Sunbury Council discusses programs on utility aggregation

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

The Vil­lage of Sun­bury has been explor­ing acquir­ing elec­tric­ity for vil­lage facil­i­ties through an aggre­ga­tion agree­ment as a cost sav­ings mea­sure; and has also moved towards elec­tric and nat­ural gas aggre­ga­tion options for vil­lage res­i­dents by plac­ing elec­tric and gas aggre­ga­tion issues on the Novem­ber 8, 2011, ballot.

Fred Holmes from Vol­un­teer Energy began stump­ing for vil­lage coun­cil to place the two res­i­den­tial aggre­ga­tion issues — elec­tric­ity and nat­ural gas — on the bal­lot well over a year and a half ago; and when the issues reached vot­ers they approved allow­ing the vil­lage to nego­ti­ate res­i­den­tial elec­tric and gas aggre­ga­tion by sig­nif­i­cant margins.

Fast for­ward 11 months and Scott Bel­cas­tro, Trebel LLC, was in cham­bers at last Wednesday’s Vil­lage Coun­cil meet­ing to dis­cuss an elec­tric aggre­ga­tion pro­gram for vil­lage facil­i­ties; and in a sep­a­rate dis­cus­sion, nat­ural gas and elec­tric aggre­ga­tion for vil­lage residents.

Bel­cas­tro, who described him­self as an inde­pen­dent bro­ker, said Trebel LLC is an energy-consulting firm. Bel­cas­tro explained that he does not work for the energy com­pa­nies buy­ing bulk gas and elec­tric energy at auc­tion and sell­ing it to the vil­lage; he func­tions more like an insur­ance bro­ker. The vil­lage has a need, var­i­ous com­pa­nies could fill that need, Bel­cas­tro would be in the mid­dle hook­ing the two up — hope­fully in the best inter­ests of both parties.

Sun­bury res­i­dents might remem­ber Bel­cas­tro. He attended a vil­lage coun­cil meet­ing ear­lier this year with Bor­der Energy vice-president Andy Mitrey. Bor­der Energy was there to explain what they had to offer as an energy aggre­ga­tion firm.

Last Wednes­day Bel­cas­tro said he believes Bor­der Energy offers the best deal in elec­tric aggre­ga­tion for munic­i­pal facil­i­ties – a 29 per­cent sav­ings in gen­er­a­tion and trans­mis­sion fees on its 1 mil­lion kW per year elec­tric bill if the vil­lage would agree to a 24-month arrangement.

Sun­bury mayor Tommy Hat­field said aggre­ga­tion is new enough to the vil­lage that he would feel uncom­fort­able agree­ing to any­thing more than 12 months. He also asked Bel­cas­tro how he is paid for being a mid­dle­man. Bel­cas­tro said he is paid by the kW hour in elec­tric aggre­ga­tion arrangements.

Under the head­ing of elec­tric aggre­ga­tion for vil­lageres­i­dents, Bel­cas­tro said res­i­dents could expect a guar­an­teed sav­ings off gen­er­a­tion and trans­mis­sion — 10 per­cent for res­i­den­tial cus­tomers, 15 per­cent for busi­ness cus­tomers — for a poten­tial $135,000 a year sav­ings across the com­mu­nity. He said there would be no sav­ings on dis­tri­b­u­tion rates. AEP and the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Com­mis­sion of Ohio set dis­tri­b­u­tion rates; those rates would remain intact on future elec­tric bills even under an aggre­ga­tion agreement.

“Almost 65 per­cent of your aggre­ga­tion process is already through; you guys have done almost all the heavy lift­ing at this point,” Bel­cas­tro said. “You’ve got two sup­pli­ers with two very good offers ready to go (Bor­der Energy for elec­tric­ity, Vol­un­teer Energy for nat­ural gas). I’ve done 65 per­cent of the work to get this going. You need to sub­mit notices for the news­pa­pers, have two pub­lic meet­ings, sub­mit your appli­ca­tion to PUCO and the flow could start in February.”

Bel­cas­tro said as a bro­ker in the mid­dle he would keep the process mov­ing for­ward by ask­ing the right ques­tions. Once every­thing is in place he would do the village’s reporting.

“The last thing is an exclu­siv­ity agree­ment,” Bel­cas­tro said. “You’re at a point right now where you guys can vote on it and move forward.”

Coun­cil mem­ber Jen­nifer Witt balked at the “exclu­siv­ity agree­ment” state­ment; Hat­field said the vil­lage already under­stands that it’s going to work with Bor­der Energy and Vol­un­teer Energy whether or not they agree to work through Belcastro.

“Part of the rea­son we haven’t done this is the vil­lage is get­ting in the way; we don’t want to do some­thing we regret,” Hat­field said. “Am I right that you’re act­ing on the village’s behalf to get this mov­ing forward?”

Bel­cas­tro said he was basi­cally quar­ter­back­ing the aggre­ga­tion nego­ti­a­tions; that it’s good to have a third party involved to get what the vil­lage and its res­i­dents need.

Asked by vil­lage solic­i­tor David Brehm for a rea­son­able time­line for res­i­den­tial elec­tric and nat­ural gas aggre­ga­tion, Bel­cas­tro said pub­lic meet­ings could be held in Novem­ber, then a statu­tory 21 days for res­i­dents to opt-out of aggregation.

“You should be flow­ing by Feb­ru­ary 1 — elec­tric and gas,” Bel­cas­tro said. “No leg­is­la­tion. You just pass a res­o­lu­tion and Dave Mar­tin signs it off. Pass another res­o­lu­tion to hire Trebel LLC to get this across the fin­ish line and we can move forward.”

In other busi­ness, coun­cil mem­bers approved a motion to spend up to $3,500 for Sun­bury Con­sult­ing Engi­neer Wes Hall, CT Con­sul­tants, to have the Sun­bury Town Hall roof inspected before roof­ing alter­na­tives and esti­mates are submitted.

“We don’t want to pro­pose a cost until we know the con­di­tion of the rafters and plank­ing by doing an inte­rior and exte­rior inspec­tion,” Hall said. “Then we can look at mate­ri­als — dif­fer­ent kinds of met­als and the weight of the met­als on the roof – and then come up with an ini­tial cost.”

Hat­field said Town Hall roof has been leak­ing; the roof­ing job needs to be done to pro­tect the build­ing for future generations.

“We don’t want to pass the buck,” Hat­field said. “But we do want to be cau­tious as we move forward.”

Posted by Gary Henery on Oct 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.