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East KY Power plans line expansions

GEPB concerns addressed

Jeff Jobe
Jobe Publishing, Inc.

We have some great news for all of Barren County.  The East Kentucky Power Company has plans for power line expansion in year 2020-21.  The exact type of lines Glasgow Electric Plant Board Chairman Tag Taylor and Superintendent Billy Ray have detailed as being needed to assure power dependability for Glasgow.

In conversation with EKP Chief Operating Officer Don Mosier, he confirmed that Taylor’s description of their lines being 69kv while TVA was offering the 161kv lines was accurate, but wanted to detail some things before addressing the issue.

He explained that East Kentucky Power is made up of 16 distributors and one of those is Farmers RECC, located in Glasgow.

Although he made it clear that their distributors take pride in serving their customers and those served now have excellent service.  Service that includes industrial parks, factories, subdivisions and a wide section of residential customers and any reference to anything other than this would not at all be accurate.  He said, “the proposed changes for the 2020-21 budget year are because of growth demands and a normal business operating decision.”  He added that the proposed budget includes providing 161kv lines to Barren County.

He detailed the project as connecting to a substation located at Fox Hollow just outside Glasgow in the county.  Not nearly the length of line expansion that had been described in one of the EPB meetings or referenced in a recent podcast.  But the mileage and distance at this point isn’t relevant because this proposed budgeted item cost would be covered by EKP and not GEPB customers.  This EKP budget could save GEPB customers the estimated millions suggested by Taylor and Ray for such a move to be possible.

This expansion also falls within the 5-year contract termination agreement currently in place with TVA.  Mayor Harold Armstrong was aware of this information but couldn’t discuss details until he had the opportunity to share with the Glasgow City Council.

He did say it certainly should be taken into consideration when hiring the consultant or signing any new agreements increasing the release notice.

Superintendent Billy Ray has been pushing the board to approve a new TVA contract that has an expanded 20-year notice release period.

We also provided GEPB board chairman Taylor with Mosier’s name and phone number so that he, too, could confirm this information as well. Taylor was genuinely surprised to hear of such a possibility.

It is not known if Ray was aware of these expansion plans prior to publication of this breaking news story.

Mosier said in closing, “this is in our proposed budget and still requires our board approval, but I can’t imagine them not approving because they understand our growth demand requires it and they are very receptive to our cooperative needs.”

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