CEO’s Message – August 2026

Honey and wine

There’s an old agricultural proverb: “When it rains in August, it rains honey and wine.”

The European proverb refers to the blooming of flowers to feed honeybees and the harvest of grapes to make wine. In other words, nourishing rains in August lead to a good harvest — honey and wine.

It’s a delicate balance. You need the right amount of rain at the right time, especially in the weeks before harvest begins. Too much rain too late in the month, and your grapes swell with excess water, diluting the flavor and causing them to split.

For Wiregrass peanut farmers, too much rain at the wrong time leaves the soil waterlogged and puts the peanut crop at risk for disease in the warm, wet conditions.

This time of year, we’re all trying to stay cool, and the outdoor temperatures force our air conditioners to work much harder to cool the indoors. It’s another balancing act to set your thermostat at a temperature that does not require your unit to work harder than necessary but also keeps your home pleasant.

We here at Wiregrass Electric Cooperative understand balancing all too well. Our employees work hard year-round to balance the cooperative’s goal of providing reliable service at an affordable rate for our members. I have spoken about this at civic meetings and even the cooperative’s annual meeting — which will be held this year on Oct. 16.

We’ve dropped the monthly energy charge on members’ meter readings by 15% since 2024, as we adjusted our rate structure to reflect the increased role that demand plays on wholesale power costs. Our hope is that while the demand rate our members pay each month is set on the coldest day of the year and can be controlled by reducing energy consumption, a lower energy charge can also make life more bearable during the summer months — balancing out the two rates for members who take steps to control their consumption during peak.

The demand rate structure gives us more control over wholesale power costs, which have continued to climb. Our wholesale provider, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, uses our system’s coincidental peak demand to determine how much the cooperative will pay for the capacity required to serve our members. But for two years now our peak has been lower than what it would have been had members not responded to our peak alerts and changed their behavior during those peak times.

And the rate structure recovers more from those who don’t reduce their energy consumption during the system’s peak.

Peak demand usually happens on the coldest day of the year between the hours of 6 and 9 a.m. from November to February. The peak for the current rate year, which resets in March, was set back in January.

Wiregrass Electric is now as low as we’ve ever been, comparatively speaking, under PowerSouth’s system when it comes to peak demand. While system growth and new members may dictate the need for more capacity from PowerSouth, managing peak demand through our rate structure keeps our wholesale power costs as low as possible.

We’ve managed to balance increased power costs with our lower peak demand and by reducing local expenses. A recent cost-of-service study indicates our rate structure is working and should allow our rates to remain stable for the next year.

It’s hard to know how long that delicate balance will last. We can’t predict the future, not even a few months out.

Data centers, for example, require a lot of capacity — most in the range of 600 to 1,000 megawatts. And while a data center in the cooperative’s service area would help balance our heavily residential load and benefit local communities with tax revenue, we must ensure such a center pays for its own capacity.

We will work closely with our wholesale provider to make sure capacity is there if the day comes when a data center looks at the Wiregrass. We will not put the burden of such costs on the rest of our members.

Data centers can bring a lot of good with them, but we have to balance that with the overall costs and what is best for all of our members. Done right, we can all benefit.

Like rain in August, it’s all about the right balance.