MMWEC provides a variety of services to help its members develop and manage their power resources to ensure they are meeting their power requirements as efficiently and economically as possible. Power management staff possesses the power market expertise and experience needed to meet the diverse needs of MMWEC’s member and project participant utilities. A few of these services are listed below.

Wholesale Power Market Services
These services enable municipal utilities to be effective participants in New England’s wholesale electric power markets. In providing its wholesale power market services, MMWEC strives to make effective participation in the marketplace as easy a possible for individual municipals, a task that is evermore challenging as electric industry restructuring expands the technical and other requirements of market participation.

MMWEC complies and provides the wholesale market operator with information regarding the electric loads, generating resources and demand management capability of each of its member utilities. It also tracks each member’s interactions with the marketplace and produces online system-specific reports detailing these interactions. In addition, MMWEC analyzes, settles and pays its members’ bills from the market operator, rendering a single monthly bill to each member for a wide variety of market services.

As the marketplace continues to change, MMWEC’s wholesale power market services also have expanded and evolved to meet the changing needs of municipal utilities.

Power Supply Forecasting and Planning
MMWEC provides services to forecast the power supply needs of its member utilities and develop plans to meet those needs. Typically, MMWEC conducts studies to determine the best available alternatives for meeting the aggregate needs of its members, either through generation ownership, contract purchases, energy market purchases, or demand management. By purchasing power resources in bulk and reselling those resources at cost to its members, the members realized significant economies of scale in their power purchases.

Project & Contract Development
Once the members have endorsed a plan to meet specific power supply needs, MMWEC develops Power Supply Projects and contracts on behalf of its member utilities. MMWEC has developed eight formal Power Supply Projects through which it has purchased ownership interests in generating facilities using the proceeds of tax-exempt bond issues. The MMWEC-owned capacity in these facilities is resold at cost to participating municipal utilities.

MMWEC also has negotiated and entered into numerous bulk power contracts with various suppliers on behalf of member utilities, which purchase their share of the contracted resources from MMWEC. Contracts providing for the transmission of electricity from the point of generation to the point of use also are negotiated by MMWEC.

Demand Management
MMWEC has developed a program called Home Energy Loss Prevention Services (HELPS), through which municipal utilities offer a variety of energy efficiency and demand management programs to their customers. MMWEC also provides services to help municipal utilities coordinate their demand management activities with the regional system operator, which is expanding its incentives for such programs. In addition, various demand management programs are considered in the identification of alternatives to meet members’ power supply needs.

Fuel Purchasing
MMWEC staff purchases the fuel and makes the fuel transportation arrangements needed to bring natural gas and No. 2 oil to the Stony Brook power plant, which is capable of burning both fuels to produce electricity. Stony Brook’s facilities include two, 8.4-million-gallon oil tanks. In 2002, MMWEC completed construction of a 5.6-mile, 20-inch-diameter natural gas pipeline to serve the Stony Brook plant.