Chapter Seven of Seven

 Being There

An Autobiographical Account of My Life and Times at Glasgow EPB

William J. Ray

CHAPTER SEVEN - The End

So, I do have regrets, and my departure due to the unpopularity of doing my job by recommending actions to a board, based on the knowledge gained by my team, still stings...a lot. I spent the last 40 years head-over-heels in love with Glasgow. Being spurned by it is the unkindest cut of my life. I regret not being politically savvy enough to recognize the development of a new resentful and angry mentality of some in the community. Further, I am ashamed of being blindsided by the possibility that their discredited ideas and beliefs could be embraced by local elected officials. While this malady did not originate in Glasgow, I should have had my ear to the ground enough to predict its emergence. I am sorry for not setting a better example for my families and my supporters. In my position, it is not enough to talk the talk. I was supposed to make sure that my walk was successful, not just accurate. I cannot help but feel sorry for giving others the assurance that doing the right thing, would always save one from injustice; and that discovery would not always lead to implementation. I learned that being right can sometimes just not be enough. I can only hope that they learn from what I failed to accomplish and move forward with the resolve gained from experience.

I did not mean for this to be so long. But I left out a lot of stuff about those 40 years, so maybe this should become a book. I left out the part where my blood children were born, grew up in Glasgow, and went on to make me the proudest Father ever known. I also left out a lot about the 124 other children – the total that worked with me during those years. I consider them my family too, and I am really going to miss them. I am a committed introvert (true, I swear), so it has always been hard for me to let both of my families know just how dear they are to me. Way back in 1984, when I was new to the EPB job, I discovered it was much easier for me to communicate my feelings to the team in writing. To make those writings personal, I began observing everyone’s employment anniversary by putting my feelings about them into a hand-written note. I guess I chose that method because I am always moved by a hand-written note from a friend, so I hoped the work family would feel the same. During my tenure at EPB, I wrote a lot of those notes – an amount commensurate to the love I have for my team. They are important to me. I believe those notes were important to my precious team, and I am really going to miss that process of making sure they know how much I care for them. 

I do not want to fail to mention a couple of stalwart Board members who, in my mind, qualify for mention like those I have already bestowed upon several other community leaders I got to work with. John “Tag” Taylor and Libby Pruitt Short joined the Board when the battle was already raging. They do not have the years of experience of some of the citizens I mentioned above, but they were quick studies and refused to accept the popular beliefs about me, my team, the rate design we created, or the sustainability discoveries we made. They might have had the toughest job of all of those who came before them, and they did that job with conscience, study, and honor. I salute them.

As mentioned earlier, I was born in Glasgow and came back to Glasgow in 1983, mainly because of the rotten political environment that existed in Bowling Green at the time. I did not intend to stay in Glasgow a long time. Over the years, there were many offers of bigger jobs and equally bigger salaries, but I just never could come up with a complaint about my job at Glasgow EPB that was big enough to give me a reason to leave. I also loved the way Glasgow was growing and changing, and that I was a part of that transformation. All of the friends I have now, and hold dear, came as a result of my time at Glasgow EPB, and the gravity created by those friends held me to Glasgow. Most of all, I loved the team that I worked with, and I still do. While I still have not found a good reason to leave, it seems that my departure is the will of the majority. While I refused to grant their wish without a fight (I’m not throwing away my shot!), sheer numbers and the clear intention of a majority of Glasgow’s voters made it certain they would prevail. So, with this narrative I bid you adieu, with my heartfelt thanks for letting me spend my life trying to make the world, starting right here in Glasgow, better. I know those who befriended me in Glasgow made my world better.

It is neither the calendar, nor the clock, that urges me to depart. Rather, it is the compass – pointing out the direction to destinations I crave – ethics, justice, and respect for science, that directs me to journey away from Glasgow EPB. This narrative should answer a lot of questions about my tenure in Glasgow, but one still remains – what comes next? Tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

Chapter Six of Seven

Being There

An Autobiographical Account of My Life and Times at Glasgow EPB

William J. Ray

CHAPTER SIX

It was with the scars from the battles we already fought, and the losses we incurred therein, that were with us as we trudged into the biggest conflict of my career. We were driven by the injustices we found, and the understanding that someone had to confront the problems we discovered. The creation of a new rate structure for electric power was not a fight we went looking for. Rather, it came looking for us. The rate issue arrived in the data gathered by one of our big research projects that tested the viability of advanced energy meters using our broadband network and allowed us to gather several years-worth of data about how Glasgow customers use the energy we sell. Instead of gathering only 5 digits of data from electric meters, once very thirty days, suddenly we were gathering that data every 15 minutes. As exceedingly bright members of the EPB team began to analyze that data by comparing our sales data for nearly 8,000 customers to the wholesale energy data provided by TVA, a story began to materialize – one that could not be ignored – one that held the key to upending the century-old electric power business.

In 2014, the brave Board that existed then (Norma Redford, Jeff Harned, Cheryl Berry Ambach, Jim Lee, and Karalee Oldenkamp) began to delve into the facts that the team was unveiling in the data we mined.  The findings included many inconvenient truths. We discovered that the existing rate architecture resulted in only those customers using the “average” amount of energy, and the average amount of coincident peak demand each month, were paying an amount directly connected to the wholesale cost of delivering that energy. Our discovery showed that very few real customers actually used the mathematical average amounts for a given rate class. Further, the facts revealed that customers using less than the average volume of energy, paid far less for their electricity than the actual cost of purchasing and delivering that energy. Conversely, we found that customers using more than the average volume of kWh (while using an average amount of coincident peak demand), were being forced to pay much more than the actual cost of the power delivered, and those were only the results within the residential rate class. Over the months, the facts also revealed that customers in the large commercial and industrial rate classes, when actual hourly consumption was compared to actual hourly wholesale cost, were paying much, much more than the cost of serving them. 

There were other previously hidden truths discovered. We found that large companies were being forced to subsidize other classes of customers. Perhaps the biggest discovery, and the one completely ignored by my vocal critics, is that there really is no significant relationship between low energy usage and household income. None. The image of cost-based rates bringing hundreds of older folks into a life of misery is conjured from nothing but misguided imagination. Much more common, and where a direct relationship was found to exist, is that a significant number of customers with low household income find themselves living in substandard housing, and those households were found to use more than the average consumption upon which the old rates were designed. The poor, in substandard housing, were paying more than their fair share of EPB fixed costs under the pre-2016 rate design.

These findings were considered by the EPB Board throughout 2013, 2014 and early 2015. I can assure the reader that no one on that Board wanted to be placed in the position of having to deal with this issue that permeates all 3,500 electric utilities in the U.S. They faced the old energy utility habit of ignoring the fact that the rate architecture, the one in place since the early 1900s, did not accurately produce billing that was connected to actual cost of service. They could have adopted that common industry habit and hoped that their terms on the Board would expire before those facts leaked out to the customers who were being treated unfairly, but they did not do that. Instead, driven by their wisdom, integrity, and ethics, they pursued a course of “good trouble” and followed the words of Martin Luther King from his March 1965 speech in Selma, Alabama, “A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” That EPB Board rose up, and they directed my team to develop a rate that brought accuracy and justice to the way people in Glasgow purchase their supply of energy, because anything else would not be right. My team followed their direction and developed what energy and rate experts who have examined it call, the most simple and elegant solution to electric power retail rate design which exists today. Although that move was largely misunderstood, and although that action of standing up for what is right ultimately caused their departure, and mine, I am proud of what the Board and my team accomplished then, and what they are still accomplishing now. If given the chance to go back and do it all again, I would not change a thing, because it was that new relationship between electric power production and the retail sale of the product that revealed the most powerful truth of my career.

For over a century, the electric power systems have operated on the belief that the daily demand curve for electric power was unalterable. This belief drove the industry to over-build generation capacity and over-mine the fossil fuels that have long been used to burn to produce the steam necessary to create the flow of electrons we hold so dear. But our work in Glasgow began to show that the daily peak demand could be flattened. It showed that off-peak power could be stored in batteries, and that our broadband network could be used to organize electric power production, storage, and consumption, into a shape which could be satisfied using mainly renewable energy sources. Before some very angry and backward voices organized to put the kibosh on research projects in Glasgow, using misunderstanding and a shocking disdain for expertise, we gathered enough data to glimpse a world with dew still on it. We discovered and demonstrated how the ratio of energy usage to peak demand could be drastically improved, using technology and cost-based rates. We saw a way toward a sustainable energy system that stole the ideas of energy conservation and storage from nature. We revealed those things before a few misguided people, promoting their local brew of uninformed populism, killed the appetite for research and discovery in Glasgow. Allowing them to do that is my greatest failure.  

Chapter Five of Seven

Being There

An Autobiographical Account of My Life and Times at Glasgow EPB

William J. Ray

CHAPTER FIVE 

Although we won many of the battles that sought us out during my time at the EPB, we experienced some gut-wrenching casualties in the process. Some of those consisted of cherished members of the team leaving for other jobs. More casualties came in the form of experienced essential members of the team who chose to retire long before their talent diminished, just due to the stress involved in the EPB world. This challenge will continue to be a problem after I am gone. But, by far, the most crushing loss of members of the team came from a couple of untimely deaths. Jama Young was our first Technical Services Manager. I wanted a small group of folks to create a “skunk works” operation to study evolving technologies and bring the deserving ones into our portfolio of products. Jama was designed for the job. Of all the people I have encountered during my long career, Jama was one of the most brilliant and capable. I fully expected her to take my place when I departed. In an unjust twist of fate, she left this world before that could happen. We think so much of her, that we still honor her by naming the building that holds most of Glasgow’s essential technology after her. The wound left by her passing has never healed.

Janice Crenshaw also left us when we were counting on her the most. Janice was much different than Jama. Janice was not a technical wizard. Rather, Janice was a customer relationship expert. She worked in our lobby, where she waited on, and counseled dozens of customers each day. While anyone can learn to talk to customers and fulfill their wishes, I’ve never seen anyone else with Janice’s capacity to make each of those interactions something that made the customers involved feel loved and respected. We are still trying to get over her loss as well.

Continuing the EPB mission is impossible without finding, hiring, and retaining more team members like those who we lost during my years.