April 17, 2009

 

The Lincoln Electric System Administrative Board held its regular monthly meeting April 17 at the Lincoln Electric Building. Items from the meeting, as well as other pertinent information, include:

 

LES to pay $9.8 million to local governments

 

Lincoln Electric System (LES) will pay more than $9.8 million to Lincoln Public Schools, City of Lincoln, Lancaster County and Waverly as an annual revenue tax payment.

The payment represents 5 percent of the retail electric revenue in 2008 from within incorporated areas. Lincoln Public Schools and local governments receive the revenue tax from LES based on their proportionate share of the local tax levy.

The revenue tax payment is higher than taxes paid by any other utility operating in the county.

LES has made the payment since its creation in 1966. During that time, recipients have received close to $179 million from LES.

The 2008 money to be paid local governments will be distributed as follows:

 

 

Over the last 43 years, the revenue tax paid to local governmental bodies totals:

 

Lincoln Public Schools	$117,591,604
City of Lincoln	$  33,403,583
Lancaster County	$  24,755,412
Waverly/Other	$    3,084,391
Total	$178,834,990

 

Transition to SPP is on time and under budget

 

A 49-member team worked six months preparing for Lincoln Electric System’s (LES) transition to the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), which occurred April 1.

 

The team’s work was completed on time and about 20 percent under budget.

 

SPP, a regional transmission organization with headquarters in Little Rock, Ark., is responsible for maintaining reliable operation of the bulk electric grid in its region, which includes 54 utilities serving more than 5 million customers across 370,000 square miles in eight states: Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

 

Besides LES, Omaha Public Power District and Nebraska Public Power District joined SPP.

“The addition of the Nebraska organizations will add more diversity to SPP’s generation mix and broaden our regional energy marketplace, adding value for all our customers,” said SPP President and CEO Nick Brown.

 

LES' preparations included modifying business practices, internal procedures and protocols from existing configurations to the SPP in the following areas:

• Reliability coordination

• Reserve sharing

• Transmission tariff administration

• Market operations

• Transmission planning, modeling and expansion

• Generating resource interconnection planning

Following the drafting of a memorandum of understanding in April 2008, an agreement to join SPP was signed last September. That same month, the installation of hardware and software upgrades began and was completed by December. This year, the SPP transition team conducted market modeling and system testing.

 

Ken Ward recognized by Board

Ken Ward, past Administrative Board member, was recognized by the Board for serving 14 years on the District Energy Corporation (DEC) Board as LES’ representative. The resolution stated that he invested personal and professional time on the complex responsibilities of the DEC Board, and thanked him for his many contributions and involvement for the betterment of the DEC and the community.

 

Other Reports

 

The following statistics for March were presented to the Board:

March 2009	March 2008	Change
Number of Customers
128,313	127,272	+1,041 (+0.8%)
Retail Electricity Use (MWh)
239,041	246,495	-7,454 (-3.0%)
12-Month Average Outage Time/Customer (minutes)
47.3	32	+15.3

Top