CEO’s Message – July 2025

During a trip to Washington, D.C., to attend the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s Legislative Conference earlier this year, I couldn’t help but reflect on the history and greatness of our country.

It has been 249 years since our Founding Fathers ratified the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and established the United States of America.

While visiting our nation’s capital and walking the halls of Congress, I thought about our country’s history and pondered what it means to remain independent. Our country’s independence and greatness are tied to having our own energy resources. And we need energy policies that allow our country to use these resources rather than rely on foreign sources.

The annual NRECA Legislative Conference is a time when cooperative leaders from around the country, including those from Wiregrass Electric Cooperative (WEC), gather to advocate for our members and speak with our national leaders about the issues affecting electric cooperatives and the larger electric utility world.

Those challenges include capacity costs, which relate to peak demand even on a local level.

For WEC members, one cold day out of the year sets the cooperative’s peak demand — everything flows downhill from there.

PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, our wholesale energy provider, uses the peak demand to determine what the electric cooperative should pay for wholesale power. In doing so, Power-South covers its capacity costs to meet the local demand, and WEC members have electricity even when that demand is at its highest. But what the cooperative pays for wholesale power directly impacts what members pay for their home’s electricity usage each month.

Capacity and demand are ongoing problems that every electric cooperative must face.

General managers, cooperative staff members, board members, statewide and national cooperative representatives were all on hand at the NRECA conference in April to make certain our elected officials understand how much these challenges affect local cooperatives and members.

We need realistic energy policies at the federal level, policies that allow utilities and cooperatives to provide reliable electricity to consumers and members. Energy policy should make our country more independent and reliant on our own natural resources and energy-producing capabilities, and these days, demand seems to be growing faster than capacity.

There’s so much more on our nation’s electric grid these days. Naturally, demand has increased with computer usage, cellphones, and chargers. However, the demand from large data centers and electric vehicles threatens to push current capacity to its limits. The grid has to be resilient and dependable, and reliability is not free.

Our business and the costs surrounding it are driven by policy and regulation at the federal level.

Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its power plant rule on carbon dioxide emissions for coal- and gas-fired power plants, which could have led to the early retirement of plants unable to meet the new limits. Such closures would leave our country with less energy supply at a time when demand keeps growing, and new power plants take years to permit, engineer, and build.

An analysis by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. last year showed that energy policy is one of the greatest threats to reliable and affordable power.

“Electric reliability is nonnegotiable,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told a House panel back in April. He encouraged Congress to repeal the EPA’s power plant rule and improve the federal permitting process. Reliable energy, Matheson told the House panel, is key to our national economy and the country’s energy security. He is right.

We’re hopeful that federal energy policy will be revisited in a way that is more realistic and addresses the growing demand across our great nation. Our energy independence relies on it.