Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Chinese utility chiefs visit EMC

With the help of Kennesaw State College, a delegation of 19 Chinese utility professionals representing 17 mostly electric supply companies from the Jilin Province, located in northeast China between Inner Mongolia, Russia, and North Korea,visited the United States recently. They were here gathering information on the structuring of our electrical utilities.

This was a first time trip to the United States for most of the guest, with only one person speaking English. An interpreter from Kennesaw State College came along to help with communications. They were very excited about meeting American people and learning about our culture.

China is in the process of restructuring its electric industry. Lui Jinglong, who was an exchange work program employee for a year with Georgia EMC in Atlanta, described it:

"We will split generation and electric network business. Possibly there may be five large generation companies and five electric marketing regions."

One of their challenges with restructuring will be their pricing. Currently electricity in the rural areas is more expensive than urban. However, it will be the same price after restructuring which could create a problem with balancing the budget.

Upon their arrival at Coweta-Fayette, they were greeted by President and CEO Michael Whiteside. He explained the EMC's organizational chart and introduced his management team who shared more information with the group.

Whiteside said, "We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and are proud to be of service to our counterparts across the globe."

"It was an honor for Coweta-Fayette EMC to be recognized for our management and operations and to be chosen as one of the site visits."

Dan Hart, vice president of marketing, spoke on the need for green power and how the Georgia EMC's now have the largest green power program in the southeast.

Manager of engineering and 0perations, Dale Hannold, spoke on reliability.

"Our goal is to have 100 percent reliability. So far, we have been able to reduce our outage time to less than 1.3 hours per member per year. Helping to improve this reliability is a formal right-of-way management program. Coweta-Fayette is clearing or maintaining at least 1/5 of its right-of-way each year. This includes trimming trees, removing dead brush and mowing."

To complete the day, the group was taken to the Mountain Creek substation that is located in west Coweta County for a closer look at one of our distribution points. The delegation was very interested in system protection both on Coweta Fayette's system and our transmission network and circuit loading.

Coweta-Fayette EMC provides electricity to members in Coweta, Fayette, South Fulton, Meriwether, Heard and parts of Clayton and Spalding counties

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