John Egan

There is a 140-foot-tall communications tower positioned at Mid-Ohio Energy Cooperative’s substation in Ada that’s vital to the co-op’s mission to provide reliable electric service to its more than 8,000 owner-members.

At the top are two radios that are part of Mid-Ohio Energy’s microwave communications network — one that communicates with another substation, and another that points back to the co-op office in Kenton — and unless both are working, the co-op would have difficulty communicating with critical systems at several substations.

To Roger Rhonemus, it’s almost like a Christmas bonus.

Every year for about 20 years now, Rhonemus, who farms 800 acres of corn, soybeans, and hay in Adams County, looks forward to receiving his capital credits check from Adams Rural Electric Cooperative.

Two decades ago, Rhonemus, 60, used those annual checks, which typically go out to Adams REC members each November, to buy Christmas presents for his three children. Now that the kids are grown with families of their own, he uses it to buy presents for his eight grandchildren. And he couldn’t be happier.

Rebecca and Ben Wever, members of Marysville-based Union Rural Electric Cooperative (URE), attended their first co-op annual meeting this year, and they say it got them thinking more about the electricity they use.

Rebecca says she and Ben are keenly aware of events and factors that affect their energy bill, so the meeting was of particular interest. “My husband and I may be a little bit unusual there, but we want to protect our piece of paradise,” she says. “We always want to know why we pay what we do.”

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.”

Being a lineworker is not a particularly easy job; besides the strenuous nature of the work that both keeps the lights on and restores power when there’s an outage, the folks on the poles need to have a knowledge base that ranges from basic knot-tying to electrical engineering.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of training that goes into becoming (and remaining) a lineworker. Also not surprisingly, Ohio’s electric cooperatives are leaders in the field of lineworker training.

Jeremy Warnimont and his cousin Jake, both linemen at Tricounty Rural Electric Cooperative, based in northwest Ohio, were coming home from a long day of training on transformer rigging near Columbus, when they saw a young girl flip her all-terrain vehicle (ATV) in a nearby field. The vehicle landed on top of her.

“She was trying to jump a dirt hill, but didn’t make it,” Jeremy says. “When I got to her, she was non-responsive. Jake called 911 and we stabilized her until the first responders arrived.”

At the beginning of March 2017, after what had been, to that point, an unusually mild winter, a huge storm system came through southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, bringing with it winds that brought down trees and power lines and causing power outages in large swaths of the area.

Electric cooperatives do everything they can — regular maintenance, tree-trimming, etc. — to prevent such outages, but sometimes, Mother Nature has her own ideas. When outages do happen, the co-ops are ready.