The Ames Electric Services department is working to solve the problem of peak power demands during the summer months.

Steve Wilson, energy services coordinator for Ames Electric Services, said by 2010, during periods of peak electrical usage, Ames residents will be consuming approximately three to four more megawatts of energy than the city can provide. The city is exploring different options to prevent those capacity breaches.

David Miller, director of facilities and utilities for facilities planning and management, said the ISU power plant is used to take some of the burden off the city during peak electric demand.

“We have a very collaborative relationship between ISU and the city,” Miller said. “Sometimes our load occurs at a different time of the day. The city will get a load that will come up in the afternoon or early evening. Our load is already on the way down then, so sometimes we share power with them.”

The Ames Electric Services department is concentrating its efforts on managing the existing energy load instead of finding ways to increase the electrical load capacity of the city. Increasing capacity would cause utility rates to rise approximately 3.5 percent. Ames Electric Services has not had to raise its rates since 1979 and would like to keep it that way for a few more years.

To reach this goal, the city has implemented load management projects.

One of these projects, the Prime Time Power project, is a voluntary program in which participants receive a monthly $5 credit on their summer electric bills. In return for the credit, radio-controlled switches that can turn the machine on and off are installed on each participant’s air conditioner. The switches turn air conditioners off for seven and a half minutes out of every 30 minutes and coordinate the cycles to lower demand during peak times. There are approximately 5,039 of these switches installed in Ames.

“We can control air conditioners to avoid putting in extra capacity,” said Gary Titus, assistant director of Ames Electric Services. “It’s fairly popular because we give a $20 rebate in the summertime if a person signs up for the program.”

The city also hired Kansas City-based engineering company Burns & McDonnell to follow up on a 1992 Integrated Resource Planning Study. The company was hired to assess the power situation and make suggestions on how to manage the existing load.

The company found load reduction coupled with load shifting from high-use times to low-use times could ease the peak problems enough so the city does not have to expand capacity.