District seeking electricity savings

By Harold Gwin

Particularly cold winters could adversely affect the amount of savings.

YOUNGSTOWN — The Youngstown City School District hopes to cut its cost for electricity by about 25 percent over the next two years.

That could amount to a savings of as much as $455,000, said William Johnson, district treasurer.

The school board has voted to join other educational groups in an electricity-purchasing consortium, a move that should produce substantial savings.

Called SchoolPool, it involves the Ohio School Boards Association, the Ohio Association of School Business Officials and the Buckeye Association of School Administrators. The contract began in October and will run through June 2011.

Johnson said SchoolPool has been able to negotiate a deal with FirstEnergy Solutions to provide a 25.4 percent discount on actual electricity used.

Based on historical consumption data, the city school district is expected to use 26.7 million kilowatt hours of electricity over a two-year period.

If the district were required to pay the full tariff rate of 6.7 cents per kilowatt hour, the cost would be nearly $1.8 million, Johnson said.

However, the SchoolPool tariff rate is only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, which would reduce the district cost to just over $1.3 million for the two-year time span, resulting in a projected savings of perhaps $455,000, he said.

He cautioned the board that the savings depend on the district’s matching past electricity usage. Long periods of extreme weather could reduce the amount saved, he said.

Johnson said Youngstown also received a proposal from another consortium known as Ohio Schools Council-Duke, the group through which the district purchased its electricity last year, but OSC-Duke offered a savings of just under 24 percent from full tariff rates. SchoolPool has a better deal, he said.

The district’s largest user of electricity is the Choffin Career & Technical Center at 200 E. Wood St. Its use is estimated at 5,452,000 kilowatt hours over the two-year contract.

East High School is second at 4,494,400 kilowatt hours; Chaney High School is third at 3,190,667 kilowatt hours; P. Ross Berry Middle School is fourth at 1,902,400 kilowatt hours; and William Holmes McGuffey Elementary is fifth at 1,708,267 kilowatt hours.

By comparison, Ohio Edison says that the average home in Northeast Ohio uses about 18,000 kilowatt hours of electricity over a two-year period.

gwin@vindy.com