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The Kitchen Table

Electricity Question

18 years ago

Just curious about this.

The house we're buying is in a city that has it's own, city-owned, electric generating plant. It's not a commercial utility company. DH just came home from a meeting at his work (he works for the state's largest commercial electric and gas company) with a map of the utility companies in our state. This is the ONLY city who generates and supplies their own electric to their residents. Now, we've been told that the rates are significantly lower than the commercial company's are--guess we'll see in a month or so. The town also is the 'water' company. And I noticed an interesting feature the other day when I went in to apply to have the power and water put into our name. There's a drive-thru window at city hall for bill paying--how convenient is THAT!

Was just wondering--does your town supply any of your utilities, or do you buy from a commercial company. How common is it for a town to be in the electric-generating business? And do you think you save, if your town does have it's own power plant?

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Comments (5)

monica_pa Grieves
18 years ago
Is it a trash-to-steam plant?
Not uncommon.

I grew up in a town in South Jersey that had it's own water company...still does, as far as I know.
gardenspice
18 years ago
My city is same. (well, I don't know about the drive through window!)
And Electric, Water, Trash are all on same bill.
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azzalea
Original Author
18 years ago
As far as I know, it's a regular electric generating station (not trash to steam). Monica, my current SJ town also has it's own water company, but unfortunately, in recent years, the state has forced us to buy water from the 'big' water company in the area. Used to be, our annual bills were lower than most other's quarterly ones, but now, not so much.

In the 'new' location, we'll be getting water and electric on the same bill. The gas (from a regular commercial company) and sewer are separate. Town supplies trash pick up--no charged for that.
bigfoot_liz
18 years ago
our city supplies our water and we depend on progress energy for electric, they are one of the two major suppliers in FL. several yrs ago our city was trying to become the supplier of electric but we voted that down thank gawd. the very next yr we had 3 major hurricanes back to back in 04' and thou we did go 24 days straight w/o power & gas it would most definitely have been alot worse. two yrs before that the next door city, winter park, did vote out progress energy. during the 04 hurricanes their city went even longer than we did w/o power and that city is choke full of multi-million dollar houses on streets lined w/ massive oak trees that came down. because they voted progress energy out, they were forced to find tree companies and electrical components at market rates, that of course, went thru the roof because of extreme demand. tree companies that did work in there have a minimum of $10K job to just come out and they got that price easily lol. now winter park is working on putting all overhead lines underground and the residents are footing that bill. atleast every power increase we get has to go thru the state. while ours has increased 30% since 04 progress energy is forced to do upgrades in order to get increases which i'm o.k. w/ as long as we improve. it will go up another 16% this fall but it could be worse (our bill is low and we conserve very strictly)...i believe winter park residents pay an additional $50 a month to cover just the repairs and tree work from 04-05 season. i'd worry about increases and guarantee of supply if my city owned the lines lol ~ liz
molly109
18 years ago
My old town had it's own Electric company. But,
it's rates were higher than the Large Company that
basically covered the State, other than a few small
towns that had their own company like mine.

The one good thing, I found, was that in the event of
storm damage, etc., the service was excellent, as the
linemen had a much smaller area to cover.

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