Mid-American Energy reports it set a new record for power demand earlier this week. The power company’s Allen Urlis says temps soaring into the nineties and high humidity had air conditioners roaring, and kicked in the company’s “Summer Saver” plan so the peak demand wouldn’t be even higher.The company puts a remote-control device on your air conditioner. When they activate Summer Saver, it turns the A/C’s condenser on and off at fifteen-minute intervals, between 4 P.M. and seven in the evening. That cuts the demand on the power supply by an estimated 49-thousand watts. Customers have signed up ahead of time for the program, and about 30-thousand agreed to it. The company’s done it five time now this year so far — and only did it once last year. Urliss goes on to point out that from the first through the 26th of June, the utility’s customers used 15-point-9-percent more electricity in that period than they did over the same time last year. MidAmerican Energy serves 1.3 million customers in a 10,000 square-mile area from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to the Quad-Cities area of Iowa and Illinois.
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