Business growth
Our vision for 2010, a year with obvious financial challenges in store for Americans, was to grow the business deliberately and strategically, never losing sight of what made sense for our customers and their businesses. Keeping expenses in line with operating revenue was a challenge as prices surged but in the end, the following areas grew without creating a stress on our rates:
Wimax project: In 2010, TMLP management gave the thumbs up for the Internet business unit to investigate providing state-of-the-art wireless coverage to customers throughout the service territory through a pilot study. The study, which is slated to go before the TMLP Commission for approval to begin in 2011, will also potentially support future SmartGrid and public safety applications.
Internet diversity, reliability and redundancy: In an effort to provide the highest level of reliability to our customers, TMLP continued to upgrade the backbone network facilities to ensure world-class network functionality and over 99.98% system reliability. In 2010, TMLP implemented an additional network access point in our system footprint to allow for multiple paths of ingress and egress to our upstream providers.
Taunton school system phones, video, data: The Internet Services Group upgraded the Taunton School system’s wide area network to 10 Gbps and their video delivery system to state-of-the-art technology. This cutting-edge network allows uninterrupted simultaneous flow of all the school system’s data, video, and telephone voice traffic over a single pair of fiber-optic fibers. TMLP currently manages the phone system which includes 250 phones and the supporting network.
Upgrading Cleary-Flood: Conducted engineering, scheduling and costing work for 2012’s planned major outage. A number of systems were upgraded in the plant including the Continuous Emissions Monitoring System (CEMS), Demineralizer storage tank, fire detection in battery room, cooling tower, nitrogen blanketing on Unit 9 boiler and a phosphate pump.
Electronic bill presentment groundwork was conducted during 2010 and is slated to go-live in March 2011. 300 customers signed up to receive their invoices electronically, a nice complement to them paying their bills online and through the Interactive Voice Recognition phone payment system.
LED Lights: Weir street parking lot replacement of high-pressure sodium (HPS) lights with LED (Light Emitting Diode) lights… wattage with HPS was 2,460 and with the replacement of LEDs, it’s now 855watts… a savings of 1,605 watts and a dramatic improvement in light quality. Three additional locations slated for replacement in 2011 include 63 Weir Street Parking lot, Washington Posts on 55 Weir Street and 55 Weir Street Wall packs.
Electrical upgrades: With an emphasis on improving reliability, Station #5 in Whittenton and Station #2 Court Street were upgraded and over two miles of new 13.8 kV distribution line were installed from the Raynham substation to the Court Street substation. Additionally, a new automated transfer switch at Court Street was installed and the Meadow Street substation was revamped by replacing three non-regulated transformers with a newly located single-tank, regulated substation transformer. $700,000 was invested in the line clearance tree trimming program and all streets west of route 138 were completed in 2010.