Reliable electricity is essential for our future
January-February 2025
As our lives become more electrified, electric cooperatives regularly seek out new ways to keep power sources reliable.
by Laura Emery, Staff Writer
Electricity powers every facet of life, including how we live, work, learn and play. Reliable electricity is needed for our homes, businesses, schools, farms and industries. It drives our economy, enables our communications, provides health and safety for our communities, and literally powers our lives down to the phone we hold in our hands. Reliable electricity isn’t just important; it’s critical — and essential for our future.
Today, the reliability of that electricity is more important than ever due to the growing demand for power. Heat pumps, smart devices, and even our cars are being increasingly electrified. The technology we now depend on is consuming more and more electricity, like cloud storage, the internet and AI. But what is reliability? Reliability is the knowledge that when you flip the switch to turn on the lights, they’ll come on — without fail.
Reliable power is vital to the health of our economies. Robust, reliable energy generation capabilities not only help retain business but also facilitate growth through expansion and the attraction of new business. A strong business environment benefits states and local communities, including increased tax revenue and job creation. Reliable power is foundational to realizing those benefits.
After many years of flat or declining electricity demand, we are experiencing rapidly increasing load forecasts while simultaneously experiencing significant retirements of fossil fuel-based generation over the last decade.
Existing generation resources — power plants — are being retired at a rate faster than new generation resources are being constructed. This directly impacts reliability, as many generation assets taken offline in recent years have been replaced with sources, including renewables, providing less baseload capacity. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation has warned power plant retirements without replacement generation will put our nation’s grid reliability at risk.
“There is very real potential for reliability to be at risk in the near-term,” says Chris Cosby, chief operating officer of Old Dominion Electric Cooperative.
At the Reliability Technical Conference held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Oct. 16, PJM Interconnection LLC indicated that it projects a potential shortfall in generation supply by the end of this decade. “Across the PJM market, power supply itself has become synonymous with reliability. Having the appropriate generation resources to feed growing electricity demands is just as much of a concern to us as any other reliability issue there is,” says Casey Logan, president and CEO of Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative.
Electric cooperatives are continually evaluating new and emerging technologies during the transition to the “new energy economy,” exploring the best methods to meet the growing power needs of our members, all while adhering to changing environmental and regulatory provisions.
Reliability is also addressed through focusing on day-to-day tasks. NOVEC President and CEO David Schleicher says, “On a day-to-day basis, our biggest reliability challenge is weather-related trees from outside the power line right-of-way. NOVEC has a 3.5-year trimming cycle, a danger tree removal program, and is now using satellite information to improve our identification of dead or dying trees as the foundation to providing our customers with first-quartile reliability.”
New technology meeting old challenges is also happening at Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. “Our aerial drone inspections now perform a full-overhead system review cycle for the distribution grid, and we also use satellite imaging for vegetation management,” John Hewa, President and CEO of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, adds.
As always, collective success in delivering reliability depends on a commitment to ongoing collaboration and support in order to keep pace with power demands and policy shifts. Today’s energy decisions made in Washington, D.C., Richmond and Annapolis will determine whether there are enough resources to meet tomorrow’s reliability demands. We need to work together to continue to “meet the moment” in a changing, challenging environment.
Cooperatives have exciting opportunities to remain on the forefront of the energy transition, but it’s imperative that reliability remain top of mind as we strategically navigate this transition and plan to power the homes, businesses and lifestyles of the future.
Reliability is now more important than ever, as new technologies consume more power.