I grew up in a house where my father took trouble calls for an electric utility. Since 1975, I have been employed in the electric utility field myself. So, for, ahem, over fifty years now, I have been closely associated with power systems and the things that make them perform well and the things that cause problems. In all of that time I have never seen anything to compare to the number of momentary power interruptions we have had over the last month caused by squirrels and blackbirds. While it is normal for us to have an interruption cause by a bird, squirrel, or snake fairly regularly; by that I mean perhaps one per week, we have had something over twenty five such interruptions in different parts of Glasgow over the last month.

I don’t know much about the lives, mating habits, and mental attitudes of squirrels and blackbirds, but it is certain that they have been up to something very strange for so many of them to simultaneously contact a grounded surface and an energized conductor over the last month. When they do that, either a power fuse blows and the folks served by that fuse are out of service for an hour or so until we can arrive to replace it, or the flash causes a substation breaker to operate which means a one second power interruption to about 400 homes and businesses. Either way, the offending animal is vaporized and the affected customers are unhappy.

Is this happening because it has been a while since we attacked the whole city with aggressive tree trimming? Is it a phase of the moon? Is it something in the air or water? It is rare that we run into a reliability problem that we cannot propose a solution for. Normally there is a solution that some liberal application of money and/or work will provide. However, this problem is vexing us. We are about to start on the north side of Glasgow with a new, very aggressive, tree trimming program that we hope will put more distance between transformers and squirrels, but none of us are sure that will keep them away. I am reminded of my own efforts to keep them out of my bird feeder and that experience leads me to predict that they will still find a way. How do we convince squirrels and blackbirds to be more careful? If you have any ideas, please let us know.

The EPB cable programming garden is in full bloom! Recent system upgrades are making it possible for us to add several new channels, one or two of which should be of interest to someone, or everyone, in your house.

Of course, we have already discussed the big one . . . The Disney Channel is now available to all Glasgow Classic customers on channel 35. This channel is very popular with everyone from three years old to about thirteen or so. A companion channel called Toon Disney is now available to digital tier subscribers on channel 134. As the name implies, it is chock full of Disney cartoons.

If you love Big Bird, The Count, Elmo, and the whole Sesame Street gang, you will love our new programming on channel 133 – PBS Kids Sprout.

Channel 195 is now WKRN’s 24/7 Nashville weather station which will give the perennial weather watchers among you another way to keep up with the regional weather at any time day or night.

For those of you who purchased a high definition television and subscribe to our HD tier of programming, we have great news for you too! Channel 517 is now VS/Golf HD. Eventually they might both have a full time HD channel of their own, but right now the folks who own both of these channels are offering this “shared” channel for fans of both VS and Golf Channel. Later on this summer, we hope to also be adding Speed HD, A&E HD, HGTV HD, Starz HD, Food HD, and National Geographic HD.

We hope all of this programming helps you enjoy the extra time at home that many of us will be experiencing as the price of gasoline makes it more attractive to stay at home. At the EPB our job is to make your life in Glasgow better. We hope this new programming helps accomplish that goal!

Last night the evening news ran a story about the possible demise of the airline industry. Fuel prices and weak economic conditions, they said, might cause two hundred cities to lose access to commercial airlines. The cost of the remaining air travel options might be so expensive that regular air travel by families for vacations and quick visits to distant cities might put such travel out of reach for all but the wealthy. As a former frequent flyer, this story left me feeling pretty sad.

After the news went off we went downtown to the courthouse square to take in a concert by our Glasgow Community Band. Walking down South Green Street toward the square, I couldn’t help but notice the infrastructure; the technology that makes Glasgow a community. There are the streets, sidewalks, utilities, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and many other technological wonders that we purchase for ourselves. These are the infrastructure items that we all count on and accumulate in a passive manner. That is to say, we pay for them with our taxes and utility bills, but are not generally personally involved in.

Those are nice, but the really wonderful elements of our infrastructure are the ones people provide from their inherent pride, generosity, talent, and commitment to improving the community without any direct benefit to themselves. Those include well maintained and renovated homes, lawns, and landscaping. Of course, the biggest item that was on display last night was the Community Band. That is Glasgow infrastructure as well, and it exists only because a handful of locals care enough about the rest of us to commit the time and energy necessary to allow their individual efforts to combine with those of others to produce beautiful music. Fire engines and utility lines are nice and useful, but anyone with enough money can buy them and all communities have them. Our Community Band is not something other towns have. It is special. It comes from that underlying current of civility and community that cannot be established with tax dollars. It is a special bit of technology that we are all so lucky to have.

Last night hundreds of locals sat on our own lawn, under a crystal blue sky, in front of the City Hall that we bought and paid for, and were entertained by a group of our fellow citizens simply because they could. Children giggled and waved blades of grass in unison with Bill Brogan as he waved his conductor’s baton. Friends and neighbors shared all of this with each other during an evening so perfect that you were expecting to wake up and find that you were dreaming. We all enjoyed the kind of evening that so many folks load themselves up into airplanes and travel great distances, at even greater expense, in the hope of experiencing. Many of the attendees did that just by walking down the street. We discovered vacation level happiness on a Tuesday night right here in Glasgow.

On the way back home I started thinking again about the evening news and the demise of the airline industry and the fact that more folks are going to need to find their entertainment at home. I pondered this as we walked back up South Green Street. I pondered the demise of cheap air travel and I finally said . . . who cares.

Well, it is official. We are going to add The Disney Channel to our Glasgow Classic tier of programming (Channel 35) before the end of June. We will also be adding Toon Disney to our digital tier about the same time. It has been a long time since we offered Disney Channel on our system. We simply felt like they were charging way too much for it. Actually, we still do, but we cannot ignore the fact that they are producing some of the cleanest and most popular programming for young folks that is available anywhere right now. We also recognize that rampant increases in the cost of gasoline and all other sorts of fuel will result in more folks staying at home instead of traveling for recreation.

So, enjoy! Disney has several blockbuster programs scheduled for the end of June and for the rest of the summer including programs like Camp Rock, Who's That Girl, and Jonas Brothers Band will be everywhere. Tell everyone you know...the long Disney drought in Glasgow is at an end. It is raining mouse ears!

One thing is certain, the Glasgow EPB is a small operation. We consist of fifty folks with no interest in any customer outside the good old 42141 zip code. We serve homes and businesses that cover a total population of only about 16,000 folks. In the great big world of electric and cable utilities, we are laughably small. But that does not mean we don’t have a mighty big impact on the economy of Glasgow and the lives of those 16,000 folks. We have. We do, and, in the coming years, we will.

This year marks our twentieth anniversary in the cable television business. During those twenty years we have always made sure that the people of Glasgow pay the lowest rates for cable television service in the United States. Even though we just announced a modest rate increase of $1.50 per month which will become effective on July 1, we still blow away the competition. The Census Bureau just released this study relating to cable television popularity and the rates people pay for cable in our country. As you can see if you click on the link, the average cost of cable in 2006 was $41.17 per month. Since this is now 2008 it is very likely that figure is now about $45 per month. In Glasgow, even after our rate increase, you will be paying only $25.75 ($29.75 outside the City limits)per month for the expanded basic package. That differential between our rates and those we would otherwise be paying if we didn’t have our own little locally owned system has existed throughout the twenty year history of our cable efforts. As a result, we have saved the folks around here over $40 million since we got started in 1988! It is certainly worth pondering what Glasgow would look like today if an additional $40 million had left the local economy over the last twenty years. It is not an image I want to dwell on very long.

But saving the community money is not the be-all and end-all reason of our existence. We can do a lot more to make Glasgow a better place to live and we are doing a lot of that right now. You see, the EPB team today, just like the folks who worked so hard fifty years ago to bring the EPB into existence, believes strongly that small is beautiful and that a few determined folks at the helm of some pretty powerful technology can constantly improve the life of local folks. To a large extent our team is guided by the principles so eloquently espoused by the great Kentucky writer, Wendell Berry (who writes and farms in the community of Port Royal, just a couple of hours up the road from us). Just a few days ago he was on KET making an observation about our present fuel crisis and how it might finally bring about a change in the way we live our lives in that we might all be traveling a whole lot less. He said, “It is clear that we are going to have to enjoy the places where we are, and, since that is the case, we need to do a lot more work making the places where we are, enjoyable.” The EPB is executing plans to make Glasgow more enjoyable.

With respect to electric power, we are well on our way to building a second delivery point so that electricity will continue to be reliable and available for Glasgow’s future. Our planned solution is elegant in that it will provide twice as much capacity as we have today should Glasgow continue to rampantly grow, yet it will also offer a much more efficient solution if our growth is stagnant or if we actually shrink. So, whatever direction our energy usage takes, we are planning an enjoyable and efficient solution.

We think that another way to make Glasgow more enjoyable in a world of $4 and $5 gasoline will be an enhanced internet and LAN system capable of affording more folks a way to work from home and leave the car or SUV parked in the garage. As this is written we are anxiously awaiting new fiber connections being installed along the TVA transmission line to Bowling Green and new cable modem management hardware and software to drastically improve the data throughput of our broadband network right here in Glasgow.

Finally, it is obvious from the Census Bureau report that increased access to cable television programming is another thing that folks find enjoyable, and we have some great things coming in that department as well. The $1.50 per month increase is going to allow us to bring some new and exciting products for your enjoyment! Very soon PBS Kids Sprout will come to our digital tier of programming and along with it will come 24 hour a day access to great preschooler programming like “Sesame Street” and “Bob the Builder” and some new characters being developed for the channel by the Muppet folks at Jim Henson Company. “The Pajanimals” will be part of the network’s “Good Night Show” block, and, as a relatively new grandparent, I can testify that Glasgow will be more enjoyable at my house when there is new programming to convince certain grand-daughters to go to sleep before I do! In addition to Sprout we will also be adding Golf Channel HD, VS HD, and it is quite likely that we will also be adding (drum roll please). . . The Disney Channel sometime in June. That’s right. After refusing to pay the exorbitant rates employed by the Disney folks for many, many years, we are finally about to cave in to the power of Hannah Montana. She got us in a headlock and we finally are about to say uncle. So, for those of you who spell additional enjoyment M-I-C-K-E-Y, Glasgow is about to get more enjoyable for you too.

There are other great things coming to your cable service as well. For example, our digital channel 103 (Discovery Home) is about to become Planet Green. This will be a channel which is calling itself the first 24-hour channel dedicated to eco-friendly living. The folks at Discovery are making a big bet here that “eco-tainment” will appeal to viewers. I think it will. Then later this year we hope to roll out our newest cable television service, VOD (Video On Demand) which will give all of our digital customers a nearly unlimited menu of movies and other programming that they can watch whenever they feel like it.

All told, the EPB is working hard to make your life in Glasgow more enjoyable and to ease your pain from beginning the process of withdrawing from a life spent traveling to another location in search of enjoyment. We think Glasgow can be plenty enjoyable! Stick with us and let us show you how.

From our perspective here in Glasgow, it is easy for us to feel that there is nothing we can do to combat the world-wide problems associated with the spiraling cost of all forms of energy. However, the converse is certainly not true. Even though Glasgow is a long way from the seats of power where the costs of energy are determined, the price decisions seem to be finding us without any problem or hesitation.

Today’s newspaper tells us that the price of oil just topped $124 per barrel. Within a few hours, the increase is passed along to us at gasoline stations right here in Glasgow. Four dollar per gallon gasoline is virtually assured. Five dollar a gallon gasoline is pretty darn likely before 2008 is history. Eight cent kilowatt-hours arrived in Glasgow on April 1. Shockingly high rates for natural gas will also arrive in our small town very soon. All energy sources virtually draw from the same pool and they will all continue to rise in price driven by two forces: demand and speculation. Even though most of us feel there is nothing we can do about either of these forces, the truth is, even from right here in Glasgow, we can blunt the effect of both of them if we put our minds to the task.

The force that is causing most of the daily headlines (other than the local newspaper’s curious interest in the contractual discussions between the EPB and Dana Corporation) is speculation in oil futures by those who worship profit ahead of all other things. This activity consists of money managers for large investment funds bidding up the price of oil to be delivered in the future. Their goal is to make more money. They feel that they can make more money by investing in oil to be delivered in the future because they think that you and I are totally incapable of moderating our usage of gasoline, and, thus, that we will simply pay whatever the price is. Now, we all must admit that, so far, those greedy money-changers have been correct and we have been helping them win their bets and feather their nests. But wouldn’t you like to see them lose a few bucks? Wouldn’t it be fun to prove them wrong and leave a lot of their $124 per barrel oil sitting around for them to swim in? Are you willing to make a few changes in order to get a chance to see this happen? If so, read on.

If we want to take the wind out of the speculator’s sails, we must be willing to respond to the other great force...our demand for energy. We use too much fossil fuel in all its forms. We use too much electric power and that means we are using too much coal and natural gas, and, to some extent, diesel fuel, because all of those fossil fuels are used to generate electric power. The main reason we are using too much electric power is that we waste so much of it by concentrating our demands into about four hours a day. We’ll talk more about that in a bit. We also use too much gasoline and much of that is simply wasted as well. The main reasons that we waste so much gasoline are the inefficiency of the vehicles we drive, and, the bad habits we have in the way we drive them and the way we design the roads we drive them upon.

So what can we do right here in Glasgow to combat the forces of speculation and demand? To a great extent, we have been gearing up to fight the wasteful demand for electric power since 1988. That was when we started building the broadband network that was first designed to help us better regulate energy usage in Glasgow, and later came to be used as the medium which delivers cable television, internet, and telephone services as well as electric power telemetry. On your behalf, we have been doing battle with TVA and other electric power behemoths for twenty years, trying to convince them to let us demonstrate how telecommunications can be blended with electric power to level out the daily demand spikes and allow us to live within the capacity of existing power generation facilities. Only within the last few months has that battle started to go our way. Finally, it seems that TVA might be about to recognize the value of what we have been screaming for the last twenty years. Maybe, just maybe, our efforts here in Glasgow are about to show how demand can be tamed with respect to electric power. If so, we will be using our network to manage electric power consumption in individual homes and businesses and that should result in lower costs for our customers.

While the EPB team is fighting to battle demand with respect to electric power, we can’t do much for gasoline and diesel fuel demand other than better manage our own consumption, which I am proud to report we are doing pretty well. We are reorganizing our work habits to reduce fuel consumption. We are working to create efficient routes to tie together all of our appointments every day to reduce fuel consumption. We are idling and getting rid of some of our vehicles. Some of us are walking to work. Others are riding motorcycles and scooters (we have one member of the team who is riding an electric scooter to work!). But the larger impact on demand will come if all of you will respond to the rampant price increases for gasoline by actually changing some of your habits. Here are a few Glasgow-specific changes you can make that will go a long way toward saving you some money personally, and, possibly, costing some of those greedy jerks who are bidding up the price of oil some of their precious funds.

Avoid all drive-up windows. Utilities like the EPB have them. So do banks, fast-food establishments and some pharmacies. All of them have one thing in common. They waste energy. While keeping a window open for fast-food transactions leaks a lot of conditioned air which wastes electric power, the biggest waste at a drive-through is gasoline. The best way to avoid this waste is to refuse to use a drive-through window. With respect to utilities, pay your bills via mail or automatic bank draft. With respect to banks, see if your employer can direct deposit your check to your account. If it is just not possible to avoid the drive-through, consider stopping your vehicle’s engine while you are waiting in line. It takes only about ten seconds worth of fuel to start a modern engine. So, any time you are sitting in line at a drive-through for more than ten seconds, you should kill the engine! That also goes for sitting and talking to someone, leaving your car in the driveway while you “run in” for just a minute, sitting at traffic signals, etc. Any time you are not moving in your vehicle, the engine should be off. Did you know that the popular hybrid vehicles that claim fantastic fuel efficiency gain most of their additional efficiency through simply automatically turning off the engine when the vehicle is stopped? Well, it is true. You can create your own “sort-of” hybrid vehicle then by simply reaching for the off switch when you stop.

Synchronize traffic signals. While we are talking about fuel waste while stopped, we should also talk about Glasgow’s many traffic signals and the way they waste our fuel. This problem really burns my toast. Glasgow is blessed with a robust broadband network available virtually everywhere in town. That means that the network passes right by every traffic signal in town. Those traffic signals are controlled by digital technology located inside a shiny box sitting near every signal. Those boxes contain interfaces which can connect to the broadband network, going right over the top of them. Once connected those signals can be programmed to allow traffic along the main arteries to move along continuously at a predetermined speed, thus using existing roads to move much more traffic without stopping and wasting fuel. But, instead of utilizing the network's capacity to synchronize the signals, our Transportation Cabinet allows each signal to operate on its own. This results in regularly stopping the flow of dozens of vehicles so that one or two can pull out and turn left from a side street. When each intersection acts as if it were an island instead of just a link in the chain of signals and ignores the need to allow traffic on the main line to move along at an assigned pace, the result, as we all experience as we try to move about town, is wasteful stopping and starting at each intersection. It is an outrage that so much technology is readily available and already paid for, but is not used. Rather, we always seem ready to spend $15 million building or expanding a road when $1500 would solve the problem. Now it is true that none of us, acting on our own, can make these connections and calculations to take advantage of this existing technology, but each of us is going to be coming in contact with folks running for local and state offices over the next few months and we can certainly make this an issue with them. This is a simple and inexpensive solution to a big problem that affects each of us every single day and it could dramatically reduce our demand for energy and our frustration.

Walk to work, or work from home. Everyone does not live within a reasonable distance to their work to make walking possible. But it is certain that some do and there is plenty of room on our sidewalks. On the other hand, that same broadband network which is already on every street in town and many streets out of town, can be used to allow you to work from home. If your main responsibilities each day consist of answering phones and interfacing with a computer screen, all you need is a connection to our network and an employer who wants to pitch in to help us reduce our demand for energy. In fact, utilizing our broadband network to reduce transportation costs by working at home might even exceed the value of reducing electric power demand by controlling peak demands. Trips not taken at all will do the most to help us make those fuel speculators miserable.

Shop locally, for locally produced goods. While buying a tomato at the local Wal Mart is better than driving to Kroger in Bowling Green for that tomato, that is really not the kind of local shopping that will help us reduce our demand for energy. What we need is more transactions where we walk, or car pool to a local farmers market where we purchase tomatoes grown right here in our area. After the purchase, take the food home and cook it outside on the grill (this will save energy because you will not be heating up the air in the house and then asking the air conditioner to lower the temperature again). Those tomatoes at Wal Mart probably traveled 2,000 miles to get here. They look wonderful, but they have been heavily marinated in diesel fuel during their journey and that makes them partners with those fuel speculators that we are wanting to kick in the shins. Buying local goods from local vendors saves energy and makes our community a better place to spend more time in. In a world where we are going to need to travel less because of the cost of fuel, doesn’t it make a lot of sense to make our local communities more attractive? I certainly think so, but that will have to be the subject of subsequent posts to this blog.

It is most important for us all to remember that our situation is not hopeless. Acting together we can begin to prevail against the forces of habit and greed that work together to bind us together in service to the gasoline pump and coal fired electric generator. We need to think globally and act neighborly. Along those lines, there is a great program playing on KET this month that greatly expands upon that philosophy. Author Forum on KET this month features Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy being interviewed by Kentucky's own Wendell Berry. I urge you to look for it and watch it. We are going to record it and make it available on Cable 6 several more times as well or you can follow this link to a web page where you can scroll down to the Bill McKibben link and watch it on-line. It is well worth watching. You also may feel that these suggestions are just too small to have any real effect. When I talk this way to customers and peers in the utility fraternity, I often get the response: "Why bother?" In response to that I strongly suggest that you read an article Why Bother, by Michael Pollan. His response to that question is far more eloquent than anything I might compose.

Once again it is time to set the record straight to help our customer/owners understand what the EPB is doing in light of the image painted by the Glasgow Daily Times. Recent news stories, while factually accurate, have certainly painted a picture that depicts images which are not at all accurate.

First, let’s talk about our contractual relationship with Dana Corporation. At our last board meeting I gave a detailed report on the specifics of our relationship with Dana before and after their bankruptcy filing. Even though the details of the EPB’s relationship with a private company are protected by that company’s rights to privacy, we started the discussion with the GDT reporter still in the room. Once we realized we were discussing a matter which should have been protected by Dana’s privacy rights, we went into an executive session and asked the reporter to leave. The next morning I also called the GDT Editor and asked them not to run information about our relationship with Dana because it should not have been discussed in an open session and since the information might tend to cause worry and strife for the families of the employees of Dana Corporation in Glasgow. However, as many of you saw, they denied my request and ran the story about our contract negotiation difficulties with Dana anyway.

The newspaper clearly had the right to run this story since we discussed some of it in a public session of the EPB. However, their reasoning for running it and unnecessarily alarming the families who depend on their jobs at Dana is simply not clear to me and, in my opinion, is not justifiable. Even though we had a nice discussion with the GDT Editor, he was not swayed by our effort.

The good news is that we now have a fully executed power contract with Dana Corporation and we are very confident that they will continue to flourish and prosper here in Glasgow. The EPB is working with them every day to make sure we cooperate to help them reduce their cost of doing business here and, thus, continue to be successful as a reorganized and revitalized operation and asset for the people of Glasgow. That happened through our determination to constantly build a better life for families in Glasgow. It was not a result of sensational headlines in the local paper.

Next, let’s talk about the next big headline you saw last week regarding our "massive" three gallon spill of oil from one of our substation transformers. How this became one of the big news stories from our last board meeting is beyond my ability to comprehend. Actually, the real news from the many, many items that were discussed in that meeting, was about the big decisions we are making about the design of the new power delivery substation which will be critical to life in Glasgow for the next fifty years. We spent nearly an hour discussing the intricate details of this decision and the millions of dollars which will be spent and saved over the next decades as a result of these decisions. Still, that did not become a headline. A small report about a very small leak at a transformer inside a fenced and highly secured substation did become a headline. Go figure.

For anyone who really cares about transformer oil leaks, here is the rest of the story. The EPB owns and operates ten large power transformers and about five thousand smaller distribution transformers. These transformers are all filled with oil of one form or another. Some of them were manufactured during a time when that oil was contaminated with PCB’s. On occasion, these transformers leak oil. When they do, we clean them up and notify the proper authorities if the oil is contaminated and regulated by federal or state law. Some of these leaks are inconsequential. Some of them can cost a lot of money to clean up. Those are the ones that I feel the EPB Board needs to hear about. However, my reporting those to them should not alarm any of the folks in Glasgow that their power is going to go off.

As you move about Glasgow, you will note that we have several substations around town (nine of them actually). We have that many so that the failure of any one of them can be accommodated by transferring the load to another substation. While it is true that we have had a number of events over the last few months that have caused us to utilize our redundancy plans more than we would like, there is no reason to believe that we are headed for darkness! We have a plan for this. We work every single day to improve our networks and make them better able to deliver reliable services to our customers. These facts are reported to the board members in an effort to keep them informed of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Why the local newspaper likes to transform these reports into “The Sky is Falling” type headlines is, again, beyond our ability to understand or control. However, due to the magic of the internet, we can at least continue to publish these explanations of what is really going on for you. We hope you continue to look here for the information you need to know about the EPB, the utility that you own.