We take our job of providing safe, affordable, and reliable power very seriously.
Part of our mission at Today in Mississippi is educating our members about the cooperative industry and how decisions made in Washington, D.C. affect all of us back home.
We take our job of providing safe, affordable, and reliable power very seriously.
Being reliable is near and dear to our reputation.
Reliability is the centerpiece of our argument for an electric grid our members can depend on to deliver power you can afford.
We know members have concerns that the lights won’t stay on when our system is stressed.
When we look at how Washington is handling these situations, we don’t see a pretty picture. Regulations with arbitrary timelines. Technology mandates. A system increasingly out of balance: we have record electric peaks and growing electric demand, but we’re prematurely shutting down power plants. We can’t get permits to build new transmission. Bureaucrats want to breach dams and tear out baseload hydropower. And gas plants designed for peak demand are now running more and more hours every year.
We know that means higher energy costs for everyone and less firm supply, and less certainty we can get electricity when members need it.
Last fall, the people responsible for advising the U.S. government on electric reliability told us, for the first time ever, one of the biggest threats to a reliable electric grid, is bad public policy.
Bad legislation, poorly-thought-out regulation, faulty assumptions, and mandates put reliability at risk.
A great example of this flawed thinking is the power plant regulation proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency last year. I guarantee you they never thought about reliability. The EPA wants to shut down existing generation and mandate new technologies that aren’t ready for prime time.
What the EPA is asking us to do is to take a big step forward, but to do it in the dark. And this is not a time or a topic to rush. When we make these kinds of decisions, we need to know we’re on solid ground.
Things have gotten this way because the conversation about energy policy – the positions people are taking, and the decisions people are making – are disconnected from the consequences they can cause.
And we have to re-connect them.
Co-ops keep the lights on. Reliability is the most important thing to us. If legislators and regulators understand nothing more than that, then they will listen to us now, when it matters.
What’s happening in Washington affects all of us. It affects our businesses, and our communities.
Carbon capture and hydrogen fuel technologies aren’t ready enough or cheap enough to be commercial-scale environmental solutions. We’ve told the EPA not to mandate them in new rules on our industry.
But we also support that argument with real-world experience. Co-ops are global industry leaders in testing and demonstrating those very technologies. It’s not theoretical to us. We know what we’re talking about.
Leaders are listening to us.
We’re investing in innovation. When we get opportunities to move the ball – on broadband, on new technology, on storage, on demand response, and energy efficiency – electric cooperatives step up and deliver.
Our message to D.C.: if you let us do our job, we will. Don’t paint us, or regulate us, with one broad brush. Flexibility and local control are key to our success.
We’re the only ones with the political courage to ask this one tough question and answer it honestly. We’re the only ones sticking up for the people who pay the bills – you, our members. You expect us to perform this simple, but incredibly important job.
We’re the leading voice on electric reliability because cooperatives are reliable. We are trustworthy and dependable.
We serve our communities by listening to members and finding the best solutions – solutions that work – cooperatively.
It’s the best thing about who we are, what we do, and who we work for.
