We, The Power

Well, the snow is gone mostly and everyone is getting out and about. Today was a big day—the Electric Co-op Annual Meeting was held at the new high school. I’ve never been to an Annual meeting of a co-op. In fact, I didn’t know that much about co-op’s until I moved to more rural places.

A co-op is a member owned organization. Yes, we the people who use and pay for the electricity actually own the company. What a concept. So of course we are interested in what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and how much money they will be using.

There were around 750 of us—509 members and some guests. We listened to the talented teen singers, took a tour of the biomass boiler that is now saving the school $100,000 a year in heating costs, ate great rolls provided by a local baker and filled the gym to find out how we’re doing.

For a rural place, we are quite progressive. Take the biomass boiler for example. The boiler uses scrap wood that comes from cleaning the forest. The same wood that becomes a huge fuel issue when the forest catches on fire. Dead trees, buggy trees and the like are chipped and hauled to the school where they become feed for the boiler. The fire burns so hot that it leaves minimal ash and little particulate matter so with filtering it is a very a clean burn.

The total project cost was around $500,000 so with a $240,000 ‘Fuels to Schools’ grant the school saved a big chunk of change. One passionate bystander let us know that even with the use of 45 tons of fuel a year, the school would only be keeping 15-20 acres clean. So, we need more schools in the mountains to get their biomass generator projects going…there’s still grant money I’ve been told.

The rest of the meeting was also interesting. We are aggressively pursuing alternative energy sources in our mountains. The Co-op just put up the first net-metering project for someone who built a solar panel array on his house. Now he’s selling electricity back to the company. Wow. The last small town where we even talked about net metering we were darn near run out of town. “We will never put electricity back on the wire!” they said, somewhat heatedly.

It’s nice to live in a place that is not only beautiful, but smart too.