Power Lines

Powering Ohio’s co-ops

“We all take electricity for granted, until you’re at your own house and you lose it, and then you say, ‘Where’s the power company?’” laughs Schunn, plant manager for the Cardinal Power Plant in Brilliant, a small town on the Ohio River in eastern Ohio. Cardinal’s three coal-burning units produce up to 1,800 megawatts of power at a given moment. It’s the main baseload generating plant for Buckeye Power.

That emergency balancing act is known by many names, including “intermittent outage” or “forced outage,” but is most commonly called a “rolling blackout.” It can happen when a peak in electricity use — usually during extremely hot or extremely cold weather — coincides with significant gaps in the generation or transmission of electricity, says Ben Wilson, director of power delivery engineering for Buckeye Power, which supplies electricity to Ohio’s electric cooperatives. 

Emily’s story is typical for co-op members. They get their electricity from, and pay their bills to, one of Ohio’s 25 electric distribution cooperatives; usually vote in the election for the co-op’s board of directors; and maybe attend the annual meeting of members. They might even get capital credits in the form of a check or a bill credit at the end of the year when the not-for-profit co-op’s revenues outpace its expenses.

For the vast majority of time, no one really thinks about electricity or where it comes from, or how it gets to that lightbulb. It’s only during that fraction of a percent of the hours in a year when power is not available that the grid comes to public attention.

But what is ‘the grid’?

In the United States, the electricity industry has a generating capacity of 1.1 million megawatts, serving up electricity to nearly every home and business — including over a million Ohioans and 42 million people across the country who are served by electric cooperatives.  

“In June, we were working 16 hours a day in 90-degree weather, for about a week,” says Wise, 22. “Then winter storm Elliott hit (in December) and we worked a lot of overtime when it was minus 30. We’ve seen the hottest of the hot and the coldest of the cold.”

“Sure, I want to be home,” Wise says. “But there are people out there who don’t have power and if we’re not out there doing this, then who is?”

“When I first started at NRECA Market Research Services, nearly 18 years ago, 100% of our surveys were being done by phone,” Sanstead says. “In the past five years or so, I feel that members are still more willing to spend time on a survey for their local electric cooperative than they would be for a political survey, but people’s behavior with phones has changed. Many people will not answer their phone if they don’t recognize the number calling them.” 

Rise to the top

Matt Berry and Tim Street served similar roles at two Ohio distribution cooperatives in 2017 — Street was director of communications and member services at Mid-Ohio Energy Cooperative in Kenton, while Berry was manager of community and customer relations at St. Marys-based Midwest Electric — when the statewide cooperative association initiated a leadership-training program called Leadership Edge for co-op employees around Ohio. 

As it turns out, Thornburgh’s donation — an average of $6 per year, a few nickels and dimes at a time — helped LCEC boost a program that helped her own family. One of LCEC’s Operation Round Up grants helped RTC Industries in Bellefontaine to provide a transition program for young adults with developmental disabilities.

A byproduct with value 

In simple terms, the act of combustion produces heat, water, and carbon dioxide, and depending on the fuel being burned — in this case, coal — there are other byproducts. 
Ohio’s electric cooperatives have invested more than 
$1 billion in environmental systems to keep most of those other byproducts contained. One such system, the scrubbers, removes sulfur dioxide and converts it to synthetic gypsum. Synthetic gypsum has many uses, and it’s a key component in wallboard used in homes and businesses.