Kris Sellstrom, the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities’ new general manager, is pictured.

With the extremely cold temperatures hitting the local area over the last few weeks, Board of Public Utilities General Manager Kris Sellstrom discussed the effects this kind of weather has been having on the BPU’s work.

The frigid temperatures have caused the BPU to need to run the power plant quite a bit, Sellstrom said, with the gas turbines running 24/7 over the past 10 days before the meeting. This is also protecting customers from significantly increasing fuel adjustment rates.

“NYSA, just as a point of interest, had a real time price in excess of $1,800 per megawatt hour,” Sellstrom said. “Normally it’s $30 to $50 per megawatt hour, so times like these are really when the power plant comes into play to protect our customers.”

Over the weekend before the meeting, the average price in the area was $420 per megawatt hour, so Sellstrom noted there is a pretty significant price increase for power and fuel when the weather gets cold.

The BPU has also called on the peaking gas contracts to get gas for the hedging done throughout the year, another thing that Sellstrom said sometimes does nothing and at other times becomes very important.

Sellstrom acknowledged the work of the power plant team to keep the gas turbine running during the cold weather, and making sure it was ready to go with other equipment out of commission.

“The Heat Recovery Steam Generator, the backside of that we had to install a big steel plate so that we could work on the Herzig leak and also still run the gas turbine, that was a pretty big effort by the team to get that done and installed,” Sellstrom said. “I don’t know that it’s ever been installed before, so it was an interesting scramble leading up to the cold spike.”

Sellstrom also reported a few main breaks occurred in January, and some minor electrical outages, but overall, he said, with the challenging weather the system has held up very well. He then recognized all of the BPU employees who were responsive over all of the cold weekends.

“It’s really challenging to go out in this weather and deal with issues, so great job to all of the team on their responsiveness,” Sellstrom said.

Besides the cold weather, Sellstrom said that the work is continuing with NYPA on the rate structure changes, solar project bids have been received with plans to review those next month, and the unaudited financial results for all five divisions are being looked at and worked on, also for next month, during his general manager’s report.