The following is a transcript of the August 26, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s news director. Our guest on this episode is Tom McKee, electric utility director for the city of Cartersville, Ga., a public power community. In May of this year, the city of Cartersville announced the appointment of McKee as the city's new electric director. Prior to his current role, Tom worked for the city of Lake Worth Beach, Florida, where he served as utility services manager as well as materials management manager. Tom, thanks for joining us.
Tom McKee
Hi, Paul. Thank you for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
Paul Ciampoli
Tom, to get our conversation started, it's kind of a two-parter. One, could you give an overview of Cartersville's electric utility system as well as, second, detail your role and responsibilities as electric utility director for the city?
Tom McKee
The Cartersville Electric system is actually celebrating our 120th anniversary this year, which is really a testament to the folks that are part of this organization as well as those that came before us. I can imagine the transformations across the industry as well as the decades of challenges that have been adapted to and overcome by the generations of electric utility employees here since 1904. Now, we currently have just over 10,000 in customers spread out across roughly 16 square miles of service territory and we currently rank as the 4th largest municipal electric utility in Georgia by annual energy delivered.
With the recent influx of large high density load customers migrating to the region in the form of data centers and manufacturing facilities that number and placement is constantly evolving.
As far as the role of the director, my opinion is that the most important duty is just managing the people. We hire experts in their respective fields to come in and do a tremendous job for us. And I really view my main daily purpose [as] just setting a clear overall direction that the team can move toward.
I think it's imperative that I provide the resources that these folks need and not place myself in a position to get in the way of or micromanage that process. I think the successful directors that I've really seen in the past are just great at sharing that overall vision internally as well as outwardly in a way that resonates with the community.
Paul Ciampoli
One follow up question, if I could. You referenced data centers in the context of load facing the city. Could you elaborate on that?
Tom McKee
We're seeing a tremendous interest in Georgia in general regarding those high density loads such as data centers, Bitcoin mining and the like that have really focused on Georgia as just a very business friendly state and just the region in general to relocate to and so that's something that we're definitely trying to focus on going forward -- being able to provide for those customers as they do relocate to the area.
Paul Ciampoli
So in the context of current resource planning, how big of a challenge is that at this point?
Tom McKee
So definitely a large challenge, especially for municipalities in that a lot of these customers essentially have the potential to double or even in some cases triple the size of a utility’s entire load footprint. And so being able to allocate and manage those changes as they come -- and they are coming rather quickly -- it's certainly something that we're working hand in hand with our partners at the state level to manage that.
Paul Ciampoli
I wanted to talk about the fact that the Cartersville Electric System has been designated as a Reliable Public Power Provider by APPA. Could you detail the steps the city’s electric utility has been taking to maintain high levels of reliability?
Tom McKee
So that's actually a really great question. I know it's a question I had myself before joining the city. Coming from a municipal electric utility without that RP3 designation, I think it's something that you want to know -- what's in that secret sauce, so to speak. And I'm fortunate enough to have started with Cartersville just after they were announced as a reliable public power provider. [I] cannot claim any of that credit, but certainly [I] have the opportunity to analyze the achievement with kind of a fresh outsider looking in type perspective. So with that you need timing. I can honestly say that I believe it's much more attributed to the culture than the technical X's and O's, so to speak.
From the moment I began to work with the group here in Cartersville a few months ago, there was certainly an attribute that really stood out across the board and that was their ownership mentality. There's just this great sense of pride in providing a reliable supply of energy to not the customers, but to the community. And I've found that that mindset is really ingrained with just about everyone here locally.
We're made up of so many long term employees that are also long time residents and with that combination, ratepayers in the service territory here are definitely not looked at as numbers because they're truly all of our employees, friends and neighbors and relatives and coworkers. The other big component is the city leadership, right? There really has to be this buy in all the way to the top and even through the elected officials that we're going to use the revenues to put back into and reinvest in the electric utility and infrastructure so that we can continuously maintain and improve that reliability. And I know not all power providers have the luxury of leadership with that focus, but they have certainly done it well here.
Paul Ciampoli
In preparing for this interview with you, one of the things that jumped out at me and I want to talk to you about is the city's relationship with MEAG Power. As you know, through MEAG Power’s co-ownership of five power plants, a portion of the state-wide transmission grid, and substation network, Cartersville has entitlement to generation dedicated solely to Cartersville’s customers. Could you talk more about how Cartersville benefits from being a MEAG Power participant community?
Tom McKee
For myself specifically, MEAG Power and as well as ECG -- Electric Cities of Georgia -- have just been invaluable in terms of resources available to me as a new electric utility director in the state of Georgia and really just getting up to speed on the processes and operating environment that is certainly very unique to the Peach state. MEAG Power in particular really allows the municipalities to focus on their end customers.
From a distribution standpoint, they provide the shared resources and expertise in generation and transmission and substations as you mentioned, really leveraging the economies of scale and allowing each individual member city to operate at a level that it would be unable to accomplish, probably on its own. So as I mentioned previously, these high density load customers that we do have coming to the area are certainly interested in settling here in Georgia and setting up shop in the Southeast and in some cases potentially doubling that entire utility system size in a single customer request.
And so without an organization such as MEAG Power, municipal electric utilities would be hard pressed to accept some of the challenges and risks associated with those endeavors. MEAG and ECG really also give all of us a represented voice when it comes to policy decisions at the state and national level, and I think we're seeing many of those discussions become more and more important to be a part of as we move toward less supply and greater demands in the next few years.
Paul Ciampoli
I forgot to mention as part of my question that MEAG Power is a joint action agency.
Tom, to wrap things up, I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell our listeners about any ongoing or recently completed Cartersville electric utility projects that you'd like to highlight.
Tom McKee
I think that one of our most beneficial new projects that is really hitting that substantial completion point as we speak is our new AMI system. The city made the decision to approach that project across all utilities and we have electric, water and gas which really with that mindset help to streamline the implementation. The utility customers are going to be well served by the advancements available as a result of that.
We on the electric side are already beginning to see tremendous improvements to our outage response and restoration times attributed pretty much directly to the amazing real time visibility that you gain with a system such as this. It will certainly be a keystone to providing continuous safe, affordable and reliable power to the city of Cartersville well into the future.
Paul Ciampoli
Two follow up questions if I could. One, were there any supply chain issues related to the meters with respect to the AMI rollout and I'll follow up with the other question after you respond to that.
Tom McKee
There were definitely supply chain issues along the way which you know just created some delays and really kind of being able to reach that full potential of the system as early on as expected. And part of that is that we're seeing kind of across the board from all utility perspective is -- luckily for us in electric, not as focused on electric at the moment -- some of our sister utilities here in the city are still experiencing some of those, while we're closer to 100% implementation.
Paul Ciampoli
The other question I had related to the AMI system -- what are the ways in which the utility has been conveying to customers all the benefits that are going to flow from that?
Tom McKee
We're trying to push that out really through social media as kind of our number one force to get a hold of our customers and essentially let them know that -- where we did not have visibility before. Historically, we would rely on customers to call in and let us know that they have an outage.
We can now see that proactively and a lot of times we can respond to a customer’s residence or business for an outage or power quality issue before they even realize that they have one, and so some of the sales of it have just come through the processes that we've been able to implement by arriving and fixing issues that the customer wasn't even aware of that they had.
That alone has really started to spread through the community and just allowed customers to understand that we can start to migrate away from the ways of the past of having to call in every single outage and we can really get a very good broad picture of what an outage or power quality issue looks like across the board now.
Paul Ciampoli
Tom, thanks again for taking the time out of your day to speak with us. It's been a great conversation. Would you be open to returning to the podcast, perhaps around this time next year?
Tom McKee
Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Ciampoli
OK, great. I'm sure we'll have a lot of things to discuss following up from today's conversation and other topics.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, graphic and digital designer at APA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
