When the Directors Guild of America recently presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Ridley Scott, the Hollywood banquet featured wines from Ohio’s Ravenhurst Champagne Cellars.
Shipping Ohio wines to California may seem counterintuitive, but for Ravenhurst vintner Chuck Harris, the Guild’s order acknowledged that he and his wife, Nina Busch, produce premium estate wines amid Union and Hardin counties’ farm fields near Mt. Victory. “It shows that great wine is great wine regardless of where it comes from,” he says.
I began writing about industry issues in this magazine two years ago, shortly after I became president and CEO of Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives. I noted then that these are “interesting times.”
Actually, these times are more than simply “interesting.” Fact is, we’ve gone through a period of historic change: Older coal plants have been cleaned up or closed, while natural gas, wind, and solar power generation have increased, surpassing the role that coal once played as the leading source of power generation. The electric power that’s produced today is cleaner than it has ever been.
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.
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.
For once, I was there “yesterday.” If you’re an angler, you know what I mean. How many times have you heard, “Well, the fish aren’t biting today, but had you been here yesterday (or last week, or last month), well…”
Putting me on the fish that magical late-summer morning a few years ago was veteran fishing guide Dave Rose. We were fishing a small river in northwest Michigan from a drift boat, casting minnow-imitation lures for king salmon (also known as Chinooks) that were migrating upstream from Lake Michigan to spawn.
