Fitch Affirms Georgia Transmission's 'AA-' Pollution Control Revs, 'F1+' CP.Business Editors NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 2, 2003 Fitch Ratings Fitch Ratings An international rating agency for financial institutions, insurance companies, and corporate, sovereign, and municipal debt. Fitch Ratings has headquarters in New York and London and is wholly owned by FIMALAC of Paris. affirms the 'AA-' rating on Georgia Transmission Corporation's (GTC GTC See: Good 'til cancelled order GTC See good-till-canceled order (GTC). ) $128 million pollution control revenue bonds (Monroe, Heard, Burke and Appling Counties) and 'F1+' on GTC's $150 million commercial paper (CP) program. The CP notes are payable on parity with other unsecured obligations of GTC, and legal covenants are standard for CP transactions. The program will allow GTC to meet its short-term borrowing needs. The Rating Outlook is Stable. The ratings reflect GTC's stable financial performance and ample liquidity (cash sufficient to fund about 140 days of operations plus $233 million of available liquidity facilities), as well as GTC's overall credit profile. Financial results are lean, but compare well with those of other cooperative systems, reflecting sufficient debt service coverage and equity to capitalization. Support also comes from GTC's predictability and stability of revenues as a reliable essential electrical service Electrical service, in building wiring, refers to the wiring that connects the electric utility's cables in the street to the building. Specifically, electrical service is the wiring from the street, through the meter and up to the panelboard, but no farther. with very little business risk compared to greater competition and uncertainty associated with electricity generation. Additional support for the rating includes the member systems' 1996 reaffirmation to pay all of GTC's committed costs via joint and several take-or-pay commitments, extending through the year 2025, and the member systems solid financial position. GTC's member systems continue to benefit from their favorable revenue base (over 70% of revenues are from residential customers) and exceptionally strong annual demand and customer growth averaging 6.4% and 4.3%, respectively, over the past five years. Credit risks are limited and include potential environmental regulation and siting/right-of-way issues that could increase the cost of new transmission projects. There are also questions with respect to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the United States federal agency with jurisdiction over electricity sales, wholesale electric rates, hydroelectric licensing, natural gas pricing, and oil pipeline rates. (FERC FERC Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FERC FEMA Emergency Response Capability ) Wholesale Market Design (SMD (1) (Storage Module Device) A high-performance hard disk interface used with minis and mainframes that transfers data in the 1-4 MBytes/sec range (SMD-E provides highest rate). See hard disk. ), which deals with transmission pricing, regional planning and resource adequacy issues, and how this might impact on bulk transmission planning for GTC, as well as issues regarding the potential for FERC to receive regulatory authority over cooperative transmission systems. GTC has indicated an interest in participating in SeTrans Regional Transmission Organization  This August 2006 is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.Please help recruit one or [ improve this article] yourself. See the talk page for details. (RTO (Recovery Time Objective) The amount of time a computer system or application can stop functioning before it is considered intolerable to the enterprise. It can be computed to be from seconds to days, depending on how critical the application is to the organization. ), which consists of several southern municipal electric systems, electric cooperatives and investor owned utilities. While GTC is attempting to comply with these proposals, it is not subject to FERC regulation and can not be required to join in an RTO. GTC was incorporated in 1996 as part of a corporate restructuring in which Oglethorpe Power Corporation (OPC (1) (OpenGL Performance Characterization) A project group within GPC that manages OpenGL benchmarks. OPC endorses the Viewperf and GLperf benchmarks. Viewperf was created by IBM and OPC provides viewsets for it, which are combinations of tests using specific ) was divided into three separate operating companies - GTC, the transmission service provider, OPC, the power supplier, and Georgia System Operations Corp., the operations business. GTC's principal business is providing network transmission services for the members' power purchases. GTC is entirely owned by its 39 cooperative members and OPC, and operates on a not-for-profit basis. |
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