By Rick Lemonds, president & CEO of South Central Power Company
When I reflect back on the past year, I can’t help but think about the progress we’ve made on behalf of our members, but also the challenges we faced.
After a relatively mild weather start to the year, a series of windstorms tested our cooperative’s system and response. Some of these spring storms included tornadoes and straight-line winds of up to 70 mph. We responded with 24/7 outage restoration work, including all of our own available employees, outside contractors, and at times employees from other neighboring utilities. These events underscore our need to invest in our workforce as well as self-healing grid technology and upgraded, hardened transmission and distribution lines. We continue to make these investments for you, and when the next weather event rolls into our part of Ohio, we will be ready to respond.
We also heard from many of you during our spring member meetings — the first time we’ve been able to host five of these regional meetings since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It was great to be out in our communities and hear from you about the topics that matter to you the most. One topic that really stood out at our 2023 member meetings was the tremendous interest in getting fiber internet into communities that currently are unserved or underserved when it comes to high-speed internet access. The good news is we are making progress on building our fiber network and plan to connect our first members in the far east and far west areas of our service territory by the summer of 2024. We are also excited about the benefits the fiber network will bring to all our members: a smarter grid, fewer and shorter outages, enhanced abilities to monitor our system, and more.
2023 was also a year of tremendous involvement in our communities. We enjoyed being a part of so many activities, like economic development projects, volunteering, fairs and safety demonstrations, and more. Our Foundation is also on track to have contributed back more than $500,000 to local community organizations in grant awards, including $100,000 in scholarships to high school seniors this year.
In addition to the weather challenges we faced, we continued to grapple with a national trend of the rising cost of power, particularly in the transmission costs we must pay to other utilities that deliver your power to the cooperative’s substations. Other costs are rising, as well. Two of the key drivers of our business strategy focus on our finances and our commitment to sound financial stewardship of your cooperative, as well as our efforts to continuously improve our business processes. While we passed along cost increases to our members this year, which included a rate increase of about 3% for the average member, our focus is on keeping costs as low as possible. But, as our costs have continued to increase these past couple of years, these costs are unfortunately passed on to you, our members.
I know it’s hard for you as a member to stay informed about everything we are doing as a cooperative. If you are reading this, thank you for being an engaged member and taking the time to learn more about us. In 2023, we also launched a new, redesigned website, which provides an enhanced variety of self-service options as well as lots of information on the topics listed in this column, and more.
Thank you for being a South Central Power member, and I look forward to sharing more with you in 2024 about the business and the communities we serve.
From the December 2023 issue of Ohio Cooperative Living.