Electricity Use Spikes in Braintree But BELD Has Plenty of Juice During Heat Wave

ISO New England, the region's power grid operator, is encouraging residents to conserve energy as this week's heat wave taxes the electric system and causes usage rates to rise to near-record levels.

Braintree is no different when it comes to residents cranking up their air conditioning to fend off temperatures that have consistently hit 90-plus degrees for the past several days.

However, while most New England residents and businesses rely exclusively on regional power sources, Braintree has the Braintree Electric Light Department, which is producing enough electricity to both keep up with the town's high demands and sell energy back to ISO.

The load experienced this week by BELD has been in the mid-80 Megawatt range, which is high but not quite record-setting. In 2006, the town set an all-time record with 93 Megawatts.

With all generation capacity running Wednesday, BELD is able to generate up to about 170 Megawatts, General Manager William Bottiggi said in an email. The extra juice is sold back to ISO, which every hour directs BELD when to run its power plants and at what load.

"We are in good shape as far as outages go," Bottiggi said. "Occasionally during high stress times like this a transformer or cable will fail but we have fared well so far this week."

Bottiggi added that BELD's new Smart Meter system, installed over the last couple years, has helped. If there is an outage or low voltage condition, the meters send an alarm to the department, allowing BELD to add a transformer to the area experiencing low voltage and correct the problem before an overloaded transformer fails.