CMS Electric Cooperative; Meade, KS

Profile:
CMS Electric Cooperative in Meade, Kansas was founded in 1945 and today serves approximately 5,200 meters. Their service area covers approximately 4,800-square-miles with 2,500 miles of line. Irrigation is one portion of their load, accounting for 10-15% of peak demand.

Issue:
Irrigation and air conditioning loads create a spike in CMS’s peak demand during the summer period of July and August. Since CMS pays demand charges based on their peak, load control is an obvious cost savings measure.

Interrupting non-critical loads at the right time can lead to great cost savings, however, if you interrupt load unnecessarily, you lose revenue and customer good will. Worse yet, if you don’t interrupt load when your system peaks, demand charges can erase your savings in minutes.

In the past, CMS relied on local time and temperature controls to interrupt load regardless of whether the CMS system or their energy provider, Kansas Electric Power Cooperatives (KEPCo), were at peak capacity. This old approach had several obvious problems:

• Farmers lost valuable irrigation time, even when there was no need to interrupt
  
• Local controls meant no communications from the field back to the home office
  
• There is no way to change the local operating parameters without a field visit

After considering these potential rewards and pitfalls, CMS sought a better solution for load management.

Application:
To gain the control and flexibility to manage their load control program effectively, CMS turned to Telemetric and KEPCo to provide a load control solution based on two-way communication and tailored to meet their requirements.

The new load management system sends CMS real time peak demand updates from the KEPCo EMS/SCADA system. If both CMS and KEPCo are approaching a peak load, the Telemetric system automatically sheds non-essential loads.

Benefits:
With the new system, interruptions only occur when needed. CMS and irrigation customers are provided with critical information such as the exact time and duration of the interruptions. All this combines to give CMS bottom line savings. Kirk Thompson, CMS General Manager, reports: “The driving factors for this project was cost savings. The entire system will pay for itself in just a few of our irrigation seasons.”