Rockville Centre's electric use sets a record

The Rockville Centre Electric Department reported a new record for peak electric use on the afternoon of July 22, when the mercury at JFK airport reached 103 degrees. A village spokesman reported the preliminary figure for the village’s electric use at approximately 58 megawatts. He said the exact amount, which will be calculated later this week, could be somewhat larger or smaller. The previous peak was 55.6 megawatts, set in August 2006.

The utility was generating about 20 megawatts on site at the Maple Avenue power plant and importing about 38 megawatts during the peak period. Crews stayed on duty until midnight to deal with any outages.

The spokesman said that by 4 p.m., seven minor outages had been reported, affecting about 65 customers in total, each of whom was without electricity for less than an hour. There were additional outages throughout the evening — all due to failures of transformers and high voltage fuses operating on residential streets. Work crews replaced the fuses. Usually the transformers can be reset, much as a home circuit breaker, but in some cases workers had to replace a failing transformer.

“I would like to thank all the men who were working in the Electric Department over this latest heat wave,” said Mayor Francis Murray during the village board meeting on Monday night. “I went down there, and the temperature on the floor on Friday was 137 degrees. I was informed by [Village Administrator Frank] Quigley and [Electric Department Superintendent] Paul Pallas that we used more electricity than on any other day and there was no brown out.”