Jeff Wilson of VEC to Take Over from Don Douglas as Vermont’s Representative to National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
Every eight years, the boards of Vermont’s two rural electric cooperatives alternate which sends a representative to the board of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA). There are 48 NRECA reps: one per each state that has electric co-ops. In March, WEC Treasurer Don Douglas steps off the NRECA board, and Jeff Wilson of Vermont Electric Co-op (VEC) steps on. The outgoing and incoming reps spoke about the task of representing Vermont to the national board, the benefits and pitfalls, lessons learned, and what Vermont can gain. Their lively conversation has been edited and condensed.
Don: I’m excited to get to know Jeff better. I have an invitation to visit his farm in Coventry and meet his family, and he certainly has an invitation to come to my neck of the woods in East Orange. We’ll spend some time together in Nashville at the national meeting at the end of March.
It’s eye-opening to be on the NRECA board. When you know one co-op, you know one co-op: each is its own universe and distinct. But the Northeast is also its own universe: Vermont is different from Alabama or California or Hawaii. When you’re selling electricity for 20 cents per kilowatt, it’s very different from when you’re selling it for 6 cents, which is the case in much of the rest of the country.
Other co-ops are much wealthier. Indiana has a million in the bank; in the Northeast, we’re sort of the poor cousins. We barely participate with NRECA, and from WEC, part of it is political. My 47 other NRECA board members realize climate change is real, but the NRECA as an organization is not ready to admit that in public, because a lot of their members back home are climate change deniers. It’s hard when the political climate is so divided.
Jeff: There are 17 of us taking on new roles. That’s a fairly substantial turnover. It spans every subcommittee they have. I’m interested in getting down to the subcommittee levels because that’s where you have impact. Don’s been on the finance committee with a minor committee in international—I’m hoping to grab that one.
My mentor, from Rhode Island, is helping me transition, and Don’s been gracious. Rhode Island is interesting because they’re smaller and the only co-op in their state. More likely than not I’ll be on the same committee as my mentor, which is business and tech. I see a lot of potential there to bring information back to Vermont.
Here’s an example. Oregon, where I’m from, just went through a pilot program for super hot rock geothermal. For regular geothermal, you need vents in the ground, like hot springs near the surface. We don’t have anything like that in Vermont. The upside is we don’t have earthquakes or volcanoes either. So for super hot rock, you just keep drilling, as deep as it takes, until the water gets hot. It’s a closed loop system that keeps geology stable—unlike fracking—heating water in closed circuits.
In theory, that’s something we could do in Vermont. Now, even if both of our co-ops banded together and leveraged every asset, we couldn’t do it on our own—but we could go to the state. Our state legislators don’t have the same plug-ins. We have a part-time legislature that relies heavily on lobbyists for info and expertise on certain topics. Learning about technology through NRECA, we can have our advocates at both co-ops lock arms and go to the legislature and say, “Hey, this is interesting and we think the state should look into it.”
Don: Sounds way more exciting than nuclear!
Jeff: It scales differently, at a way different threshold. Now, I’m personally an advocate for nuclear. I’m all for renewables, but we need a stable base.
I want to talk more about generation. Vermont doesn’t generate much power to speak of, and not at a public level. We have extremely high electric rates, and we rely on out-of-state power. We have decisions to make: do we reinvest in our dams? Diversify in other directions? What makes sense long-term? I’m a VEC member of course, and I live in Coventry, and WEC somehow got up here and is harvesting the methane from the landfill. That’s really cool.
But anyway, NRECA has a much broader reach to introduce information and get contacts to us. Next time I’m in Oregon I’ll get to tour their facility, or better yet, bring one of our engineers out there.
Don: The biggest benefit to NRECA membership is it handles retirement. If we had to manage our own retirement program, it’s such a headache. NRECA handles that for more than 900 co-ops, and it’s incredibly complicated. Yes, it’s expensive, but the price is kept down for each co-op. Neither of our co-ops would want to deal with that.
The second biggest benefit is the connection to government agencies. I was able to connect WEC to the Department of Energy to lock in a $2.5 million grant for advanced meters. On our own, I’m not sure whether we would’ve been able to get that grant with all that was going on during the federal administration transition. But through our NRECA contact, I helped JJ [Vandette, WEC Director of Special Projects and Innovation] maintain contact with the person at the Department of Energy, and we got the grant.
Jeff: There are a lot of programs, and retirement is a massive one. While I have some issues with where NRECA invests its retirement, you can have those discussions only when you’re at the table. But you’re one out of 48 other people. I’ve made a bit of a name for myself already by being blunt. I’m really interested in having conversations and hearing people’s perspectives, but I’m not going to hedge my viewpoint. I’ve shocked a couple people but we’ve had some fun conversations already.
As Don said, it’s a very conservative organization at the national level. The Midwest is not switching away from oil, coal, and gas anytime soon. But there are a number of more progressive groups in there. There’s a lot to discuss across political and generational spectrums. Some new reps coming up, though conservative, see the need to diversify because they see supply becoming more constrained, and they have a NIMBY thing with opening up new coal mines. That was an interesting side conversation I was able to have. Even with our political climate what it is, even with renewable and carbon neutral generation curtailed nationwide, I think we’ll start to see a shift, even under this administration. Even within conservative groups like NRECA, there’s acknowledgement we’ll have to shift. It’ll take probably two decades.
Don: When I come back from NRECA, and say “We can’t just curtail coal fired generation, that’s not a possibility,” my WEC Board is ready to string me up. I’m a different person now than when I became a rep. But Jeff was born ready.
Jeff: I have twitchy arm syndrome. I was in the Marines for six years and they told me in basic training, “Don’t volunteer for anything,” but my arm kept twitching upward.
I’m a combat engineer with experience in blowing things up. I look at transformers with a much different appreciation than Don does. I originally joined VEC’s board because I wanted to understand how the electric grid worked: in Oregon, we have cheap and abundant electricity; here we have itty bitty cute dams and power is really expensive. I wanted to understand why.
Now I’m on VEC’s board and I get to go back to all the people in my community. People say, “I thought you’d bring our rates down.” I say, “No, I said I’d try to understand why rates are high and work to keep them reasonable.” The different factors that go into rates was a huge education, just at the local level. At NRECA, it’s a whole other firehose of info, which I will start bringing back to my board in December.
I cornered VEC’s advocate [Andrea Cohen, VEC Government Affairs and Member Relations Leader] after the board meeting and said, “What are we currently talking to state legislators about?” There are different things we could hook into, and this network could be an opportunity to bring in people in other states. An example is that groups of co-ops that are part of NRECA apply for federal grants as a group, which they wouldn’t be able to get as individual co-ops, or even just pairing with those in their state. That’s been fun for me. I will have the dubious pleasure of being one of the youngest people on both the VEC and NRECA boards, which feels odd now that I’m in my mid-30s, that I’m still the youngest person I’m hanging out with.
If there’s a decision to be made, I want all the info I can get and then to move forward. I don’t like endless debates. That’s what I plan on bringing: whether or not I agree with the decision the group makes, making decisions is often better than remaining in a holding pattern and getting nothing done.
Don: You’re going to enjoy your time on the national board. You’re going to make friends with these folks—I predict some lifelong. They’re all country people and they’re open. I already told you it’s better not to talk politics, but you didn’t listen!
Jeff: He did warn me a month before my first meeting not to talk politics, and I managed to for at least 10 minutes. I think someone else brought it up.
Don: I look forward to seeing you in Nashville.