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Power Supply
It is the policy of CVEC to provide reliable and affordable energy and energy services to its industrial, commercial, and residential members. Furthermore, this policy is consistent with CVEC’s business objectives of making financially sound and timely investments in the capital infrastructure of the Cooperative to ensure the reliable delivery of energy and energy services to its members.
Finding Affordable Power
As a Cooperative, CVEC works to find the most affordable power for its member-owners. All together we use about 722 million kilowatt-hours per year. The average member uses about 1500 kilowatt hours per month (1.5 megawatt) which costs about $100 on the wholesale power market.
Since electricity cannot be stored on a distribution system, CVEC has to plan power purchases for members, scheduling buy more energy during winter mornings and summer afternoons and less during the early morning hours of shoulder months, when people are asleep and the weather is temperate.
When charted out over a year, CVEC develops a load curve and then purchases blocks of power of varying amounts from different sources and stacks those blocks until it reaches just below or above the load curve. If it turns out members use more power on that day, then CVEC buys it on the wholesale energy market in order to meet member demand. If they use less than the contracted purchasesit is sold into the market.
CVEC is utilizing a power supply portfolio strategy that features about 20 different sources of energy, CVEC is working to ensure that, in the future, no one source will impact the cost of wholesale energy for our member-owners. As part of the portfolio, we have executed new contracts, and purchasing agreements for the output from different generation plants, including 28 megawatts from a gas generation plant in Ohio, 7 megawatts from the Kerr Reservoir on the North Carolina border and 4 megawatts from the Blue Creek wind plant. CVEC even owns a small hydro-electric plant in Nelson County.
This is how your Co-op delivers Comfort and Convenience for you and your family with the most affordable power to be found.
The CVEC Power Supply Strategic Plan contains Ten Supporting Goals:
- Provide for power supply that is diverse in fuel sources, geographic location, and risk profile.
- Develop a power supply approach that will avoid a significant (40% to 60%) sudden rate increase.
- Partner in new generation facilities using proven technologies, when
cost effective. - Avoid projects using unproven technology.
- Consider formula rate contracts with partners that have generation fleets with diverse fuel sources.
- Avoid all-requirements, lifetime (30 years or more) commitments that allow others to make all of the power supply decisions for CVEC members.
- Implement a power supply portfolio according to the directives of the CVEC Power Supply Strategic Plan.
- Implement an energy hedging strategy according to the directives of the CVEC Power Supply Strategic Plan and that complies with its Risk Management Controls.
- Set conservation, efficiency, and demand side management goals for CVEC that matches the Virginia Energy Plan’s goal of conserving 10% of the 2006 level of energy by 2022, when cost effective.
- Set a renewable power goal for CVEC power supply that matches the Virginia Energy Plan’s voluntary goal of providing 12% of 2006 level of energy from renewable resources by 2022, when cost effective.
CVEC Power Sources (Effective 6/16 - click on chart for a PDF version)
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Phone: 434.263.8336 | Toll free: 800.367.2832 | Fax: 434.263.8339
Corporate Headquarters:
800 Cooperative Way
Arrington, VA 22922
Payments:
Dept. 1340 | PO Box 2153
Birmingham, AL 35287-1340
Correspondence:
P. O. Box 247
Lovingston, VA 22949