July 20, 2007

 

The LES Administrative Board held its regular monthly meeting July 20 at the Lincoln Electric Building. Items from the meeting, as well as other pertinent information, include:

 

Revised Customer-Owned Generation Policy Approved

The policy and guidelines for customer-owned generation were updated by the Administrative Board at its meeting Friday (7/20).

Approval by the City Council on Monday (7/16) of the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) standards led to the addition of a renewable net metering policy and pricing. Under the policy, LES subtracts the energy delivered to LES from the energy LES supplied the customer and bills the net amount, said J. Todd Hall, vice president of Consumer Services.

In the past, LES paid customers for the excess energy they generated and billed them separately for the energy they used from LES, he said.

Net metering service will be available through 2012.

“The impact of this change is that net metering increases the amount customers receive for their excess generation,” he said. “This improves the incentive to our customers when they consider constructing renewable energy generators.”

Hall said other changes include the following:

• Updated the price LES pays for customer-owned generation to the current prices to more accurately reflect the methods LES uses to price all electricity.

• Expanded the list of laws, regulations and codes that customers must comply with in order to qualify.

• Procedures for processing requests were revised to make them clearer for customers, and steps were added for System Control and Engineering.

The changes take effect immediately.

 

Other Reports

The following statistics for June were presented to the Board:

June 2007	June 2006	Change
Number of Customers
125,856	124,154	+1,702 (+1.4%)
Retail Electricity Use (MWh)
276,503	290,046	-13,543 (-4.7%)
12-Month Average Outage Time/Customer (minutes)
26.4	20.8	+5.6