January 2025
Metering System Replacement
I hope all of you had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! As we begin the New Year, I would like to take this time to briefly reflect on the year 2024 and summarize your Cooperative’s plans for the year 2025.
In 2024, your Cooperative experienced more significant storms and storm damage than normal. Very high winds and multiple tornadoes moved thru the service territory on April 2nd causing 4,200 outages and again on May 26th resulting in 9,000 outages. Your Cooperative employees did an outstanding job in restoring service during these significant storms.
In 2024, the Cooperative continued the necessary investments in the distribution system in order to provide members with a reliable electric supply. Some of the investments included testing poles, treating poles, replacing degraded poles, rebuilding aging infrastructure and trimming/clearing in the vegetation management program. In fact, the Cooperative completed trimming and clearing of vegetation in the Cadle, Lake of Egypt, Minerva, Ramsey, Ridgway, Saline River, Shell, and Shetlerville substations. As we have certainly experienced in the past with storms, a sound vegetation management program is crucial to your Cooperative’s ability to reduce risks and outages associated with major weather events and to maintain a reliable electric supply for members.
In summary, the Cooperative expects to end the year 2024 in sound financial condition and deliver over 739 million kilowatt-hours to all of you as Cooperative members. In addition, last month your Cooperative announced the retirement and return of $1.68 million of Capital Credits to the members. The capital credits that were returned were from the years 1986, 2019 and 2020. Over the past 15 years, your Cooperative has retired and returned approximately $27.3 million to Cooperative members.
In 2025, your Cooperative will continue to make the necessary investments in the distribution facilities that serve your energy by rebuilding aging infrastructure, replacing degraded poles and performing other maintenance activities including pole testing, regulator maintenance, breaker maintenance and sectionalizing in order to help ensure a safe and reliable electric supply. In fact, the maintenance work will begin in early January with the testing and treatment of approximately 8,000 poles. The Cooperative will also continue to make significant investments in the vegetation management program that is crucial to the reliability of service that you receive. Cooperative members will receive more details regarding the 2025 vegetation management program in next month’s article.
In addition, your Cooperative plans to begin the process of deploying a new advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system in 2025 and complete the installation in the first part of 2026. The former AMI system was expected to last approximately 15 years but your Cooperative extended the life to 20 years but it’s time to be replaced. The new AMI system will provide many enhanced capabilities including, but not limited to, two-way communications, outage detection, power quality monitoring, remote service connect/disconnect, etc. The new AMI system will also allow for advanced retail rate design options such as off-peak rates, time-of-use rates, etc.
Currently, your Cooperative does not foresee the need to implement a retail rate increase in 2025. However, there will be some increases in the wholesale power cost adjustment charge. Your Cooperative’s wholesale power supplier, Southern Illinois Power Cooperative (SIPC), purchases the coal locally that is used to generate electricity at the Marion plant. In 2022, SIPC’s former coal contracts were expiring and SIPC had to purchase some additional coal contracts that were at higher prices. As we move into 2025, SIPC will be consuming coal at a price that is higher than in previous years and that will be reflected in the wholesale power cost adjustment charge. In addition, SIPC is dealing with inflationary impacts in other areas just like almost every other industry. Your Cooperative will continue to work diligently to improve and enhance the level of service and reliability that you receive. On behalf of the Trustees and all employees, we want you to know that your Cooperative is committed to providing reliable and quality service while keeping rates affordable. We thank you for the opportunity to serve you.
See you next month and as always, “We’ll keep the lights on for you.”
