Introduction General Manager's Letter Commissioners' Letter Year In Review Employees 2018 Financials

General Manager's Letter

By definition, municipally owned and operated electric utilities are community-centric. As a municipal, public power utility Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant is owned by the ratepayers who elect or appoint the board that governs what we do. Our revenue is reinvested into our system and in our communities. We take the initiative and progressive actions to provide our ratepayers with reliable, competitively-priced services in a sustainable, environmentally-sensitive and customer-centric manner.

We're your hometown utility. We embrace our history AND recognize our commitment to the future. We have made great strides within the past decade to ensure that we exceed expectations and mandates, especially as they relate to green and carbon-free fuel sources and renewable energy. We've made even greater strides in implementing these and other initiatives while keeping rates cost effective to our customers.

These initiatives and projects will help meet the future needs of our customers and complement our efforts to continue providing safe, reliable, environmentally sustainable electrical service and outstanding customer service at competitive rates. As one example, the distributed generation project at the West Water Street station was already providing a benefit in 2018 and was responsible for reduced peak load, leading to significant savings in avoided costs for our ratepayers. We expect that this project will continue to result in significant savings well into the future.

Another example, the battery storage project at the Cleary-Flood Generating Station, which was in the planning and permitting stage during 2018, will also help mitigate capacity and transmission costs to provide additional savings. We were awarded a $1.25 million grant in late 2017 to help fund this project, the largest amount awarded as part of the Energy Storage Initiative (ESI) Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) program funded by Department of Energy Resources and administered by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. We take our responsibility seriously to be a leader, not a follower, in ensuring that renewable initiatives are supported well into the future.

While these projects are important to TMLP's future, they are only a part of our story. TMLP was awarded the prestigious Reliable Public Power Provider (RP3) designation from APPA in 2018, a designation awarded to less than 12% of the public power utilities in the country. This award recognizes TMLP for providing the highest level of safe and reliable service to our customers. While TMLP is honored to be recognized for reliability and safety from our peers and APPA.

TMLP continues to upgrade infrastructure and technology in all areas, things that are not as visible – or heralded – but are just as important as the projects that are in the forefront. These less visible but vitally important projects are why we rate high among our peers and our ratepayers. Those are the things that help make TMLP reliable, customer-oriented and efficient.