January 5, 2012
Fellow members,
I hope that your holiday season was warm and fulfilling, and that the time spent with friends and family warmed your winter with joy, and that you are as excited to turn the page to a new year as we are.
The coming year promises to be one of opportunities and challenges for all of us at YREC, but we are genuinely eager to embrace them.
This year, as recommended by the YREC Board of Trustees, and as approved by the members of YREC at last year's annual meeting, YREC will embark on an aggressive updating of our system, switching over to Broadband Power Line and changing all meters in our system over to new Smart Meters. This is nothing less than a complete overhaul of our entire infrastructure, from service lines to metering to billing to outage management. We are among the first rural electric cooperatives in the country to take this step. I am proud of our members and of every YREC employee for showing the determination to move forward with this process.
Once our system is fully converted to this new smart grid, we can expect to see several benefits:
- Greater accuracy in billing through the elimination of meter reading errors.
- Reduced injury exposure to workers, as it will no longer be necessary to read meters in the field
- Reduced outage durations as due to enhanced diagnostic abilities
- Lower operating costs through increased efficiency in connecting and disconnecting service
- And finally, more powerful demand management tools that we will be able to place in the hands of our members, such as web portals, time of use rates, and programmable thermostats.
There will no doubt be bumps in the road was move through this changeover, but we'll face them together, and in the end we'll have a stronger cooperative that will enable you to keep more money in your pocket.
With regards,
Manager Bill Faulkner
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