Top Issues for Electric Coops in 2022 and Beyond

The U.S. electric utility industry is evolving at an increasingly fast pace, and electric coops (electric cooperatives) are not immune to the changes.  In fact, their challenges and opportunities are similar to those faced by larger, investor-owned utilities, but as smaller companies, the impact of these challenges can be much greater.

Opportunities, Challenges for Electric Coops Going Forward

My friends at Utility Dive published a list of issues that should be top of mind for electric coops in 2022 and beyond.  You can check out the full list here.  Below is an abridged version that focuses on 6 of the issues from the Utility Dive article:

1. More employees are retiring from the utility workforce than ever before, simply due to the demographic dynamics of the current environment. The knowledge drain is tough, especially because succession planning is usually not a utility core competency.  Adding to the challenge is the difficulty attracting young talent to the industry.
2. Climate change is accelerating the push for more renewable energy, and utilities of all shapes and sizes will need to invest in their systems to accommodate this shift.
3. Expansion of distributed energy resources (DERs) will require an improved effort to capture and analyze the accompanying data, something that many utilities are not yet set up for.
4. Customers and regulators have increasingly stringent expectations. They want outages restored rapidly because there is less of a tolerance for any interruption of digital life.  There is also an increased expectation of more information transparency, delivered in real time.
5. More and more communities expect electric utilities to contribute to economic development. This may entail community investment, rate reductions, and similar tactics designed to benefit the local area.
6. Of course, outside of natural disasters, cyber-attacks are probably the greatest challenge facing electric utilities today. Approaches to deal with this new reality will continue to evolve over the next decade or more.

So, there you have it – my ‘abbreviated’ version of the top issues facing electric coops in 2022 and beyond.  No one said it would be easy, right??