Utility wants PUC OK on energy-saving plan

Malcolm Hall

Thursday, March 28, 2002 | 11:16 a.m.

Nevada Power Co. is seeking approval to revive a 20-year-old energy saving program that lets it automatically shut off home air conditioners of participating customers for brief periods.

The Public Utilities Commission will address the issue Friday.

During a successful pilot program last fall, the company installed 1,447 remote-control receivers on homes belonging to low income and senior citizen customers to test new technology that controls air conditioners via radio waves.

The devices -- small black boxes placed on a home's roof -- electronically turn off air conditioners for up to 12 minutes per hour in exchange for a $15 monthly rebate and lower power bills for participating customers.

Now the utility wants to install another 3,000 units before hot weather hits and intends to expand the voluntary program by adding single-family residential customers -- regardless of income or age -- and to get builders to install the devices on new homes during construction.

Paul Heagen, Nevada Power's vice president of communications and marketing, said the program is being revived because the recent consumer sessions on Nevada Power's request for nearly $1 billion in rate hikes proved to the company that people want new ways to lower their electric bills.

The air conditioning plan is one component of a proposal to curtail use of up to 17,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and would be funded through general operations, Heagen said.

But primary on the list is what Nevada Power officially calls the "air conditioning load management plan," which had been in effect from 1982 to 1995. It was launched at a time when electricity was expensive, then discontinued when power costs dropped.

Nevada Power spokeswoman Sonya Headen said the electronic devices cost the company between $90 and $110 each and are about the size of a tissue box.

"At the height of the program we had about 60,000 customers with the device on their homes," she said.

The company routinely conducts energy audits, which show homeowners where they are wasting electricity, and has plans to modernize older homes by adding new insulation, wrapping and insulating water heaters, switching to energy-saving light bulbs and other measures; enticing people with cash rebates to upgrade to new appliances, which use much less electricity than those built even a few years ago; and community outreach programs on how to conserve power.

"We're geared on programs we can act on," Heagen said. "We want to do things that make sense to people, that they can understand and act on and hopefully see a near-term benefit from doing it."

One issue in Las Vegas is what Heagen calls "poor housing stock," many of the houses built 30 to 40 years ago that don't feature the energy saving technology available today.

Heagen said Nevada Power has identified some areas of downtown and North Las Vegas where homes are using more electricity than homes of the same size and will contact those homeowners and stage neighborhood meetings to show them how to make their homes cheaper to cool while using less electricity.

"We plan a very robust program of community level workshops showing them what they can do on their own maybe with a trip to a store like Home Depot," he said.

Heagen said the company also is targeting old energy guzzling refrigerators many people have in their garages but that use so much electricity they're like "throwing the windows wide open" when its 110 degrees outside.

"Nobody really buys a decent refrigerator for their garage because it's just for beer and pizza and last Thanksgiving Day's turkey," he said. "We're talking about literally having a contractor haul that out of your garage and handing you a check. It's actually worth our while to get those out of our garages."

Nevada Power, which has forecast a peak load this summer of 4,687 megawatts compared with a peak last year of 4,395 megawatts, also has suggested more research into different types of electric meters that could produce energy savings.

The company last week asked the PUC to speed approval of the air conditioning plan because the black boxes must be installed on selected customers' rooftops in April and May to shave demand during this summer when the southwestern electricity grid is strained to the hilt.

Commission Chairman Don Soderberg agreed to move forward with the process.

"Our recent consumer sessions showed us that the air conditioning load management program was extremely popular and can be of great assistance to low income residents," Soderberg said.