Finding Good Answers
Branko Terzic is a managing director at Berkeley Research Group, and a nonresident senior fellow of Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. He served as a commissioner at FERC and on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. He also served as CEO of Yankee Energy System, Inc.
America’s electric cooperatives are frequently overlooked when it comes to debates about the future of electric policy. However, the nation’s eight hundred and sixty-four electric distribution cooperatives serve twelve percent of electric consumers and deliver ten percent of the nation’s electric energy.
To provide this service they have built forty-two percent of the nation’s electric distribution lines, which cover seventy-five percent of the country’s geography. Their responsibility is to deliver adequate, reliable and reasonably priced electric service to their members, who are geographically widely dispersed. No easy task.
Thus, they face the same investment and management issues as the municipal and investor-owned electric utilities operating in the rest of the U.S. Recently, I spoke to attendees at a state electric cooperative association annual meeting.
My comments mostly covered the usual topics of interest to electric utility audiences.