Contact: Priscilla Knight, 703-392-1580, pknight@novec.com
Suburban Growth Forces Change
A regional electric cooperative serving residents and businesses in the thriving western outskirts of the nation's capital develops a more agile fleet as dense development encroaches upon the shrinking countryside.
By Julie Britt
Expansion of bustling urban centers into distant, bucolic suburbs is changing the way some rural electric cooperatives build and maintain infrastructures and serve customers. Such operational shifts are affecting utility fleet managers as well.
Instead of providing electricity to far-flung farms and spacious residential areas, co-ops near major metropolitan areas are suddenly dealing with high-density housing developments and traffic congestion. Many of their new customers are transplanted urbanites who expect big-city services and convenience along with pastoral views.
For example, Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative, the 11th largest co-op in the United States, is adjusting its fleet and workforce to accommodate its growing customer base in the western suburbs of Washington, officials at the Manassas-based utility said.
"We have about 130,000 customers right now," said Jim Moxley, a NOVEC senior vice president who is responsible for fleet management. "We are growing and have been growing at about a 4.5% to 5% pace every year for the past four or five years. Last year, 2005, we added over 6,000 customers."
NOVEC's growth stems from its prime location just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, which attracts high-technology industries such as software developers and defense contractors. "There has been a significant growth in the residential population," Moxley said. "That economic growth has fueled a fairly rapid growth in new residential construction as well as in commercial construction."
Building a Fleet That Fits
NOVEC isn't expecting any slowdowns. "We do long-term planning and forecasting, and that … modeling takes into account local economic conditions as well as that of the region, and to some extent the national economy as well. We may not grow quite as much in 2006 - that has yet to be seen - but we don't expect and anticipate any significant changes," he said. Indeed, tightly packed communities and massive traffic jams have led NOVEC to purchase equipment and trucks that can maneuver in dense areas.
"We've added a lot of light-duty bucket trucks … [to cope with] traffic and also private drives that you have to go up in," said Steve Staats, who makes fleet purchase recommendations as supervisor of the co-op's fleet maintenance facility. "Houses are so close now you just cannot get these bigger aerial devices in there. We've also had to … purchase [four] Bobcat excavators in order to get between the houses … and fences to shoot trouble with and for digging."
Two factors have caused NOVEC to change its fleet mix, Moxley told LIGHT & MEDIUM TRUCK. "One … is the types of construction, some of the physical constraints. But also, with our increasing focus on service and rapid response to power outages, it has become evident that these smaller vehicles have become more useful, more practical, to serve a rapid response force than the larger bucket trucks that we had been using and which have been replaced for this purpose," he said.
With only about 150 drivers, NOVEC for several years has relied on contractors to help design and install its electrical infrastructure, Moxley said. The contractors do not service NOVEC customers, he said; instead, they work on new construction with their own fleets, which include trenching equipment and pole-installation equipment.
"Although we have not increased total staff, the distribution and mix of that staff has changed a little bit," Moxley said. "We have created and expanded a quality assurance force that … spends time in the field inspecting new construction that is being performed by our contractors, so that has created a need for additional vehicles - light-duty and medium-duty pickups - to serve that purpose."
"Most of the [light-duty trucks] we've gotten so far … have been the F550 Fords," Staats told L&MT. "Approximately we have 12 right now. We've got six more [2006 models] we just have purchased [that are] being built right now." The fleet also includes 32 medium-duty trucks, including digger derricks and large aerial devices, and 90 full-size pickup trucks with four-wheel-drive, Staats said.
While focusing on managing growth and construction with external contract forces, internally NOVEC has been emphasizing improved customer service and system reliability, Moxley said.
"I think it's fair to say that over the past few years, with the change in demographics … that there is a set of expectations that has increased," Moxley said. Customers expect their power to remain on, and if an outage occurs, they want service restored as soon as possible, and they have that right, he said. "So we've placed a lot of emphasis on satisfying that need, and the results have been that, compared to the other electric utilities in the region … we have the highest reliability by a significant margin."
Wanted: Workers to Keep the Fleet Running
Fulfilling customers' expectations requires a well-tuned fleet, but there is a shortage of qualified technicians to keep the trucks primed for rapid response. "Finding the right employee with the right qualifications is a challenge, because in this area . . . the unemployment rate is very low, and we are challenged to find qualified people to fill the positions that do come available, especially in the fleet technician area," Moxley said.
"We take care of everything in the fleet as far as maintenance," Staats said. "We actually are [General Motors] certified, so we do our own GM warranty work right here. It takes quite a bit of education they have to keep up with. . . . All of our techs also have to be state inspectors, so it takes quite a bit of training, and … that's one of the biggest challenges we have to face right now, just trying to keep fleet techs. They're in such demand, they're hard to come by."
"There's a variety of competition," Moxley said. "Certainly the auto dealers, but also truck and heavy equipment service facilities, which have grown in our area, so they also represent competition for the same expertise."
Additionally, there are some constraints in hiring practices because these NOVEC employees are members of a bargaining unit, Moxley said.
NOVEC is making sure the community knows about its employment opportunities through a highly visible advertising campaign that includes newspaper ads, notices on its Web site, www.novec.com, and a well-placed billboard, said Communications Manager Inia Burginger.
"We're located . . . on a major highway that channels a lot of commuters into the D.C. area, who are sitting stock-still often in freeway traffic heading into the city," she said. "As they pass this billboard . . . , we're trying to capture that audience with a message that if they worked nearby, they wouldn't have to commute all the way into the city. And we're going to be putting some additional bumper stickers with that same message on the back of all of our fleet vehicles - rolling billboards that are going to be out in the community all the time."
Other co-ops around the country are facing similar rapid growth and its related challenges, including those that serve the Maryland suburbs of Washington, as well as co-ops in the Carolinas, Florida, Oregon and the Denver area, industry experts said.
Moxley offered some advice to those fleet managers: "Make sure that the plans for any changes to the fleet are consistent, obviously, with the overall corporate strategic plan, and that includes deciding or perhaps re-evaluating just what function you want the fleet to play."
For example, NOVEC leaders had to decide whether to "support growth through growth in employees and … in fleet and equipment, or whether … [to] support growth through outsourcing and thinking about perhaps a change in function of the vehicles and employees," he said.
"We're supporting growth through outsourcing, but at the same time, there have been some other types of growth, such as with our inspection program, that have required an increase in that particular area in employees as well as vehicles," Moxley said. "We've decided that's much more cost-effective for us in the long run."
NOVEC has been outsourcing for more than 12 years, and there are no plans to change that system, he said.
"Even though we foresee growth to continue, in the final analysis there could come a time when the growth could decline substantially, and we'd rather terminate a contractor than our own employees," Moxley said. "It's much easier to downsize a contractor workforce than it is your own employees."
Fuel Efficiency in a Booming Electric Co-op
Managing fuel costs while complying with federal mandates to purchase certain alternate-fuel vehicles is one of the Manassas-based Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative's chief business concerns, officials told LIGHT & MEDIUM TRUCK.
NOVEC serves 130,000 homes and businesses spread across 651 square miles in the western suburbs of Washington, which requires maintenance of more than 5,200 miles of power lines, the company said.
When fuel costs soared late last year, NOVEC "just had to absorb them," said Jim Moxley, a NOVEC senior vice president who is responsible for fleet management. "We have been very conscious of the way we use fuel for some time. We periodically remind all the users about efficient use of fuel in the vehicles and provide them guidelines on how they should operate the vehicles in an effective and efficient manner, such as guidelines that say you really shouldn't be starting and idling vehicles for a long time, as could be a habit with some employees. So those are just ongoing reminders."
NOVEC also gained fuel efficiency when it added some smaller bucket trucks to the fleet to help navigate crowded residential streets and traffic jams in its rapidly growing territory, Moxley said.
"There's always the ongoing challenge of controlling costs of our fleet, costs of maintaining a proficient technician force and keeping them up to date in changes in technology as well as the cost of maintaining them, including the cost of things like tires and, certainly, fuel," Moxley said.
Another challenge is adding alternate fuel vehicles to the fleet, said Steve Staats, supervisor of NOVEC's fleet maintenance facility. "We just don't have the infrastructure anywhere around to support all this. . . . Everybody's offering E85 [vehicles], but there's nowhere to purchase E85 [fuel] anywhere in the metropolitan area."
NOVEC owns some alternate fuel vehicles, including those that run on liquefied petroleum gas and compressed natural gas, but those fuels are not readily available either, Staats said. "They're bi-fuel [vehicles], so I can still use them off gasoline."
The Environmental Protection Agency requires energy providers purchasing vehicles under a certain gross vehicle weight to choose alternate fuel vehicles. "In order to be fully compliant, we are actually purchasing vehicles that are above that threshold weight - the full-size pickup as opposed to a medium-size," Moxley said. "We have to comply with those guidelines and requirements, so because of the unavailability of fueling stations, we're having to adjust the fleet that we have in place by making choices with vehicles that we might not otherwise make."
That can defeat the purpose of the EPA's mandate, Staats said. "If you get the smaller vehicles, you would use less fuel."
To read more stories, see the latest issue of Light & Medium Truck.
