Question of the Month: What’s the difference between municipal and investor owned lighting companies?

If you’ve lived in Merrimac your whole life, you may not realize that the electrical needs of the surrounding communities, such as Haverhill and Amesbury, are provided by an investor-owned utility (IOU) – National Grid. That brings us to our question of the month: is there a difference between an municipal lighting department (MLD) and an IOU?

There are three major differences between an MLD and IOU.

1 – Lower Rates: Our customers are our shareholders. We do not make a profit and our resources are reinvested into our system to lower costs and increase performance. On average our electrical rates are 40% less than IOUs.

2 – Customer service: since you are our main concern- you come first. We work daily to be here to address any of your electrical needs and concerns.

3 – Reliability: we work to respond to any outages in an efficient and expedient manner. Since we are local and have a strong familiarity of our system, we can respond to outages in a faster manner than IOU crews who have larger territory to cover. On average our response time for outages was less than 4 minutes.

Rising costs of electricity

The ability to continue to provide you with this high quality safe and reliable system is a constant struggle. Merrimac Light purchases the power from third parties and delivers it to your home. The cost of this power is increasing at rates of 10 to 15% every year. Under a state mandate to purchase power that is greener, we have seen a significant rise in our power purchase costs. By 2030, we will have 50% of our power coming from carbon free resources. Overall, the increase in power, labor, equipment, and supplies has initiated a need to raise your rates more frequently. Merrimac Light needs your help. With these increases, we need to find ways to either generate revenue or reduce costs.

So, how can we help Merrimac Light save money?

You can help us by going paperless. The cost of sending a bill to you each month costs $2 per billing cycle, or $24.00 per year. Just by viewing your bill online at merrimaclight.com, you help the department save $24 per year. If every customer went paperless, the savings would be huge. $75,000 per year.

Next time you are visiting friends or relatives in an IOU territory- ask them how they feel about their utility bills- I think you will be surprised by their responses.