Blue Grass
Energy
Hi-Tech Partnership
February 1997
The Jessamine
County Public Schools, south of Lexington, are taking advantage of
the most state-of-the-art uses of electronic technology thanks to a
partnership with Blue Grass Rural Electric Cooperative Corp.
The
Nicholasville-based co-op helped the school system connect its eight
schools and central offices with fiber optics, which are glass
cables that can carry much more information than regular copper
wire. The fiber-optic connections are allowing the schools to use
electronic mail and to participate in video conferences that can’t
be carried by regular phone lines.
“There are not
many school systems in the state, or even the country, that have
this kind of fiber-optic network in place,” says Bill Weigle, a
teacher who has been spending a lot of time lately helping install
the school system’s electronic network. “I can’t say enough
about Blue Grass RECC. This has been a wonderful partnership.”
The project began
when the Jessamine County school system was looking for ways to save
money on a special, high-powered phone line that would connect them
to the Internet, the worldwide network of computers linked through
phone lines. Weigle says they reasoned that it would be more
economical to connect the schools together and use one phone line
for all, rather than paying for a high-capacity phone line to each
school. Their research led them to Blue Grass Co-op, which offered
to do the work of hanging the fiber-optic cables on the utility
poles.
“This was
certainly good for the schools,” says Dan Brewer, president and
chief executive officer of Blue Grass. “And it’s good experience
for us, too.”
Brewer says that
Blue Grass, the customer-owned utility that serves more than 19,000
consumers in six counties in central Kentucky, is anticipating that
fiber optics will be used more and more as technology advances. He
says the Jessamine County project will help give the co-op expertise
in that area.
“Fiber optics
is fairly new technology in the electric utility business,” says
Brewer. “This work with the Jessamine County schools helps us get
up to our elbows in the experience of using fiber optics.”
And now the
Jessamine County schools are even returning the favor to Blue Grass
by using their computer network to develop a World Wide Web “home
page” on the Internet for the co-op.-Paul Wesslund |
