HAGERSTOWN – Hagerstown Mayor and Council had a work session on Tuesday afternoon where electricity was a pretty big topic of conversation. 
It looks like the rates are going up again. 
The increase will be a little more than 11 cents per kilowatt hour. 
Hagerstown Mayor Bill McIntire said, “About 30 to 35 years ago, Hagerstown generated our own power. We don’t anymore. It wasn’t cost feasible. But now, gosh, the war on coal energy, trying to go towards green energy is costing a little bit, so now we have to go out of state and it’s basically just like in my business, it’s the lowest bidder is who we’re going to try and figure out who we can buy electricity from.”
Maryland doesn’t produce any electricity in the state. 
McIntire said, “It was a big push to put people in office that were on the green energy train. Now we’re here, and now people are seeing the cost of their electricity, because now we have, as Marylanders, we have to buy it out of state. And it costs.” 
Allison Trobaugh of News Talk 103.7FM pointed out, “I think that this should be a lesson learned, that it matters who you vote for, because these things cost you a lot of time and finances down the road.”
Hagerstown Mayor and Council also talked about solar panels and battery storage sites. 
McIntire said, “First off, you’re looking for acreage with solar panels. The good thing about the battery, there was one that’s on Frederick Street that was right near ConAgra a few years ago. I forget how many, maybe seven or eight years ago, I got a call that they were setting up a battery there, and I got a call to go fix their little control room, because it had air conditioning in it and it couldn’t operate without me fixing it. So I did. So I had the guy show me how this thing works, and it basically stores energy and tries to shave off peak hours. So whatever your peak hours are, this battery would serve during that time and lower that rate. So late last night, Nathan Fridinger said it would lower that 11 cents that we were talking about, it would lower to about five, a little over five cents, it would cut it in half. The way I understood it, the difference between the solar and the battery solar, if you just say, you pick a solar field, if it’s not close to a substation, you’ve got to be able to get that power to that substation. These batteries, you can set them up right at the substation.”
The mayor was in Annapolis last week. 
He said, “I got to go and sit in on a House voting session. It was the Maryland Mayors Association. So all the mayors, most of the mayors across the state that is involved in MML, were there for a conference. I got to sit in on a House vote, and we got introduced in front of all the House at one time. The next day was classes, just different things, learning about things you can do for the city. And then we had dinner at the governor’s house on that night.”
The Republican Central Committee in Washington County has a meeting coming up to determine what will be done with the vacant Count Commission seat since Derek Harvey resigned. 
McIntire said, “We’ll have that conversation over the next two weeks. The central committee put out an ask for applications for that position, there are applications that have come in. So we’ll start discussing those.”
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