Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. does not expect to request action by its customers on Friday (8/4) to conserve electricity despite continuing hot weather and near-record demand.

"All available PP&L generating units are running, and the regional power pool is able to rely more firmly on electricity purchased from other pools in the Northeast and Midwest, where the heat wave has broken," noted Barry Trayers, PP&L's manager of Bulk Power Operations.

"We are more comfortable with the power supply situation today and do not see a need to request customer action, as we did Thursday (8/3)," he added.

PP&L, and the other 10 utility members of the PJM Interconnection power pool, asked industrial customers to curtail their use of electricity between noon and 6 p.m. Thursday under a special rate plan.

Those businesses have special "interruptible" contracts with PP&L which give them a lower price for electric service in exchange for agreeing to reduce their power use when demand for electricity is extremely high.

"The interruptible rate has benefits for PP&L and for the customers who have chosen to use it," said Richard A. Mazzini, manager of Electric Market Strategies & Operations for PP&L.

"The rate enables PP&L to reduce electricity load on short notice. It's one of the tools we have used to defer the need to build additional power plants," he said. "The customers are able to reduce their overall energy costs because of the discount they receive for agreeing to curtail power use when asked."

On average, interruptible customers have been asked to curtail power use once or twice a year since the rate was introduced in 1984. The last such request came during an extreme cold spell in January 1994.

The rate worked as designed yesterday, Trayers said. After the PJM power pool initiated the call for interruptible customers to cut back on their power use, PP&L customer demand fell by about 400,000 kilowatts as those customers responded to the request. Without the reduction, PP&L likely would have set another summer use record. It would have been the third record in a week.

PP&L serves about 1.2 million customers in 29 counties of eastern and central Pennsylvania. PJM coordinates the distribution of power to more than 22 million people who live in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Demand for power by PP&L customers and across the five-state PJM power pool is expected to continue at near-record levels Friday.