I attended the Annual Meeting and conferences sponsored by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) in early March. It gave me opportunities to learn about employee retention and recruitment, good governance, pending legislation and the Inflation Reduction Act. These are all important topics, but energy reliability and resiliency were the most pertinent topics. 

Each year your cooperative creates a plan of work to provide safe and reliable electric service and maintain the financial integrity of the cooperative. Achieving the goal of safe and reliable electric service requires a large cooperative family working together. Our cooperative family each has different roles, but all are necessary for us to be truly successful. 

For most of us, providing reliable electric service means maintaining our system to withstand the forces of nature. We are doing just that by investing more than $6 million annually in new facilities and the replacement of older overhead power lines.

Your cooperative has about 1,500 miles of overhead lines that we intend to rebuild over the next 20-plus years. This is a needed investment to maintain reliability and to be able to deliver more electric power to our members.

No matter how well Central Electric maintains the local distribution system, our members would not have electric service if the power wasn’t generated and delivered to us. East River Electric Power Cooperative of Madison delivers our power. They build and maintain the electric transmission system and substations that support the electric cooperatives in eastern South Dakota and southwest Minnesota.

Central Electric is represented on the East River Board by board member Duane Wolbrink. East River Electric’s 2023 plan of work includes a $78 million investment in new facilities and improvements. The goal is also to maintain high reliability and increase the capacity of the electric system.

The third member of our cooperative family is Basin Electric Power Cooperative from Bismarck, ND. Basin Electric owns generation and transmission assets to create and deliver electric power to 131 electric cooperatives across nine states. Every year, Basin surveys the members and monitors trends to forecast what is needed for generation and transmission assets in the next ten years. They invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually in their fleet of generators and transmission lines. Central Electric is represented on the Basin Electric Board by an East River Electric board member.

Other members of the family include the South Dakota Rural Electric Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. Each organization provides training to board members and employees and supports safety programs. These organizations also monitor and introduce legislation to protect your cooperative and keep electric rates affordable.

Despite the millions of dollars invested to provide reliable electric service, your average cost of energy per kilowatt hour is well below the national average. If you were to break down how our dollars are spent, about 70 cents of each dollar pays for generating and delivering electric power, and the remaining 30 cents is used to operate the cooperative. 

You can easily see that there is a lot of work behind the scenes to provide reliable and affordable electric power at the flip of a switch. Inflation, higher interest rates and material delays are ongoing challenges. We will continue working together with our cooperative partners to overcome these challenges. 

Until next month, stay safe!