LAURINBURG — Since 2019, the city of Laurinburg has been partnering with ElectriCities on load management of utilities, which has saved the city more than $520,000.

During Tuesday night’s monthly meeting, ElectriCities Manager of System Operations Jason Thigpen spoke to the council about not just the savings but how load management works.

“When we define load management it is simply just a process used to reduce load to achieve savings,” Thigpen said. “For us that means we’re reducing load during a certain hour every month. The way the wholesale power cost works is every month there is one hour that the entire system actually peaks. Our goal is to reduce load during that hour because that is the hour of the highest cost.”

The program is optional for customers and, when switches are installed, the customer can save up to $100 per year — but the numbers are much larger for the city.

Thigpen shared the savings data from just the load management switches 2019 to 2021 — in the four months that it was used in 2019 there was $87,000 in savings; in 2020 there was $279,470 in savings; year-to-date for 2021 there has been $162,010 in savings — for a total of $528,480 in savings for the city. Thigpen also shared the load management tracking has also expanded to generators in the city.

“We started tracking generator savings in June 2020 so we had about seven months of data for that year and your total savings was $294,000,” Thigpen said. “Year to date for 2021 is over $354,000 so taking advantage of those generators if they’re deployed at a water treatment plant or things like that you can utilize the devices on your system to shed load.”

Thigpen also explained how ElectriCities monitor the loads of customers’ homes once they agree to participate in the program.

“We install the switches at customers’ homes on an appliance, HVAC unit or water heater,” Thigpen said. “Water heaters give us the most savings year-round, we utilize them year-round. HVAC units we control them during the summer months and in the winter we’re controlling customer heat strips.”

It was asked how often ElectriCities monitor the systems, which Thigpen explained with water heaters for example is about 125 hours per year. As an example, in the summer Thigpen said at the peak time the air conditioning units would be controlled about 25% of the hour and many customers don’t even know it’s being done.

“What most cities do, Laurinburg included, is we’ve adopted partial control,” Thigpen said. “Some utilities will offer 100% control … when you look at the customer adoption rate its much, much higher for the 25% control or the 30% control than it is for the 100% control.”

Anyone who wants to sign up for the load management program can do so by calling the billing department at the city 910-276-2364.

Reach Katelin Gandee at kgandee@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com.