The Chester Municipal Electric Light Department (CMELD), serving approximately 700 customers in the community of Chester, Massachusetts, has joined the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) as a member.
Under the agreement, CMELD will receive a variety of services from MMWEC, the Commonwealth’s designated not-for-profit joint action agency for municipal utilities. MMWEC provides services including power supply planning, resource development, risk management, wholesale markets solutions, pooled loan program, energy efficiency programs, and legislative/regulatory and communications support.
“We’re very excited to welcome Chester Municipal Electric Light Department into MMWEC membership,” said MMWEC CEO Tom Barry. “We look forward to working very closely with Chester General Manager Diane Hall and to provide Chester with the broad scope of MMWEC services and benefits now available to them. Working closely with smaller communities, like Chester, to help them mitigate risks and achieve their primary goals through true joint action efforts is what public power in the Commonwealth is all about.”
CMELD joins 19 other Massachusetts municipal light plant (MLP) MMWEC Members. MMWEC serves 39 MLPs via membership, as generation and transmission Project Participants, and as demand management program participants.
CMELD is a municipally owned utility, meaning that is owned by its customers, and has been in operation since 1926. It is CMELD’s goal to do everything possible to ensure that its service is always at its best. The Municipal Electric Light Department, under the direction of the Operations Manager, is governed by an elected Board of Commissioners which holds public meetings on a monthly basis.
MMWEC is a not-for-profit, public corporation and political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts created by an Act of the General Court in 1975 and authorized to issue tax-exempt debt to finance a wide range of energy facilities.
MMWEC provides a variety of power supply, financial, risk management and other services to the state’s consumer-owned, municipal utilities. It is the largest provider of asset-owned generation for municipal light departments in New England.
