In a recent interview with APPA, Dennis McFee, CEO and General Manager at Public Service Commission of Yazoo City, Mississippi, offers an updated on a comprehensive multi-year initiative launched by the public power utility in 2024 with the objective of significantly enhancing power reliability and resiliency for customers in Yazoo City.
The initiative, which is called the Power Project, includes several key components “such as proactive vegetation management, which really helped us reduce outages caused by overgrown trees, pole replacements to strengthen the grid, some much needed service upgrades to modernize infrastructure,” McFee said in recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast. “It also involved installing sectionalising equipment to....keep some of those major outages down,” he noted.
“We invested in things like smart meters, some grid automation and some real time monitoring,” McFee said. “The biggest part of this project is the construction of a new substation. We are primarily fed from one end of town, so if we have an outage on the transmission side, it causes pretty much everyone to be out. So in order to provide some redundancy and some additional capacity, we're looking to build a substation on the northern end of town.”
He noted that when “we put this thing together, it was initially supposed to be a five-year project. Since its launch last year, we've definitely encountered some unexpected challenges, including supply chain delays, the fluctuating cost of equipment, staffing, weather related disruptions -- all these things played a role into the timeline of this project.”
But what the utility found out “was the work that we've done already, we're already seeing some significant impact, so I'd say we're still on course for that five-year mark and pretty much we’ll finish before then.”
In the interview, McFee was asked to discuss how the utility has communicated with customers with respect to detailing how they will benefit from the project.
“We’ve used multiple means of communication. We've done billboards, press releases, workshops, community partnering and the biggest thing is probably our heavy use of our newly launched social media platforms,” he said.
“But I think the biggest form of communication -- it's been the customer seeing the results in action. Reduced outages, shorter interruptions and faster response time and there is no better communication than them actually feeling it and seeing it.”
Community Service Projects
Along with the Power Project, the utility has “wanted to have our presence felt and known other than just being a utility provider,” he noted. “So we've started quarterly community service projects that allow the employees to give back to our community in different ways.”
In addition, “we've launched an employee support program where employees can make voluntary contributions to assist customers with their bills in special circumstances. And of course, we've really beefed up communications, which has helped us out a lot and needless to say, there's a lot going on here,” he said.
“One thing we've done is a community clean up. We cleaned up a a heavily trafficked road, which was just filled with litter. We collected probably about 20 bags of trash off of one road, one street. It was big for us because not only that we feel like we made a difference, but you could visibly see it,” McFee said.
“We were constantly getting stopped by customers, members of the community just thanking us and appreciating the work that we're doing. And it kind of changed the atmosphere here. People started to buy into more to the mission and the values and what we're trying to do as a utility.”
The Public Service Commission is a multi service utility. “We provide three services here -- electric, water and sewer. The utility has been in service for over 120 years -- definitely a long time and we have approximately 5,500 customers with a little bit over 40 employees,” McFee said.
