In a recent Q&A with the American Public Power Association, Tom McKee, electric utility director for the city of Cartersville, Ga., a public power community, provided details on the city’s advanced metering infrastructure project and discussed the utility’s efforts to maintain high levels of reliability.
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, McKee worked for the city of Lake Worth Beach, Florida, where he served as utility services manager as well as materials management manager.
“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,” he said in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“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,” McKee noted.
“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.”
McKee also detailed the ways in which the utility has been conveying to customers all the benefits that are going to flow from the AMI project.
“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,” he said.
“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,” McKee noted.
“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.”
Reliability
McKee also discussed the steps the city’s electric utility has been taking to maintain high levels of reliability. The Cartersville Electric System has been designated as a Reliable Public Power Provider by APPA.
“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,” he said.
He said he has had “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.”
McKee said that “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.”
He added that “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.”
In the interview, McKee also said that MEAG Power and 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.”
He also said that “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.”
