Richmond Power & Light has a new control house at its U.S. 27 location.
The control house was delivered in two pieces that were lifted by crane onto a foundation. Now, RP&L staff is working to make the new control house operational.
Tony Foster, RP&L’s general manager, provided the control house update to the RP&L board, which is composed of Richmond Common Council members, during a July 3 meeting. The control house is larger and moves the operations out of the generating plant at the Whitewater Valley Generation Station.
Panelmatic Building Solutions of Fairfield, Ohio, was awarded the control house bid last year for $817,000.
Foster also told the board RP&L was lucky during late-June and early-July storms. He said trimming trees aggressively has helped RP&L avoid large outages. Smaller, isolated outages were caused by trees on June 29, July 1 and July 2, while lightning caused outages July 1 and July 2 and birds caused outages June 29 and July 1.
During the meeting, Foster opened an Altec Industries bid for a digger derrick truck. Altec was the only bidder at $290,115 after providing an $18,000 trade-in credit, with estimated delivery during the final months of 2026.
Foster showed board members a redesigned rp-l.com website during the June 5 meeting.
Colored tabs on the homepage guide users to the three most frequent reasons for website visits: paying a bill; starting, stopping or moving service; and reporting outages. The outages area includes a place to report streetlight outages.
A new weather camera (rp-l.com/weather-cam/) that’s mounted on the RP&L smokestack at its U.S. 27 service center provides real-time video of weather to the west.
The home page also provides an opportunity to register for the SmartHub app that enables users to manage their accounts and check usage information.
During that meeting, the board approved a 0.003378-cent increase to the utility’s residential energy cost adjustment for the third quarter. That raises the charge to 0.0166608 cents per kilowatt-hour to adjust for what RP&L pays for electricity. The increase would amount to $3.37 each month for a typical 1,000 kilowatt-hour user.
RP&L’s board now must approve the energy cost adjustment each quarter because the utility left the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
In other action, the board awarded the bid to pave the service center parking lot and access drive to All About Asphalt for $216,320.
A version of this article appeared in the July 12 2023 print edition of the Western Wayne News.