HARDWICK – A power outage early Tuesday morning, February 16 left most of the Hardwick Electric Department (HED) service territory without service for two or more hours. “The outage was caused by a pole fire owned by Green Mountain Power (GMP) south of our Hardwick substation,” Scott Johnstone, HED General Manager said.
courtesy photo
“It covered almost our entire service territory. We got disconnected from GMP and then Morrisville [Water & Light] backed us from the west, ending the outage.”
On Wednesday, Feb. 18, Johnstone reported, “I believe GMP came to town yesterday and repaired the damage to their system that caused the outage.”
During the outage, customers who were able to access the internet reported the link at the top of the HED website (hardwickelectric.com) never showed outages in the HED service area.
Johnstone explained, “Currently we are challenged outside of work hours to keep the map up as we don’t have any office staff working to do that. [It is a] manual task. Once we install advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) this fall, those maps will auto-populate.”
Johnstone joined HED in mid-October, after the previous General Manager Sarah Braese had left her position with the department.
He said pressures from legislation and regulation are causing small municipal electric departments throughout Vermont to look at closer cooperation with their neighbors. Swanton and Enosburg are already working together and in this area Barton, Orleans and Lyndon are doing the same.
Lamoille County municipal electric departments are doing the same, looking at collaborative and cooperative agreements.
Johnstone joined HED as its general manager through a cooperative agreement with Morrisville Water & Light (MW&L), a department of the Village of Morrisville, where he also serves as manager.
Johnstone said his work and the work of the commissioners looking to the future is in understanding customer demand and working to be ready to meet it.
Most of Vermont’s small electric utilities are members of Vermont Public Power Supply (VPPSA), that provides them with needed services, including rule- and rate-making.
HED customers now pay less for their electricity than 90% of Vermont residents, said Johnstone. HED rates are currently in the upper third of Vermont electric utilities, but below the largest of them, which include GMP, Burlington Electric, Washington Electric Coop and Vermont Electric Coop, he said.
Within HED, Johnstone noted the line crew is well-staffed. Business and Finance Manager Beth Essary has recently retired.
In Greensboro, new discussions between HED, the Town of Hardwick, The Greensboro Association, the Town of Greensboro and perhaps the State of Vermont will be happening to identify appropriate ownership and management roles for the Caspian Lake dam, said Johnstone.
HED manages the dam under state guidance, which means it does not serve any power generation function and HED has no financial interest in continuing to own it. Changes in how insurance is obtained for dams may make it difficult to insure in the future, said Johnstone.
The property there is owned by the Town of Hardwick. The situation is further complicated because the dam is in Greensboro and controls the water level for lakeshore property owners, represented by The Greensboro Association.
Additional complications arise because HED’s roughly 4,350 customers come from eleven Vermont towns with approximately 325 miles of transmission and distribution facilities. Investments funded by those customers have supported construction and maintenance on the dam over many decades, thus the Vermont Public Utility Commission will be involved in approving any potential changes to the dam’s ownership.
Jackson Dam, on the Lamoille River in Hardwick is also owned by HED and no longer serves the purpose of generating power. Studies have recently begun on the value of that dam, vs. the value of removing it. Those discussions are ongoing with no plans for repairs or removal made yet.
A critical dam in HED’s power portfolio is Pottersville Dam, also known as the Wolcott Dam. It is a 52-foot-high concrete hydroelectric structure located on the Lamoille River in Wolcott. Built in 1920 and operated by HED, it supported local power generation until 2023 flooding damaged it.
The turbine damaged then had been supplying about 10% of HED’s power. That turbine has now been refurbished, but penstocks damaged since 2023 need repairs that are being reviewed by FEMA, said Johnstone. Those costs are likely to be in the $6.5 to 6.7 million dollar range. The FEMA review might take another three months and, with appropriate approvals and financing, the dam could be reenergized in 2027.
The Pottersville Dam is an important power source for HED because it’s within the HED service area and supplies power without fees for transmission that most other sources supplying power to the HED system require.
Johnstown said HED commissioners will be looking at other aspects of that dam, possibly improving the trash rack, taking steps to ensure there’s enough water flow to wash sand from the bearings, and new technologies to monitor and manage it.
There’s also work to be done throughout the HED distribution system to upgrade transmission lines to handle the newer loads like electric vehicle charging. That could mean investment in the $10 million range to meet customer expectations about outages,Johnstone said.
On top of that, new trucks cost about $425,000, requiring ten years of reinvestment because of the way the state requires utilities to fund themselves out of current operating funds without building up capital funds. That adds interest expenses to any large investment made by the utility.
Future work on the HED system is likely to include Distributed Energy Resource Management (DERM), used by electric utilities to control, optimize and visualize distributed energy resources (DERs), such as solar, wind and batteries, to improve grid reliability, manage congestion and increase capacity.
