CEO’s Message – May 2025

A Complex Job

Each month, this page includes a group of people from all over Wiregrass Electric Cooperative’s (WEC) service territory. They are WEC’s Board of Trustees, and they represent you, the members.

They live in your communities, elected by members to represent 9 geographical areas within the service territory.

In the month of May, my senior staff and I along with the board will have a strategic planning session. We will meet to fine-tune the vision of our cooperative. We will discuss the best path to maintaining a reliable electric distribution system with the goal of keeping it affordable for our members. And, of course, we want to do this with the safety of our employees and members at the forefront.

Board members help guide what plan best fits the cooperative’s mission, strategic vision, and overall direction. It is not an easy task, and the challenges facing electric cooperatives can be daunting.

Our board members take their responsibility seriously and must keep abreast of the complexities of the electric utility world so they will have the necessary wisdom to think strategically on cooperative matters.

Wholesale electricity demand keeps increasing, and existing power plants won’t have enough capacity to meet that demand in a few years. WEC’s wholesale provider, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative in Andalusia, is planning to construct a 400-plus MW generating facility that is scheduled to be online by 2030 to meet the capacity shortage it expects. As a member of Power-South, we have to pay our share of the cost of that construction. Reliability, after all, does have a cost.

We are very blessed to have a board that understands the magnitude of its responsibility. They listen intently to our recommended options and work collaboratively with me and our senior staff for the benefit of the collective membership. The cooperative doesn’t have unlimited funds, and it is a constant battle to keep electric service reliable and rates affordable. Efforts to achieve affordability are often at odds with efforts to achieve reliability, and cooperatives have little to no control over some of the factors that impact both.

I believe that as a cooperative, WEC is doing an excellent job when it comes to reliability and affordability. WEC is competitive on costs for end users despite having 1 of the highest wholesale power costs in the region due to our poor load factor and high residential load.

We’re working to lower our costs while maintaining members services. We’ve introduced innovative technologies to be more efficient. Our employees are highly trained, work hard and are motivated to serve our members.

With the support of our board of trustees, we’ve implemented a rate restructuring designed to address rising costs associated with demand. We put the power in our members’ hands so they have some measure of control to lower their own costs by reducing their usage during peak demand times. As a member-owned cooperative, we believe a demand rate is a fair structure to cover rising capacity costs. I certainly appreciate our board’s ability to understand that it was the right thing to do.

We developed strategic partnerships with companies that provide services in information technology, billing, communications, rights of way, and, most recently, with Alabama ONE Credit Union. These partnerships help us maintain services for our members while providing new member services and making it easier for members to do business with us.

The board of trustees collaborate with me and our senior staff to do what is right for the collective membership. Rest assured, decisions are not made lightly and are based on facts and come from the desire to help all members. We understand everyone may not agree with our decisions.

If you have questions or concerns about a decision or direction the cooperative is taking, feel free to reach out to anyone in our office. We have a wonderful member services team and wonderful senior staff. Call us, reach out to us. And, of course, my door is always open. We’ll be happy to explain the reasons for any decisions or direction taken.

At the end of the day, we’re blessed and humbled to be able to serve our members, and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. We’re also blessed to have our board. They do an excellent job, and I appreciate them and their efforts to help us stay on course and look out for you, the members of Wiregrass Electric Cooperative.