Jill Moretz, General Manager of Chester Municipal Light is up next for our Women in Power series! Chester is the second smallest municipal light plant (MLP) we’ve featured in this series with a system of about 1MW or seven hundred meters. Jill’s superpower is being a jack of all trades, and she really leans on her background in finance as she and a part-time employee manage the day to day finances at Chester MLP.
What sets Chester MLP apart from the Investor Own utilities (IOU) like Grid or Eversource is the personal service and reliability that they can provide for customers. With Jill at the helm, the team at Chester has a faster turnaround time for every service you can provide on the electric system including upgrades and outages. Jill values keeping the main focus on the customers of Chester MLP who are truly known and cared for.
In order to meet customer needs, the management of a municipal light department has become more complicated as the price of electricity continues to climb. Jill is concerned as to whether or not her older population will be able to afford the price of electricity. One thing she’s not worried about is the excellent service they are capable of providing by keeping a bare bones operation to offset the rise in prices coming from the inflated cost of power and ever-increasing cost of transmission. That’s why at the end of the day, residents should choose to live in a municipal light district where the costs will always be lower than the IOUs and the MLP will be committed to giving the best customer experience.
Jill and the team at Chester are grateful to Energy New England’s expertise in management of the power portfolio especially during these critical times of inflation. Together we can work to advocate for the end user and help the Department of Energy to see that there is a breaking point for high electricity costs. It needs to be examined whether the customer can continue to afford these prices but with leaders like Jill, the customers are always in good hands.
