Blog Archive

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Notice From City of Glagsow

The folks at Glasgow City Hall have asked us to provide you with a copy of the following notice:

A friendly reminder from the City of Glasgow, leaving grass clippings on city sidewalks and streets or dumping trash, limbs or foreign objects of any kind into drainage ways is considered littering as defined by City of Glasgow Code Numbers 93.05 & 130.18. This creates a safety hazard for pedestrians and contributes to drainage issues in our neighborhoods by causing the storm sewers to clog, resulting in unwanted water runoff and standing water. The City of Glasgow Street Department is working hard to keep the streets drainage ways clean of debris but we need citizens to help out. Please follow lawn mowing etiquette' and sweep up and remove grass clippings or sweep grass clippings back onto your own property.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013

New Features For Glasgow-ky.com!!!

We hope you have taken a moment and read the blog post about how to help Glasgow save money this summer. If not, please click here.

Have you noticed the new graphic on www.glasgow-ky.com near the real-time City electric usage graph?

We are working to try to predict when that highest reading might be and inform all of our customers, asking for your help in holding the energy usage down just for those days when we think the peak hour might occur, rather than every afternoon. You will see various notifications posted on Facebook, Twitter, The Weather Channel crawl, cable advertisements and any other format we can think of to get the message out to all of our customers. You will likely see this occur about once each week, but the remaining days in the week will be open for you to use electricity as you desire.

For those of you wondering just what this means, here are the descriptions:

  • Load Level Green - This is the standard level for the Glasgow EPB. It means that no peak electric demand is expected and no action is being requested of the EPB customers.
  • Load Level Blue - This indicates an anticipated higher electric usage day due to weather or system conditions. EPB customers are requested to limit usage of any unnecessary electric equipment and appliances such as washers, dryers, and dishwashers, and raise the thermostat two degrees between the hours of noon to 8 pm.
  • Load Level Red - This indicates an extreme condition due to weather or system conditions. All EPB electric customers are asked to put extreme conservation practices into place from noon to 8 pm. Please curtail any unnecessary electric usage and raise the thermostat to at least 78 degrees, if at all possible.

On Wednesday, June 12, we will put this new system into action, with a Load Level Blue condition. With temperatures predicted for the low to mid-90's, we anticipate that we may set a new peak for the month. (Our peak this month is shown as the orange horizontal line on the graph, and was set on June 5 at 2:00 pm.) Again, as we described in the earlier blog post, our bill from TVA is partially based on this peak, so it pays our customers to keep this peak as low as possible. We're asking for each of our customers' help - whether residential or business. We need everyone's assistance between the hours of noon - 8 pm. Simply think before you turn on that appliance, lower that thermostat or push the start button on that electric powered piece of equipment. Just by making some changes in the way we use our electricity, we can create a savings for all of our customers!

We are counting on each of you to help in our efforts to hold the costs down for the entire community. With just a few minor changes for just a few hours each week, we can make an impact!

Monday, June 3, 2013

We Have a Plan for Saving Glasgow Money



During the past couple of years you have heard us talk about Summer and Winter peak times for electricity use.  We have asked you to curtail your electric usage in the months of June through September during the time frame of noon – 8 pm each Monday through Friday.  Well, this year, we are going to approach our efforts to save money for our customers in a different way.



We purchase all of our power from TVA, and each month they send us the bill for that usage. A large portion of that bill is based upon the maximum, or peak, energy used by our customers during one hour of each month.  Yes, you read that right, the bill from TVA isn’t just based upon the total amount of energy used in Glasgow, but also on the highest one hour reading they see during the month.  So, you can see how important it is for our community to keep that highest reading as low as possible.



We are working to try to predict when that highest reading might be and inform all of our customers, asking for your help in holding the energy usage down just for those days when we think the peak hour might occur, rather than every afternoon.  You will see various notifications posted on Facebook, Twitter, The Weather Channel crawl, cable advertisements and any other format we can think of to get the message out to all of our customers.  You will likely see this occur about once each week, but the remaining days in the week will be open for you to use electricity as you desire. 



You can always see how we are doing in trying to stay below our peak by going to www.glasgow-ky.com to see the city electric demand graph on the right hand side of the page.  The red line represents today’s usage, and the orange straight line represents our peak.  When you start seeing the red line approaching that orange straight line, we will ask for your help to control the maximum usage. 



If you are at home, just refraining from using your washer, dryer, or electric range can make a big impact.  For an even greater impact, if you have an electric hot water heater, please refrain from using hot water during that time.  Of course the ultimate impact will be to raise your thermostat just a few degrees so that your air conditioning doesn’t kick on.  If you are at your place of work, again, adjusting the thermostat a few degrees, and turning off lights in unused areas can make a difference. 



We are counting on each of you to help in our efforts to hold the costs down for the entire community.  With just a few minor changes for just a few hours each week, we can make an impact!
Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Network Outages for March 24 and March 25

This Sunday evening, March 24, at about 11:00 p.m., we will commence a big project to ready our community for major advancements in the way healthcare is delivered, but that project will cause widespread interruptions to your cable television and internet services for a few hours.

We are proud to have been chosen by T.J. Samson Community Hospital as their vendor/partner for their high speed network connections between the new Healthcare Pavilion and the main hospital, and also to the outside world. We have been feverishly installing new fiber optic cables all over town to provide multiple layers of redundancy for the new medical network, and now we are ready to reconfigure our Jama M Young Technology Center (JMYTC) to accept and terminate the new circuits.

The work has been scheduled during the late evening of Sunday March 24 and the early morning hours of Monday March 25, in the hope that our customers will be least inconvenienced during those hours. Our team will be doing tedious fiber optic cable splicing inside JMYTC and on the street outside our campus during those hours. Half of all EPB customers will be affected, anywhere from one hour to about seven hours. This work will impact both cable television and internet services.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause, but we are also thrilled that our community is going to have such a sophisticated medical network environment. Stay tuned to the Glasgow Electric Plant Board Facebook page for additional updates on this project.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Spring, and EPB Network Updates, Just Around the Bend




The calendar says that spring is just around the corner, and we are ready for it, because we have a lot of work to do. Right along with nature’s transition, your EPB team is also planning a spring full of construction and maintenance to our networks. Some of that activity will impact the products you purchase from us, so this message is an update on the upcoming activities.

Over the next several weeks you will see several notices from us regarding internet, cable television, and electric power projects that might impact you. As we have been saying for some time, the very best way to stay abreast of these events in real-time is to “like” our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/glasgowepb This page has become the easiest way for us to move timely information out to all 15,000 of our customers.

The biggest upcoming potential impact on your internet services comes from a variety of sources. We now connect Glasgow to the world through high capacity circuits from Windstream and AT&T, but we are about to add a third source via our partnership with other cities called MuniNet. Very soon MuniNet connectivity will add a new internet access point from Level3 in Nashville. Upcoming maintenance activity from Windstream and AT&T may cause some night time interruptions, or slow downs, to your internet service from EPB. At the same time, upcoming additional bandwidth from Level3 should, after our initial testing of the new connections, enhance your internet throughput significantly. Though all three of these issues will result in improvements to our product, like all construction projects, getting through the changes may prove a bit bumpy. Stay tuned to our Facebook page and our Twitter feed https://twitter.com/glasgowepb for updates.

We have other network projects that will affect you as well. In an effort to establish multiple redundant fiber circuits for TJ Samson Hospital and the new TJ Healthcare Pavilion, we will be adding new fiber routes into our JMYTC Technology Center at the EPB offices. That work, and the splicing necessary to incorporate it into the city wide network, will cause some both cable and internet interruptions, mainly during the wee hours of the morning, for several hours.

Finally, we also have a couple of large electric power network projects that may affect you, especially as you drive around the neighborhoods surrounding our Front Street Substation. Over the next couple of months a line construction contractor will be performing work doing what we call “reconductoring.” As the cost of energy has risen over the decades, we find that some smaller conductors which usually carry large amounts of current, are simply no longer economically efficient. The upcoming work will consist of removing the smaller conductors near Front Street Substation and replacing those with much larger capacity conductors.

We join you in welcoming spring to Glasgow! Hopefully, spring, along with these projects, will bring us much more benefits than frustrations.
Thursday, December 20, 2012

Merry Christmas from Glasgow EPB!

We don’t claim to be in direct contact with your Elf on the Shelf, but we do have reliable information that many of you have added, or soon will be adding, new internet connected devices to your homes. Check under all of that mess of boxes and shredded wrapping paper in your living room! The EPB elves have also been considering how good you have been this year, and we are going to do our part to support the Elf and help make your new devices totally rock. Whatever speed internet service you presently purchase from us, that speed is about to double, and the increase is going to take place at no additional cost to you!

Popular devices like AppleTV, Roku boxes, and any other new device that is going to stream movies or video via the internet to your computer or television, consume many times more bandwidth that what you needed back when you first got your internet service from us. Even though we have repeatedly increased the speed and capacity of our cable modems over the years, the volume of data involved with streaming a high definition movie to your home via that cable modem almost always outstrips the capacity of our regular 5 MB internet service that 90% of our customers still use. So, before you move from opening those devices, to installing them, the internet service to your home is going to be upgraded for you, by us.

Now, for some of you, even doubling your present internet speed might not be enough if your home is an early adopter of many of the latest streaming technologies. If that is the case, we have solutions for you as well. We have two tiers of internet speed that are even faster than the base product that will soon provide 10MB service to the thousands of Glasgow homes and businesses that use our basic product (and all of those speeds are being doubled as well). Just give us a call or examine our website for more information about these even higher speed products.

In most cases, you will not even need to call us for this year’s upgrade to arrive at your home. The process is quite simple, and will happen during the night. You don’t even need a chimney! Your present cable modem has already been reprogrammed, from our office, to deliver the higher speed. All you have to do to implement the higher speed service is to unplug the power cord for about one minute, and then plug it back in. Within minutes the modem will download the new operating file and you will be in the fast lane. In some rare cases, if you still have one of the old gray cable modems, we need to replace those for the higher speed, but that is also very easy. You can just bring it by our office and we will swap your old modem for one of the newer ones.

The EPB Elves have been working for months trying to get our network upgraded so that we can deliver this present to our customers. We only got the last piece of this in place this week. Now we can be a big part of delivering the games, movies, YouTube videos, or whatever content you expect to receive from your new toy, flawlessly and quickly. We know that, with everything else going on over the upcoming holidays, you want things to work as advertised. Getting the higher speed internet service from Glasgow EPB can work magic, just like that Elf on the Shelf!
Monday, October 29, 2012

Sandy Hits the New York Area, and Maybe Us

Hurricane Sandy, the "Frankenstorm" about to hit the New York area, could also have considerable impacts right here in Glasgow. We are already getting warnings from cable programmers like ESPN, that we may face extended outages. Though we don't need to board up our windows here in Glasgow, we do need to prepare.

Though our technology normally functions so well that we completely ignore it, the truth is that beaming live television events to cable systems all over the world involves unbelievably intricate devices working flawlessly, and continuously. For example, when you watch a sporting event on ESPN or a live news program from CBS, NBC, ABC, or Fox, there are satellite earth-stations, many of which are in New York or other places in the northeast, beaming that programming to a satellite parked 22,236 miles over our heads. In turn, that satellite retransmits that programming down to satellite receivers at cable systems and local broadcast stations in thousands of cities across our land. Hundreds of pieces of technology are involved to make these seemingly simple events appear in our homes.

If any component in that route breaks down, your normal television programming is affected. In the case of Sandy coming in right now, the liklihood of breakdown of the satellite uplinks seems considerable. This is something you should know and prepare for.

Of course, we all know power outages to the folks along the coastal areas is assured. Normally their problems would not affect us in Glasgow, but it is not beyond imagination for us to be impacted. The TVA power grid, to which we are attached, is also interconnected with many power grids that will be greatly affected by Sandy. Though unlikely, sometimes trouble in a neighboring grid can ripple out to cause trouble here. Even if the TVA grid is not immediately affected, we will all surely be impacted by the amount of damage about to be done and the amount of electric power distribution hardware which will be consumed to repair the damage. It is likely that we will have trouble finding some conductor and hardware items for the next several weeks, and that can certainly impact our ongoing work to maintain the electric system here in Glasgow.

Finally, spend a bit of time thinking about how the internet might be impacted by Sandy. The area where the storm is hitting is the point where most of the transatlantic cables depart North America headed for other continents. That same area houses dozens of the servers and routers that make your favorite web sites available to us here in Glasgow. If those servers farms should flood or lose power for extended times, our internet service right here in Glasgow will be impacted. It is time to make plans for that as well.

We hope all of our fellow countrymen along the storm's track have good luck and that the plans they have made are effective. This storm is going to present unprecedented problems for us all. I hope we are all ready.