It’s All About Reliable Electricity

You flip a switch and the lights come on. It’s an expectation we’ve come to enjoy and trust. So, how does Santee Cooper make it happen?

It starts with securing fuel, generating power, moving power across transmission lines, making it accessible for customers’ homes and businesses, and then delivering it to them. It’s quite a process.

As you can imagine, the path from the fuel source to a home or business is long, and there are numerous variables along the way for which to be prepared. Santee Cooper has a long history of ensuring that process remains uninterrupted to deliver some of the most reliable power in the industry.

In fact, for distribution reliability, the U.S. Energy Information Administration ranks Santee Cooper No. 1 in South Carolina and No. 7 (top 1.5%) in the United States, out of 486 investor-owned and cooperative utilities.

Santee Cooper supplies electricity to more than 2 million people throughout South Carolina. Most of these people are served through Central Electric Power Cooperative, which purchases Santee Cooper power wholesale and sells the electricity to the state’s 20 cooperatives. The co-ops then distribute the power locally to their direct customers. 

In addition to Central, Santee Cooper supplies power directly to more than 200,000 commercial, industrial and residential customers. That’s a lot of people depending on us to provide the power they need, when they need it. 

An important aspect of executing that reliably is load forecasting, which is how we predict how much electricity our customers are going to use and how much we will need to provide.

“The goal is to figure out how much an average customer is going to use, and then we multiply that by the number of consumers we have,” said Santee Cooper Senior Manager of Financial Forecasting Greg McCormack. “It’s called statistically adjusted end-use, or SAE, forecasting.”

During this process, a utility’s peak demand is also predicted. From a load-forecasting perspective, peak demand is the highest projected usage during the year.

“Peak demand is typically what you build your generating stations to serve,” said McCormack. 

Interestingly, Santee Cooper is both a winter and summer peaking utility. McCormack explained that weather has the greatest impact on peak demand, and South Carolinians experience both summer and winter climates.

“That drives usage higher in the summer through cooling needs and in the winter through heating needs,” he said. “When our customers are faced with more extreme weather in the summer and winter, they use more electricity.”

Peaks in demand happen daily, and the lower those peaks, the better for reliability.

“Spreading out the demand for electricity helps us run our generation assets as efficiently as possible,” said McCormack. “Generating power efficiently lowers the cost for customers and helps reduce the environmental impact.”

Santee Cooper has programs — and we are working on others — that help our customers level out the peaks, which helps us maintain reliable electric service at a lower cost. One such program is demand-side management (DSM), which helps customers modify how much and when they use their electricity.

There are many ways to help with DSM, including programs that encourage customers to use less power when the demand is higher. But something as easy as using energy more efficiently can also play a part.

Our customers can have a considerable impact on demand and help prevent many of the undesirable effects of hitting large peaks. The biggest impact would be made by shifting when they use their energy, but using less energy also helps.

Energy Advisor Farris Vereen knows quite a bit about energy efficiency and shares his knowledge with our residential customers through Home Energy House Calls.

“When a customer calls looking for ways to reduce their usage, I make a trip to their home and give them some pointers,” said Vereen.

During his visit, Vereen checks out the house and identifies areas that could be improved to make it more comfortable and energy efficient. The visit takes about an hour, and Vereen leaves the customer with personalized recommendations and a Home Energy House Call Kit.

“We give the customer things they can use immediately like caulking, weatherstripping, LEDs and handy leave-behinds with helpful energy-efficiency tips they can reference,” he said.

Energy efficiency will ultimately lower energy use and is an attractive option to customers looking to lower their bills, but the most effective way to level out demand is shifting usage from times when demand is high to when it’s not.

That’s why we developed SmartRewards.

Our SmartRewards demand-response program provides bill credits to those customers who allow us to “cycle” their heating and cooling systems and electric water heaters on and off for short periods when demand is high or there is a reason we cannot easily produce the power that is needed.

SmartRewards is part of our EmpowerSC initiative, which helps our customers make the best energy choices for their businesses and households. We encourage all the residential and commercial customers we serve directly to visit www.EmpowerSC.com for more information.

Delivering reliable service doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a dedicated team that can execute a well-thought-out plan. The world is always evolving, and the utility business is no exception. We’ll continue to stay ahead of these changes so our customers can keep enjoying the most reliable service possible.