay tuned for your opportunity to view your energy consumption via this new invention from your EPB team. We will continue to bring you the future . . . faster!