This year the theme for National Co-op Month is “Co-ops Grow for the Communities They Serve.” 

Reflecting on this, I started thinking of all the ways our co-op, and the industry as a whole, has grown and changed since I began my career in the electrical field 30 years ago and I wanted to share some of my memories and experiences with you.

Climbing poles was a huge part of line work and my first assignment was working on a maintenance crew out of a pick-up. We climbed poles to change out or hang transformers and the line workers on the ground raised and lowered them with hand crank rope winches attached to the bed of a pick-up. It was strenuous work, and every aspect of the job took a toll on your body.  

Meters were mechanical, and our meter readers went out to read every meter on the system monthly for billing. When we switched to the first generation of AMR (Automated Meter Reading) it was a huge step forward in technology. However, it still had issues that we dealt with often and we still needed to read our three-phase meters manually. Now we have AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) which gives us real time data, reports and restores outages, and even records blinks on the service.
The first time that I was on call for after hour outages, I carried a two-way radio that was patched to our phone system and I took the calls for every outage that came through our system. We didn’t have google maps or navigation systems, we had to rely on our paper maps and knowledge of the area to find the members’ homes that were out of power. We then moved on to pagers and a dispatch service, yet you couldn’t stray far from home because you only had landline phones to respond to the dispatcher. However, this was still a huge upgrade as taking all the outage calls made it tough to focus on getting the power on, and a pager and dispatcher simplified the restoration process for the line crew.  

Then, cell phones were introduced into the market, some of the first electronic mapping systems, small bucket trucks, track vehicles, outage management systems, vehicle GPS, battery operated tools, and the list goes on and on. Today, we know that an outage occurs prior to the member calling and we also know when it is restored before the line crew report back to us that the power is on.  

Now we are seeing renewable power, electric vehicles and high efficiency appliances as standard items within our service territory. In the past 10 years there has been a huge change in how we construct, maintain and deliver power to our membership with minimal increases in rates to the members over that time frame. 
What will we see in the next 10 years?  

Click here to read more about our Cooperative History in the October 2023 issue of Energy Lifestyles Magazine.