It appears that the city of Covington will not have the opportunity to purchase excess power from Marietta as the other city has rethought its offer to sell some of its reserve capacity.

According to a December memo to the mayor and council from Covington Utility Director Bill Meecham, the city's plan to acquire 15 megawatts of base load capacity from Marietta, a Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia member, has fallen through since Marietta rethought its future power needs.

As a member of MEAG, Covington would have taken part in the negotiations along with other MEAG cities.

 Instead Covington will purchase 25.369 MW from the city of LaGrange. The purchased power will include the capacity needed for 2008 plus an additional federally mandated 15 percent over that amount in reserves.

LaGrange is selling the power at $22.05 per kilowatt for a total cost of $559,386.

The city of Covington approved the purchase of this capacity at their Dec. 17 meeting.

In other city power news:

An agreement for the purchase of 20 MW of peaking power through MEAG was scaled back to only 15 MW as the result of MEAG receiving a smaller amount of subscription requests from its participant utilities, therefore requiring the electric authority to purchase 150 MW instead of the planned 300 MW.

The cost of the peaking power was increased slightly in light of the smaller power purchase by MEAG. The cost increased by 15 cents per KW per month according to the memo. The annual cost of this peaking power is $686,052.