Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
With the mercury and the humidity hovering in the 90s, county residents have been staying indoors and cranking up the air conditioners.
This has stressed the distribution system of Kosciusko County REMC electric utility to the breaking point, and they're asking for a break.
"The increased use of air conditioners due to the hot and humid weather has resulted in about a 50 percent increase in electric demand," said Gary Hurd, operations manager for Kosciusko County REMC. "We've experienced some outages due to excess loads.
"The lake areas are particularly bad, with people coming in from out of town on the weekends," he said.
He said the utility is asking that people turn their air conditioner thermostats up to at least 78 degrees, and that they not use clothes dryers or other high electric usage appliances during the heat of the day.
"If they could wait until after dark, it would help decrease the loads," Hurd said. "Once we get the temperatures back down, we should be all right."
NIPSCO representative Julia Van DeWater said they haven't had any outages due to an increase in electricity demand.
"We're doing great. We're not experiencing any problems with load demand. We're not asking any of our customers to cut back in any way," she said. "Certainly we believe in energy conservation because that's good for the environment, but we're not asking our customers to sacrifice their comfort levels."
Van DeWater said NIPSCO has been able to meet the increased demand of the past several weeks without any problem because of a rigorous preventive maintenance program during off-peak times in spring and fall.
"We use those periods of low-demand to do the maintenance necessary to meet the peak times like we've been experiencing," Van DeWater said.
She added that media reports that NIPSCO has asked its customers to cut back on the electricity usage were incorrect.
"We've heard that WRSW aired a request from NIPSCO for our customers to cut back on their electricity demand, and that was incorrect," Van DeWater said. "We're able to meet our customers' demands."
