No shut offs to seniors during heat

WYOMING, Mich. (WOOD) - Consumers Energy has suspended electricity shut offs to senior citizens and will decide on other shut offs on a case by case basis through the duration of the heat wave.

That announcement comes as Consumers officials reassure the public they have the capacity to keep the electricity flowing.

In Consumers Energy System Control Center in Wyoming, crews are monitoring energy usage by about a million customers mostly in this side of the state.

The big board spells out the potential problems; from substations serving your neighborhood, to the transformer serving your street.

"We're monitoring the system, monitoring the amount of electricity we have a demand for," said Consumers Energy spokesman Tim Pietryga "They're also monitoring temperature too; if they seem to get excessive, we may indeed dispatch a crew to take appropriate action."

The number on one of the boards, marked CE Gross, is important. It represents the megawatts they're using in a given moment.

By 4 p.m. Monday, the number was predicted to rise to around 8,200 megawatt hours, still short of the record.

"The all time record is 8,883 megawatt hours which actually occurred about 5 years ago," siad Pietryga

There have been a number of localized outages, mostly from overloaded lines.

"Folks have added air conditioning, they've added hot tubs, they've added flat screen TVs, they've added computers," he said. "In some cases, when they have all those thing operating, it can overload a neighborhood transformer."

But so far there's been no widespread outages experienced, and no major outages expected. Consumers says they have the capacity to keep up with demand over the next several days.

But be warned, you may be in for some sticker shock when you open that next electricity bill. Consumers Energy  is into their summer billing cycle. The average bill household customer uses about 1200 kilowatt hours a month.

Consumers charges 7.5 cents for the first 600 kilowatt hours used. After that point, it goes to 14.5 cents kilowatt hour.

You can save money by using less electricity. Pietryga says don't use appliances like stoves, washers and dryers during peak periods, usually between 3 and 4 p.m.

But the one thing that could save you money may be sitting in your garage or basement.

"If you have an old refrigerator that's sitting in the garage that just has pop in it or whatever, chances are if it's over 15 years old, it's probably using $150 worth of needless energy a year."

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