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KCP&L talks over transition with business leaders
Civic leaders and officials from the area recently acquired from Aquila by KCP&L met with KCP&L representatives to hear about the utility's plans for the future. John Marshall, KCP&L senior vice president, spoke to the assembled guests.
"It's a great opportunity to be with you and meet you today," Marshall said. "We worked very hard over the last two years on the acquisition of Aquila; and as we acquired it, we restructured and picked up about 300,000 customers. Now the majority of our customers are in Missouri. We want to work with you to have strong, secure energy production."
Marshall said the cost of doing business is continuing to rise, mainly because of the price of oil.
"The impact on our company because of oil prices is dramatic," Marshall said. "Every dimension of our business is seeing increases in prices. We have been trying everything we can to keep prices down."
Marshall said the drive to keep prices down was one of the reasons for the acquisition of Aquila, the economy of scale would help reduce costs and keep increases minimized.
"The acquisition of Aquila will save customers $500 million," Marshall said. "Prices will go up --we've had a lot of investment in new construction, but it will go up less than if we hadn't done it."
Marshall said the company was trying to reach out to the customers with services to help them save money by conserving electricity.
"We have an energy optimizer thermostat that can be installed to save energy," Marshall said. "We can send out a signal during peak demand times, and that's the most expensive energy, to change the temperature up to one degree an hour for up to four hours to help cut peak demand."
The programs Aquila had in place at the time of the changeover to KCP&L will remain, and KCP&L will work with regulators to offer them to all of their customers.
"There are a number of energy efficiency programs we have in place to help save customers money," Marshall said.
"Aquila had some and we will try to find solutions that will work for all our customers. This is a great opportunity to work with communities in the area to reduce consumption."
Marshall pointed out that KCP&L has a wind farm at Spearville, Kan., which utilizes the movement of air to generate electricity which helped keep fuel costs down.
"Our wind farm at Spearville will generate about 100 megawatts of power. It's in a very good location, which gets lots of wind," Marshall said.
Julie Righter, publisher of the Nevada Daily Mail asked what the company is doing to help businesses manage their energy use.
"We have several energy efficiency programs to help businesses save money," Marshall said. "We've worked with hospitals to help them save energy on their chillers and steam. We're trying to be far more pro-active with business customers. Energy costs are a large part of the cost of doing business."