Peak Times

Our own Bill Bullock wrote a very interesting article on energy consumption during peak times for the Cooper-Young newspaper, the Lamplighter.

The electricity network, all the way from generation to a customer’s meter, is similar to a highway system. If roads are built to handle all traffic smoothly during the few hours per week of rush hour then they are significantly over-built for the rest of the time. Often, there is a compromise in road building where there are bottlenecks and delays at times, but vehicles eventually get where they are going.

In distributing electricity, such compromise is not a good option. A bottle neck at any point in the process, whether a lack of generation or too small of a wire or transformer on a pole, can result in an outage. For this reason, infrastructure is built to handle peak load conditions...

You can read the full article here.
You can read more about MLGW's Smart Grid plans here.