Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Kit Konolige - Soleil Securities.
Kit Konolige - Soleil Securities
I wanted to just focus for a second on your discussion of the more or less offsetting sales earnings effect, where you sold last year service territory and more in to MISO and you came out of ahead. That sounds like a pretty good deal, I mean is there a way that you can work that so that’s a permanent condition or how should we think of that going forward.
Rich Marsh
With respect to the first quarter, lower industrial sales meant that we had lower fuel cost and since their contracts rolled off at December 31, ’08 they paid higher price and we had lower fuel cost. That would be nice to continue, but the auction will determine that beginning May 13.
Kit Konolige - Soleil Securities
Is the auction going to have a separate pricing mechanism for industrial or different class of customers?
Anthony Alexander
That I would be a slice of the system?
Kit Konolige - Soleil Securities
But the auction won’t affect your fuel cost?
Harvey Wagner
Well, the auction will affect it to the extend that it effects our dispatch strategy for the generating units.
Kit Konolige - Soleil Securities
Right, so in other words I shouldn’t really take much from that. In the first quarter you had some extra megawatt-hours to sell, you sold them, that were a good deal. The industrials are paying demand charges, not energy charges and it comes out slightly ahead, but that is effectively over written in the new regime once the auction is conducted?
Harvey Wagner
Yes.
Anthony Alexander
But also in the first quarter we really had a strong performance of the entire fleet. It wasn’t a lot of scheduled outages and the units ran strong for us that with the kind of performance that we’ve seen over the last several years. So, there were a lot of positives moving through this timeframe.
Obviously, the colder weather help to offset some of that to as customers moved into higher pricing brackets in their own tariffs.
Kit Konolige - Soleil Securities
You will have more outages for work this year; I think it you talked about presumably that will be in the second quarter and fourth quarter primarily?
Anthony Alexander
Well, we’ve got three new clear outages scheduled this year. We’re in the process now closing down one. We are in the middle of a second one and we have a third one coming up later this year. We also took an outage at one of our plants that was not scheduled well actually it became scheduled during what would be the second quarter.
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