Washington Electric Cooperative

Source: Energy Digital

Date :9/17/2007 7:00:40 AM

Rural Power Player

Cooperatives such as Vermont’s Washington Electric Cooperative are more prevalent than most people realize, and often leading the way toward green electricity

Written by James Buchanan & Produced by Melissa Abbott

On September 4, 1882, the first electric utility fired up its generator — creating enough power for approximately 85 customers in lower Manhattan. Within a couple decades after that, electricity had found its way into homes throughout the United States.

However, while it was relatively easy and economically feasible to connect large urban areas to the budding power grid, rural areas had to wait until the mid 1930s when the federal government, under President Franklin Roosevelt, created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA).

As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935, the REA soon began to lend money and help create the infrastructure for a number of rural electric cooperatives, which would act as utilities for defined rural areas.

Today, 75 percent of the country’s landmass is provided electricity by more than 900 rural electric cooperatives. In all, these utilities represent a huge success, even as they have faced a number of challenges — which includes finding affordable and consistent supplies of electricity for their members.

For Washington Electric Cooperative (WEC), which provides electricity for approximately 10,000 members in north central Vermont, its location has somewhat exacerbated those challenges.

According to Avram Patt, general manager for WEC, “We’re an electric utility that’s a rural electric cooperative, and in that sense we are very much like the thousand or so other cooperatives around the country that serve rural communities. We were founded in the 1930s to provide electricity to rural communities that were economically difficult to serve, as far as the number of meters per mile, and with fairly rugged terrain.”

In fact, the WEC is considered the most rural utility in Vermont, already a very rural state, with only eight meters per mile. This means that the cooperatives spending on infrastructure is spread among a fairly small population, which puts a premium on finding affordable sources for electricity.

Most of the cooperatives around the country have joined together to form second tier cooperatives, says Patt, which are called generation and transmission cooperatives. This means that electricity is generated or purchased in bulk for all of the members of these larger cooperatives and distributed on a share basis. Therefore, most rural electric cooperatives don’t have to deal with finding or generating their own power supply.

In the case of WEC, things are a little different because there are not enough cooperatives in Vermont to support a second tier generating and transmission cooperative.

The WEC must find and purchase its electricity independently from what Patt describes as an a-la-carte menu of sources.

The cooperative’s primary source of electricity is its landfill gas plant, which burns methane gas created as the materials in the landfill decompose.

The cooperative’s next supplier is Hydro Quebec, which is a large provincial utility based in Canada. According to Patt, the WEC is part of a contract between a number of utilities with Hydro Quebec, and receives electricity commensurate with its financial participation in the contract.

The WEC also owns and operates its own small hydro generating plant located on the north branch of the Winooski River.

Lastly, the WEC receives electricity from a number of small renewable generation sources such as hydro and woodchip burning plants. The electricity created by these sources is pooled, says Patt, and each utility purchases a share.

As to the overall carbon footprint or environmental impacts of the cooperative’s power supply, Patt says, “We have no contracts with any fossil fuel burning source or nuclear plant. The landfill methane plant, though, is a combustion process.

“The burning of methane is a source of carbon dioxide, but our plant is considered carbon neutral because the methane at the landfill would have to be flared off anyway — methane is about 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide — so we are burning it instead to produce electricity,” he says.

The low environmental footprint of the WEC’s electric generating sources is also what Patt says is unique about the cooperative.

By policy of the board of directors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the organization began to look at energy generation and what it means to be an electric utility in a different way than most, he says.

In particular, WEC’s board decided to place a heavy focus on energy efficiency and conservation. To this end, the organization targeted and developed incentives for its business and residential members to use much less electricity.

By encouraging members to take a long look at how they used electricity and the ways to decrease usage, WEC’s members now average approximately 500 to 600 kilowatt hours per month. The national average is twice that amount, says Patt.

“We really did that at a time when the benefits from a utility’s point of view — getting people to use less — were not really embraced by many utilities,” says Patt.

What WEC found, though, is that conservation and increased efficiency are a much better way for a utility to spend its money as these measures led to a strengthening of the WEC’s financial position.

The initial success of the program has now led to the next generation of efficiency and conservation efforts at the cooperative.

“We want to get the members to participate at a much higher rate,” says Patt.

By way of example, Patt says the cooperative could see reduced usage and increased efficiency if its members do two simple things — replace older filament light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs, and replace older (10 years or more) refrigerators with newer, more energy efficient refrigerators.

“It literally makes sense to throw these out,” he says. This is because the new refrigerators are far more efficient, so selling an old one to a neighbor or keeping it to cool beer and apples in the basement doesn’t make good electric sense.

“These are the types of things that people can do, but beyond that we want our members to really look at what opportunities they have to save on their energy usage,” says Patt.

On the generation side, the cooperative has sought cleaner generators and projects that are closer to home. In fact, WEC was able to end its contract with Vermont Yankee — a nuclear power plant on the Vermont/Massachusetts border — and replace it with the landfill methane gas plant at a lower cost.

Of course, rates are perhaps where the rubber hits the road as far as the customers of any utility are concerned. In that regard, says Patt, WEC has had some of the highest rates in the state, which is primarily the result of also being the most rural utility in the state — fewer people paying for more infrastructure running over hill and dale.

On the other hand, the cooperative has not had a rate increase since 2000, and Patt says he doesn’t expect to have one for another five years.

“[For] any utility that is exposed to the spot market for electricity, the trend is to always go up,” says Patt. “And utilities highly exposed to short-term prices are very exposed to a great deal of price volatility. We took out that volatility in part by building the landfill project.”

Looking to the future, Patt says, “We have made a lot of progress, but we want to do more for a predictable and secure power supply. We still need to lock in a few more local sources.”

The cooperative is also looking for new technologies that could help it and its members be even more efficient and aware of their energy usage. One of the leading prospects, he says, is smart metering, which enables members to monitor their electric usage in real-time.