June 2020

Being a board member for an Ohio electric cooperative comes with a sense of pride in service to one’s community. Board members, after all, are the link between owner-members of the cooperative and the services those members receive from the cooperative, and they take that responsibility seriously.

While many travelers regard Holmes County as the crux of Ohio’s Amish Country, few realize that Walnut Creek is its cradle. In 1809, Amish farmer Jonas Stutzman migrated from Pennsylvania to present-day Holmes County as the area’s first white settler. More Amish folks soon followed, putting down roots that blossomed into the world’s largest Amish-Mennonite community.

Bridgewater Dairy, a family farm in Montpelier, Ohio, has 3,000 dairy cows that produce 30,000 gallons of milk daily. They also produce an estimated 15 million gallons of manure each year.

A decade ago, Chris Weaver, Bridgewater Dairy’s chief operating officer, started turning his farm’s animal waste into something valuable — electricity — by installing an anaerobic digester.

“I wanted to manage the animals’ manure with an eye to helping the environment,” Weaver says. “I also wanted to improve the comfort of my cows. An anaerobic digester lets me do both.”

Ohio electric cooperative trustees and employees took their policy priorities to Capitol Hill in late April at the NRECA Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C.

Co-op leaders from dozens of states joined Ohio’s delegation for the annual conference, which focused this year on building momentum from the successful Co-ops Vote campaign during the 2016 election.

The first containers Kathleen Killilea remembers planting were terra cotta window boxes with cherub embellishments. “My father lifted me over the wall of a client’s garden and handed them to me,” she recalls. Killilea’s job was to place those flower boxes she had helped to plant. She and her brothers played assistant to their dad, who started working at deMonye’s Greenhouse in Columbus when he was 13 years old and grew up to own it.

Local control is one of the defining characteristics of your electric cooperative. That control comes from a board that’s elected from the membership — member-consumers like yourself. Much of the success of the electric cooperative program is the result of effective governance by proactive, focused directors, whose primary role is to direct the CEO and the management team, assuring commitment to business success through maintenance of the highest standards of responsibility, service, and ethics.

Many times, prospective homebuyers are so caught up examining other aspects of the houses they see, they don’t consider energy costs (such as electricity, gas, and propane) in their decision. They ought to, since the average home costs about $2,000 in energy expenses per year — that’s a lot of money over the life of the home.

The size of a home is one of the most important factors that will determine energy costs. As square footage increases, lighting requirements increase, and more importantly, the burden on heating and cooling equipment increases.

When Teresa Harshbarger and her family built their home outside of New Concord several years ago, they bought their water heater from Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative (GMEC). It came equipped with a radio-controlled switch that allows the cooperative to remotely turn off the heater to curtail electricity use during times of heavy demand. Though she says she’s sure the switch has been activated from time to time, she has never noticed when it happens.