Welcome to PowerXchange. On behalf of the NRECA Board of Directors and our entire team at NRECA, I want to tell you how glad I am you’re here. Electric cooperatives understand the importance and the significance of coming together. It’s our calling card: building consensus, trading ideas and learning.
This is where we communicate. This is where we collaborate. This is where we set the table for our collective success. Today in the U.S., there is no doubt in my mind that energy is on the table. Energy is at the center of the table. And electric cooperatives are seated at the head of the table. I’m here to tell you this is an important conversation to be part of, because it’s a table where some important decisions are going to be made.
For nearly three years, we’ve carried a simple, unassailable message about the importance of electric reliability. We know bad policy has created some bad circumstances for the electric industry and real concerns about the future. Curtailment orders are real. Some of your co-ops have gotten them. Shortfalls in electricity supply are a real risk. We haven’t planned for the growth in our economy and increases in electric demand the way we should have.
That was our main message to the Biden Administration, and it’s been our main message to the Trump Administration. For people who need to hear it most, we’ve connected the dots between economic growth and reliable, affordable and always-available electricity. The ironclad relationship between electricity and opportunity is something your cooperatives demonstrate every single day.
Let me talk about some places I’ve been in the last few weeks:
- Welcoming the new Secretary of Agriculture to her first day at USDA and making sure she knows RUS is a vital source of partnership for electric cooperatives.
- Meeting with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and the chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, Jason Smith – two crucial congressional leaders with significant connections to electric co-ops.
- Sitting down with Lee Zeldin, the new EPA Administrator, to talk about undoing the many harmful regulations from the previous administration, especially the onerous power plant rule.
- Orienting new leadership at the Department of Energy to our priorities: resilience, cybersecurity, wildfire mitigation and energy technology.
- Working one-on-one with leaders like Kentucky congressman Brett Guthrie, new Chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee.
We’ve done some great work. But the people in this room know the reward for good work is more work. Now, we’ve got more important work to do. We’re at the table. We have the relationships. We’re leaders because we know what it takes to bring power to the places America depends on for its strength.
Rural America may have been the last mile in the electrification of this country, but it is the next mile on the road to the bright future ahead of us.
For electric co-operatives, that future began just 90 minutes down the road from here, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt built the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. in 1932.
FDR was in his last year as governor of New York before becoming president in 1933. He’d been coming to Warm Springs for years to treat his polio when he decided to build a residence. Think of it like a rural Mar-a-Lago – I guess presidents have been coming south from New York for a while now.
It was in Warm Springs — against the backdrop of the Great Depression — where Roosevelt said he understood the plight of rural communities. It was at the Little White House where he conceived of the Rural Electrification Administration, the REA. Like our parents and grandparents, FDR personally understood that link between electricity and opportunity.
Roosevelt “buried the kerosene lamp” at Warm Springs. Like many rural communities that celebrated electrification, in Warm Springs they dug a hole in the ground, laid a kerosene lantern in it, and filled it up with dirt. They put their entire life before electricity in its final resting place.
It was a powerful ritual in rural America. It showed our commitment to an electric future full of new opportunities. Electric lights, radio, farm machinery and running water were just the beginning.
Rural electrification made important outcomes possible — quality of life, economic opportunity, stronger communities, education, information and family. We still associate those outcomes with the work we do today.
Roosevelt was determined to “bury the lamp” simply because he knew the possibilities of a life with electricity were richer than a life without it. He had a vision. He chose power. He became a champion.
Most importantly, he knew what we could do. He saw resilient men and women, forged by the experience of life in rural places, who could take on tough tasks. Who possessed the self-reliance, the grit, the ability to work together, to pursue an ambitious goal and then make it happen.
And you know what – those attributes still ring true in rural America. Among the seven cooperative principles, two of them have always been special to us — autonomy and independence and cooperation among cooperatives.
The goal of rural electrification was to leverage the cooperative business model for electricity. To invest in the futures of resilient, rural communities, with their vast resources, and resilient, rural people, with our vast resourcefulness. To invest in the potential of the people we call neighbors and the places we call home.
Our unique kind of leadership inspires me … you, too … but each of us has a different reason we’re inspired to serve our rural communities.
My great grandparents, David and Sarah Matheson faced tough choices. They came to the U.S. from Scotland, crossed the continent and settled in the small rural town of Parowan, Utah.
You’ve seen pictures of the covered wagon trains moving west across the plains? Well, David and Sarah walked. They pulled their worldly belongings across the plains in hand carts.
My great grandfather had lost his sight from a bout with scarlet fever. The folks in Parowan provided a job to him as the janitor in the schoolhouse. Since he couldn’t see, his kids would come to the school to shovel coal into the boiler in the winter and clean the school throughout the year.
David and Sarah had a family of 13 children, and, as was common in rural America, they paired each of the kids closest in age — so one worked on the farm for a year while the other went to school. The next year, they’d switch who went to school and who worked the farm.
My grandfather, Scott Matheson, was paired up with his brother Angus. At the end of a year when Angus had worked on the farm and my grandfather went to school, Angus suggested it would be best to give up his school opportunity so my grandfather could continue.
I think about that all the time. It must have been a difficult decision for Angus. He recognized the importance of education. He valued that chance to go to school, and he knew that each of them holding half an education could never accomplish what one of them could holding all of it. Angus was right.
My grandfather Scott was the only one of the 13 children to graduate from high school. Angus worked on the farm his whole life — a life he chose. It says to me a lot about the costs of being exceptional, what it takes sometimes to completely change your circumstances. Angus’s decision was rooted in his own self-reliance but really self-awareness and selflessness. And thinking back to the earlier example of Roosevelt for just a minute: the same way FDR called for sacrifice so the nation could invest in rural America, Angus sacrificed so his family could make a similar investment in his brother.
They were a tight-knit family who loved to sing songs, act in plays, and be part of the community. They had little money and challenging circumstances, but they were wealthy in other ways. Their commitment to faith and family mattered most to them, and what may appear to be a hard life to those who didn’t grow up in a rural town was actually a life that they cherished.
They knew what it meant to make tough choices. But they tried hard to make the right choices.
We all have great stories just like that one. Our families all have examples of tough times and the hard decisions that come along with them. But we strive to do the right thing, and we’re good at doing this for a reason.
In the face of hardship, we draw on this incredible foundation laid by those who came before us — character, courage and hope.
As electric cooperatives, we know we still face tough choices in rural America today.
We talk about the challenges all the time:
- Growing demand for electricity and supply that can’t keep up.
- Bad policy, red tape and regulations that hamper investments in our electric grid; in generation; in technology.
- Undervaluing reliability when it matters most, when the light on the dashboard is blinking red.
- Failing to plan for the future our children and grandchildren deserve.
Yes, these are challenges, but we don’t allow them to defeat us. When I talk about a pro-energy agenda for America, I’m talking about what we do best.
Pro-energy means local control. You can meet the demands for growth in your communities with the right strategy for you. When we plan for the future, we do it with members of the community as stakeholders in leadership positions at our co-ops and in our boardrooms. With transparency, with democracy, with real concern for the community.
Pro-energy means being practical — when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Today, NRECA is successfully pressing for the withdrawal and repeal of dozens of harmful regulations. We’ve stopped the EPA from digging the biggest hole of all — a power plant rule which would force the closure of significant sources of electric generation we’re relying on to serve the needs of a growing rural America.
In federal courts and with the Trump Administration, we have opportunities to put that tough conversation about reliability first and make the right decisions for each of our co-ops.
Being pro-energy, by definition, means being for something. We can describe this future in real, tangible terms. This spring, when thousands of electric co-op advocates come to Washington, D.C., we’ll deliver a clear message:
- Permitting reform
- Siting new generation instead of shutting it off
- Diversifying and strengthening our national energy portfolio
- Investments in infrastructure and technology
- Laying the groundwork for a prosperous, connected future in rural America
Here’s the bottom line: let’s create certainty where uncertainty exists today. Uncertainty undermines our confidence. It has a cost. It stands in the way of progress. It’s paralyzing.
On the other hand, certainty means the opposite, doesn’t it? It means a chance to be bold. When there is certainty, and a new business comes to you and asks if you have the power supply to serve them the answer isn’t “maybe,” it’s “yes.”
When there is certainty, and a CEO delivers a budget in the boardroom with a proposal to improve analytics or grid security or sensors the answer isn’t “maybe,” it’s “yes.”
When there is certainty, and an apprentice lineman or a promising employee, just starting out, asks you if an electric co-op is a good place to build a career the answer isn’t “maybe,” it’s “yes.”
And when I talk about a pro-energy agenda for America, people in Washington listen. They know who we are and they know where we come from.
Together, we’ve built a reputation for creating opportunity … it’s the very purpose for starting an electric co-op in the first place.
They know rural places, rural communities, and rural people are worth investing in. They know our country is stronger when rural America is strong.
For our part, here this week, our task is this: We need to bring that future into focus and renew the commitment FDR made to rural communities 90 years ago.
Let’s acknowledge the moment we’re in. This is a chance to create real, meaningful change. Throughout the history of electric co-ops, we’ve always approached times like this with ideas and vision. With positive, constructive engagement. With authentic leadership.
All our conversations this week add up to one, strong, powerful voice. A voice we can use. A voice that works for us. That’s the voice people hear in Congress, in the White House, in Washington and across the country. And that’s the voice we use when we’re at the head of the table.
When we’re faced with tough choices and we choose the communities and people we serve, when we put them first, we make an incredible difference.
Photo reprinted with permission. © National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
