News Release

Electricity and Water Use At Record Levels

June 22, 2006

The warm weather is driving the demand for electricity and water by Huntsville Utilities' customers to record summertime levels.

At 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, the hourly peak demand for electricity reached 1,063 megawatts. Demand represents the amount of electricity flowing into the system at any given moment.

The previous summertime record demand for power by HU customers was 1,034 megawatts set in July of 2005. The all-time record demand for electricity was established in January of 2003 at 1,144 megawatts.

Utility officials expect another high demand day on Thursday.

There were only three significant power outages on the system Wednesday and two of these were animal-related. A squirrel caused an outage Wednesday morning in the Whitesburg Drive/Airport Road area, and a snake caused an outage in the Winchester Road area Wednesday afternoon. The third outage was in the Meridian Street/Walker Street area and was caused by electric equipment failure.

The HU Water System came within one million gallons of a record daily demand Wednesday.

Over 66 million gallons of water were pumped from the Utilities' water plants and wells. Utility officials expect a new record will be set today if no rain falls in the Huntsville area. The record for demand for water is 67.6 million gallons set in August of 2000.