CEO’s Message – December 2025

Reflecting on the Good

It’s been a good year for Wiregrass Electric Cooperative.

I could go on and on about the challenges we face in the electric industry, but I’d rather end the year with a look back on the positive.

Let’s start with our 2025 Annual Meeting in October and the more than 4,000 members who took time to vote in the elections for board trustees and bylaw revisions. We value our members’ involvement in cooperative elections. It’s democracy in action, and one of our cooperative’s core principles is that members make decisions through a democratic process. We also appreciate that the majority of those members who participated in the election agreed with a series of bylaw revisions that allow us to modernize our communications and voting methods.

It's been a good year for reliability. We avoided big storms, and when we did have outages, our cooperative team was able to respond quickly. We remained below the state average for the number of minutes a member experiences an interruption in service. WEC also received high ratings from our members for providing reliable electric service and for restoring outages promptly.

Our cooperative’s engineering and operations teams, along with the line crews who inspect our lines and transformers, help keep our system in top shape so we can provide reliable electrical service to our members. Our partners in clearing rights of way and conducting pole inspections also help us eliminate issues that could contribute to outages.

On the affordability side, we were fortunate that our members listened to our messages about how peak demand dictates our wholesale power costs and impacts our bottom line and our members’ monthly bills. As a result, our peak demand rate for 2025 was lower than it could have been considering it was set on a day with frigid temperatures and a rare 8 inches of snow on the ground in Southeast Alabama. While not as good as it could be, our peak demand level for the year was still below our historic high.

We’re moving in the right direction when it comes to keeping our peak as low as possible. We will continue to alert members when peak demand times could occur through the end of February. We’re grateful for the action members took to reduce their electricity use during those possible peak times, and we will be even more grateful if members continue to listen and act so our 2026 demand rate can be even lower.

The cooperative had a good year financially, and we received a clean audit with every penny accounted for by our finance team. I’m proud of our accounting and billing employees. Members can rest easy knowing they handle the cooperative’s finances with integrity and accountability.

Because of how our finances have been managed, we were able to give the cooperative’s board of trustees the opportunity to retire more than $2,100,000 in capital credits and refund that amount to our members.

Prices are up on everything, but we are keeping our costs as low as possible and have become more efficient even with leaner employee numbers. We’re being strategic when it comes to purchasing, and our warehouse keeps a trained eye on our inventory.

Our communications team had a good year as well, winning seven awards of excellence in the Alabama Rural Electric Association’s annual contest. We don’t do what we do for awards, but I’m proud of how our team communicates with our members through social media posts, our website, our mobile app, the annual report, and the pages of this magazine.

I appreciate how hard our board works, and I’m grateful we’ve had a good year in safety for our employees.

Yes, overall, we had a good year. I hope our members have, too. Our doors are always open, and we want to hear from our members. We may not always agree. We may not always be able to act as members wish, but we will always listen and always be willing to provide helpful feedback as to the reasons we are doing what we are doing.

So, here’s hoping for another good year, and we hope our members have a wonderful Christmas.