By Carson Williamson
According to studies performed by Construction Coverage utilizing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the past decade, there has been a growth of 14.4 percent in total housing units in Delaware, with 8.5 percent of those units located in New Castle County alone. Between 2020 and 2023, Delaware has seen a four percent increase in population. Numerous housing developments have continued to expand, and growth in various Delaware municipalities has steadily increased, yet with this increase a greater strain is put onto state and municipal infrastructure, namely water, sewage, and electricity.
Following a recent increase in electric bill prices, and growing concerns over supply and demand, the three major power suppliers in Delaware: Delaware Electric Cooperative (DEC), Delmarva Power and Light (DPL), and the Delaware Municipal Electric Corporation (DEMEC), were questioned and provided responses on their past actions, future plans, and the current situation regarding electricity in the First State. In addition, Charles Anderson, the city manager for Seaford, provided some insight into electrical consumption on a local level, and how the city of Seaford provides power to its residents.
Anderson explained that Seaford serves as a retail seller of power to eligible customers, which encompasses those within city limits, schools, businesses, houses, etc. “(Seaford) does not generate power, so we have to buy power from the market,” Anderson said. “We buy that power and resell it to our customers at the retail rate. We have linemen that go out and maintain our systems, we have two substations, one on Pine Street and one at our utility building on Herring Run Road, so they serve all the customers. We have one tie point at Pine Street substation to the transmission system that Delmarva Power owns.”
With 10 people in the electric department, Seaford has eight linemen, two supervisors, three bucket trucks, a service truck, a digger truck, and associated tools and equipment. Anderson also explained that Seaford serves as a public power entity.
“Our profits from the electric business go to support our city services, specifically general fund stuff; think services like policing, parks and rec, those types of services, whereas Delmarva Power and Delaware Electric Coop do different things with their profits than we do,” Anderson said. “We buy about $11 million worth of electric every year currently, and we sell about $18 million worth of electric. That sounds like a lot, but we have to pay for the electric business, all the people, do all that, and then what’s leftover is profit, or what we call Gross Operating Margin.”
Anderson said that this year, there was a return of $3.2 million that the business returned to the government entity of Seaford to pay for police and other general fund items.
Anderson shared that while there has been a lot of great growth in Seaford, there is a concern over keeping up with infrastructure to support the expansion of the city. “We focus here in the city of Seaford, and we invest a lot of money into jobs creation; we’re building industrial parks, even housing provides jobs, and it’s housing for nurses and teachers, and all those things are good,” Anderson said. “As far as planning for growth, it’s very difficult. You see these developers come in and go ‘I’m going to build this 200 unit thing down here, and a restaurant over there and a grocery store here.’ We transmit that growth plan throughout our organization so we can try to extend water, sewer, and electric, and grow smartly.” Anderson continued by mentioning that developers have various impact fees, special assessment fees, and other fees that help offset the cost of development, which includes funds in advance to extend infrastructure to the planned development area.
“After the pandemic, for the last five years, electrical transformers and some equipment are very hard to get,” Anderson explained. “Some of those lead times are more than a year for transformers, so (developers) have to give us the money 54-56 weeks in advance so that we can place the order so we can be ready with the equipment a year or more out. And that exchange of money does a few things; it lets us know they’re serious, and we’re working off their money, so as long as they want us to sit on it or put it in the ground and wait, okay. Typically, developers don’t want to strand investments, so the way we do things helps us weed out the people that are more speculative.”
Another major concern that puts a strain on electrical resources comes from nature itself, whether it be a particularly cold winter or an overly hot summer, wild animals, or various other weather issues.
“Animals, birds, squirrels, things like that are a big issue for electrical systems,” Anderson explained. “That is a very common thing, where wildlife gets in (substations and electrical systems), birds build nests and the like. The larger issue is power insufficiency in the grid. If we get to a point with the load, whether it be extreme heat or extreme cold, or whatever… I’ve heard in California and Texas that they do rolling blackouts, rolling brownouts; we’ve not had to do this here.”
Anderson continued by explaining that when Seaford had its own power generation in the past, they would shave the peak of electric usage during the day. “You get up in the morning, you turn things on, you make breakfast, you take a shower, you do all that, and then you leave the house and you go to work all day, and then you come back home at six o’clock at night and you finish laundry and turn the TV on or the air conditioner on, and you go to bed at night,” Anderson explained. “So you have what’s called daily peaks in your usage… There’s peaks and valleys, and when I say peak shave what I mean is that there’s base load that comes on; you know the big power plants, nuclear power, whatever, and they generate all day. These peaks are when the price of power goes way up… every megawatt hour we had during that heat spell we got was $3,100 a megawatt hour. Those intermittent resources out in the field come out and they shave this peak.”
While Seaford itself does not have power generation and cannot shave the peak itself, DEMEC owns a power plant in Smyrna that serves as a peak shaving plant, and shares profits made from that plant to those amongst the nine member group. “We are looking as a group, and DEMEC, of potentially making another power plant, maybe more than one, and we’d like to put it on the peninsula because that’s where the power congestion is,” Anderson explained. “We’re unfortunate because there’s transmission lines that come down from the north, and there’s a bottleneck down there. Power coming down to the peninsula is an issue in the grand scheme of things. PJM is predicting in the future that we’re going to be 900 gigawatts short of power, so we need to build more generation, be that solar, wind, natural gas, whatever that is to meet the demand that’s forecast, there needs to be a lot of generation built in this area.”
Part of the reason that power bills are increasing comes from a desire by PJM, a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity, to encourage development of new power plants.
Anderson also spoke on some of the national and global changes that have affected the price and consumption of power. “I’m going to call it public policy. What’s happening during our lifetime is there’s been a huge shift and a huge focus on global warming. They want to phase out coal, oil, natural gas; they don’t want to burn hydrocarbons,” Anderson explained. “I understand it, but unfortunately, Indian River Power Plant closed down and that’s taken 300 or 500 megawatts right out of our power supply, at a time when the eastern shore is growing. We are becoming, as a people, more and more reliant on electricity. As these older power planets, coal, fire, whatever, keep closing down across the nation, enough power generation is not coming on. I foresee it becoming a real crucial issue; one of the worst things that can happen to you is when it’s February and it’s 20 degrees out there, and you have to shut power off… there’s people extremely vulnerable to that. They’re going to die. And that’s unconscionable I think, so we as a people need to have a good energy policy that says where we’re going, and what we can do in the short term because we have an energy problem right now.”
Editor’s note – This is the first in a series of stories on electricity issues in the state. See part two in next week’s Stars.
