By Louis Porter
We can’t promise a financial and outage period as good as 2025 every year, but we can promise we are using the opportunities before us to prepare your cooperative for the future.
Washington Electric Cooperative had a tremendous 2025!
With no major storms and extremely good production at the Coventry Landfill Gas to Energy plant, WEC was able to defer $1.2 million into the new year, making a rate increase during 2026 very unlikely.
This was at a time when our neighboring utilities nearly all had to substantially increase rates for their members or customers, in some cases for a second or third time in a few years, to cover rising costs. As described in Co-op Currents recently, WEC residential members now see smaller power bills for similar consumption than Green Mountain Power customers, provided they are at the lower end of the usage spectrum.
WEC is also helping income-qualified members through the Affordable Community Renewable Energy (ACRE) program. Working with Vermont Electric Cooperative and using state-administered grant money, we are reducing the bills for each qualifying member by $45 a month for a five-year period. So far about 157 members have signed up, while about 40 spots remain open.
Meanwhile, WEC met its reliability and performance measures, except for the System Average Interruptions Frequency or SAIFI score, which we exceeded by only the slimmest margin. More on that can be found in the Service Quality and Reliability Plan report on page 8.
We should not allow any of this to make us complacent. We still provide 100% renewable power in a very rural (and therefore expensive to serve) part of the world, and many of our members are still struggling to pay their energy bills. And while last year provided a welcome break from major storms, we know the long-term trajectory is for more damaging and more frequent storms.
In the meantime, we are moving ahead with improvements to our system and in how we operate. Our line crew and engineering folks are working on multiple projects to strengthen, update, and improve sections of our system, including with the use of a lot of grant funding. We are working on buying and installing new meters which will provide us with more data and speed power restoration during outages. We’re also developing a utility-scale battery project to reduce costs for WEC members, and pilot projects to integrate home-based batteries and electric vehicles, in a way which will help both individual members and the membership at large.
Our service representatives assist Co-op members with everything from new connections to paying their bills, while technicians, mechanics, and others work on updating, maintaining, and fixing all of the millions of parts and pieces that are necessary to make a utility, even a small one, run. And all of them are supported by dispatchers and accounting and administrative workers who make sure we comply with very complicated regulatory and financial requirements so we can provide renewable local power at a reasonable price.
We can’t promise a financial and outage period as good as 2025 every year, but we can promise we are using the opportunities before us to prepare your cooperative for the future.