In a recent interview with APPA, Terry Wimberley, President and CEO of Tennessee’s Paris Board of Public Utilities, the public power utility for Paris, Tennessee, details the wide range of projects underway at the utility including rebuilding a substation. He also discusses how Paris BPU’s Customer Academy has proven to be an effective way to engage with its customers.
Wimberley made his remarks in an August interview as a guest on APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
The Paris Board of Public Utilities was formed in 1938. Today it serves a little over 23,000 electric customers. It serves the full footprint of Henry County in Tennessee. “We also provide water services as a part of what we do for our community. We have 5,000 water customers primarily inside the corporate limits of Paris, just a little bit outside that and then we have sewer services also to about 4,000 customers here,” he noted.
“We're in the era of our utility where we're spending money on projects to make sure that our infrastructure is sustainable,” he said.
In the interview, he detailed rehab work being done on the utility's India Road substation. “It's one of 12 distribution substations that we have here within our system. It's a 1960s model substation and we’re calling it a rehab project, but basically we took the thing almost back to the ground. We're putting in all new breakers, a new transformer, all new bus work. We're basically rebuilding a substation in place,” he noted.
“We've got it switched out where we can do that. So that's a $2.7 million effort.” He added, “We've already done a few. We've got others scheduled in the future. “
Wimberley also noted a new partnership “that is just underway with a telecom company to provide high speed Internet. We will not have Internet customers ourselves. We will build out fiber infrastructure that they would lease out from us and we will be able to provide Internet to our community through a telecom. And so we're building out about 500 miles of fiber infrastructure to our community.”
With respect to the high speed Internet project, he was asked if there is a timeline on completion.
Construction began in May, he noted. “We think all of the main backbone will be built out by the end of ‘25, so 500 miles in a little over six months. We will actually start connecting end users to their Internet within the next two weeks and so by the end of the year, we will pass 10,000 of our 23,000 meters with that offering and we'll do that by the end of 25.”
The fiber infrastructure “is going to be a hedge on our next version of AMI. We're doing power line carrier now bringing meter reads back through the power line itself, but you know what is that next generation of AMI? Is that talking to each meter through fiber? And if so, we've got the backbone in place to do that and a communication path to those meters.”
There are the lease revenues “from the telecom company that's going to fund the project and eventually be able to put revenues back into the electric funds and create a supplemental revenue stream there. “
And the idea with that “whole thing would be electric rate stability with that project. So that's a big project that's on the way now.”
Turning to the utility’s wastewater treatment plant, “we have a $5 million replacement of all of the electrical components that are on that campus, all of the electric to all of the buildings, all of the electric to pumps and motors. We're also putting in controls out to all of those places where we can bring back and have SCADA control for the first time.”
That plant was built in the mid 80s, “so for the first time we're going to be able to have SCADA control of all of the pumps and motors inside the wastewater treatment plant. Again, it's a utility that's trying to just keep up with the technology and really keep up with sustainability and keep things moving forward and just being here for the community -- that's sort of what we were asked to do in 1938 is to take care of the utilities for this community and so you know we're doing that at the wastewater treatment plant.”
Meanwhile, the utility is also pursuing a $5,000,000 addition to its building. "We sit one block off of the court square here in Paris, Tennessee. We have a vacant lot next to us where we have our kiosk and a little bit of parking. We're going to use that vacant lot,” he noted.
“We're going to build a two-story building there that's going to be storm rated, a FEMA rated building where it's one of those things where we just want to make sure that we're going to be here to serve and if the unfortunate circumstance comes through where a storm hits our downtown area -- we're in a very old building here -- and it's compromised for whatever reason that we're going to have a building that's going to be standing and so our server room is going to be in that protected building where all of our servers are up and running,” he noted.
“We're going to have our command center also built” into it “where we run our storm restoration efforts, those kind of things. And so again we're preparing for the future with really the first storm rated building that we've ever had in our history.”
Customer Academy
Wimberley also discussed the benefits that flow from the utility’s Customer Academy in terms of engaging with the Paris community and the utility’s customers.
“We're always looking for new ways to engage with our customers. We recognize very quickly and easily that misinformation and lack of information leads to wrong perspectives about us as the public utility provider. And that's hard to watch,” he noted.
“We realize that we can't win all of the social media battles that are out there. But what we see is how can we educate more? How do we get the right answers to the people?”
That is why the Customer Academy was created.
Last fall, “we began that initiative to bring some folks into our facilities and educate them on their local utility, so we advertised that opportunity. We took applications from the public, from our customers. We took the entire month of June to bring those applications in. There was not a lot to it, just identifying themselves, stating why they wanted to be in the class. There was not a lot to that,” Wimberley noted.
“We named a class of 12 in early July,” he said.
Classes ran for six weeks starting in mid-September, running through the month of October.
“We did it on Tuesday nights for two hours from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm and so each of those Tuesday nights, this group of 12 would come in and spent some time with our departments working out our curriculum and what we would do for those two hour sessions and how we would share about our utility. “
He said the first night “was basically an introduction – a history of how we got started, just an overview of our entire utility, our governance, those type things -- just kind of get them introduced to who we are as their utility.” The second night “we hit on all the administrative stuff, policies and billing and customer service and our policies there.”
The third night involved metering and engineering “and they learned how their meter is read.”
They were able “to see our SCADA system on the electric side and how we communicate with substations and devices out on the line -- they got to see how our outage management system works and we did some fake outages to see how that worked,” he noted.
“We also let them splice some fiber. We've had some dark Internet that we've leased out through the last 15 years and so we we've got our own splicing trailer. We were already in that business.”
The next three nights were electric, water and wastewater.
“One of the cool things we did on the electric night, they saw our lineman do a pole top rescue, which we train on annually, so they got to see a demonstration of that.”
One of the big things that night “was just helping people understand our strategies during storm power restoration times because you get into a multi-day storm and people think they should be next in line and to understand how we work through the larger circuits first and we work our way down to the smaller onesie, twosie outages. It was a very good perspective there to share with them.”
Customers were also able to visit the water treatment plant. "They got to see the plant, how water is treated from the wells all the way to the finished water. We talked about our water distribution system as well. Challenges with infrastructure, which is a lot. We're spending a lot of money there and they learned a little bit about TDEC regulations. Obviously, we're highly regulated in treating water and so we got to share a little bit about that.”
The overall goal with the Customer Academy is to “create advocates for our utility -- if they could see us in detail, take the curtain back and let them see behind that and how we operate, what we're about, help them to better understand us and create advocates. And that was our goal.”
