This past week a small number of legislators toured the Ameren headquarters in St. Louis.
The legislature creates laws for investor-owned utilities in our state and the Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC) enforces and adjudicates those laws. The PSC is the regulatory agency that ensures these monopoly utilities operate within state law and control what rates the companies can charge their customers for electricity (and/or natural gas, water, and sewer).
Ameren Corporation is the parent company for Ameren Missouri. Ameren operates in both Missouri and Illinois, serving 2.4 million electric customers and nearly one million natural gas customers in both states. They are a Fortune 500 company, with origins back to 1902.
Ameren currently employs more than 9,000 employees across their two-state region; with employees operating generating plants, more than 7,500 circuit miles of electric transmission, and distribution for both electric and natural gas systems. In Missouri, Ameren has approximately 1.2 million electric customers and 132,000 natural gas customers, serving 500 communities across 64 counties.
While touring the corporate headquarters in St. Louis, we were allowed into the very tightly-secured transmission dispatch office where employees maintain control of the electric grid and coordinate with the interconnected neighboring utilities, under the direction of the Mid-Continent Independent System Operator (MISO), which is headquartered in Indianapolis, Ind.
We also toured the emergency operations centers which are staffed up during times of storms to oversee and coordinate the response to restore customer power as safely and quickly as possible. We asked about the last winter’s outages in Texas and how new upgrades to the distribution system will make electrical service in Missouri even more reliable during dangerous weather.