WASHINGON—Federal agency leaders at NRECA’s 2026 Legislative Conference discussed their efforts to support new generation, transmission and distribution projects as electric cooperatives gear up for swift demand growth.

Co-ops at the annual conference, which had over 1,500 registrants this year, got updates Tuesday from officials with the Department of Energy and the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service, as well as the U.S. Army office that oversees the Corps of Engineers. They talked about regulations and funding programs that could help serve rising demand from data centers, electrification and manufacturing.

“At the end of the day, we need to bring these megawatts onto the grid to meet this demand,” said James Young, chief of staff for the DOE’s Office of Electricity.

While smart federal policies are essential to that mission, the agency leaders praised the dedication of co-ops in providing reliable, affordable power.

“Rural for me is not a place, it’s the people,” RUS Administrator Karl Elmshaeuser said. “People that are resourceful and resilient and reliant on one another. And for me, that’s kind of the definition of a co-op.”

“You’re working together, regardless of cost, regardless of size,” he continued. “When a group of people work together for a common cause and a common good, you can accomplish amazing things.”

DOE programs aim to bolster grid

Young outlined several DOE initiatives to upgrade and expand the electric grid. The agency has announced more than $6 billion in funding under the first and second rounds of the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program, including for electric co-op projects.

The DOE also announced a new $1.9 billion funding opportunity in March through the Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades program, known as SPARK. The SPARK program aims to demonstrate how reconductoring—replacing existing power lines with higher-capacity conductors—can improve grid reliability and energy affordability.

“We’ve got a huge amount of load growth,” Young said. “We’re hoping everyone sees [reconductoring] as way to use your current infrastructure to get more electrons onto the grid.”

He acknowledged frustrations with the pace of DOE funding awards but said the department is trying to improve that process.

“We’re doing everything we can in the administration to speed that process up,” Young said. “We don’t like seeing it take three years, two years for these things to happen.”

Young said the DOE is hoping to release an updated study soon on electric resource adequacy and is advancing programs to speed environmental permitting and approval of transmission projects.

He encouraged co-ops to stay in regular contact with agencies and lawmakers in Congress on their policy priorities beyond the Legislative Conference.

“Follow up,” Young said. “That is the biggest thing.”

High demand for RUS loans

During the RUS breakout session, Elmshaeuser said the agency had a “record, banner year” in 2025, handing out over $24 billion in grants and loans as demand grows for new energy capacity.

“We need power that is reliable, affordable and responsible,” he emphasized.

The traditional RUS electric loan program has $7 billion in lending authority for 2026, but anticipated demand already exceeds that level. For the third year in a row, the agency notified Congress that it will lend up to 25% above the program’s loan authority, as permitted by statute.

For fiscal year 2027, NRECA supports increasing the program’s loan level and allowing RUS to lend up to 50% above that threshold, to give the agency flexibility to meet evolving demand.

When it comes to the RUS loan program, “there’s a lot of need,” Elmshaeuser said.

RUS is also making progress on loan and grant awards through the New ERA and PACE energy development programs.

Elmshaeuser said RUS has obligated New ERA money that will fund power purchase agreements to restart the idled Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. Bloomington, Indiana-based Hoosier Energy and Wolverine Power Cooperative in Cadillac, Michigan, were tapped to receive the money, which will help cover their PPAs with Palisades owner Holtec International.

A little over half a billion dollars remains in New ERA and PACE funding, with RUS hoping to release a notice of funding opportunity soon, Elmshaeuser said. The agency is looking to potentially direct those funds to nuclear energy or reconductoring projects, he added.

Army Corps of Engineers seeks co-op input on permitting

Co-ops also got an update on Clean Water Act permitting and efforts to lower regulatory barriers to energy projects.

The Army Corps of Engineers is exploring ways to expand use of Nationwide Permits to authorize certain activities under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act that have minimal environmental impacts, including the construction and maintenance of utility power lines.

Co-op input would be valuable to that effort, said Lee Forsgren, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, whose office oversees the Corps.

“What would be helpful to your communities?” Forsgren asked. Comments on potential changes to the Nationwide Permit program are due May 15.

The Corps is also working to streamline other permitting programs and create granular maps to identify water bodies that are subject to federal regulation to give co-ops and other utilities more certainty.

“We’re working on a multitude of fronts to try to help the regulated community find ways to get their permits faster,” he said.

The Corps is also evaluating how to expand its hydropower production, which generates about 25% of U.S. hydroelectric output and provides affordable, reliable power to many co-ops. Among other options, the Corps is considering ways to attract outside financing and accelerate approvals for hydropower facility upgrades and electrifying new dams, Forsgren said.

He also emphasized the Trump administration’s support for the Lower Snake River dams in the Pacific Northwest, saying a water subcabinet of senior administration officials was uniformly against breaching the dams.

“We need to find ways to meet the president’s objective of producing more electricity,” Forsgren said.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

WASHINGTON—More than 1,500 electric cooperative leaders gathered at NRECA’s Legislative Conference this week to meet with lawmakers and agency officials and push for policies that will keep the lights on for 42 million Americans.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told co-op leaders Monday that they are viewed as truthtellers by policymakers, giving them a unique advantage as they advocate for top co-op priorities. The key, he said, is that co-ops deliver a consistent message about the need for reliable, affordable power, no matter which political party is in control of Congress or the White House.

“Policymakers know we’re not of Washington,” Matheson said. “We’re laser-focused on doing the right thing for the communities we serve. That’s a powerful differentiator.”

This year’s conference focused on four issues: streamlining the federal permitting process, mitigating the risk of wildfires, expediting disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and increasing funding for the Rural Utilities Service Electric Loan Program.

Co-ops can have a huge impact on policymakers by telling real-life stories about how these issues affect their consumer-members and by promoting commonsense solutions to broken federal policies, NRECA leaders said.

“Make no mistake, lawmakers want to hear from you,” Louis Finkel, NRECA’s senior vice president of Government Relations, told co-op leaders. “Your voice is powerful.”

Natural Resources chairman: ‘We desperately need permitting reform’

House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., said the time is right for reforming the cumbersome federal permitting process that delays electric co-ops’ efforts to improve their systems and meet rising demand for power.

“We need to make it so you can grow and provide more energy,” he said.

Westerman helped lead the House to passage of two significant, NRECA-backed permitting reform bills late last year.

The SPEED Act would streamline the requirements imposed by the National Environmental Policy Act on co-ops applying for permits to build new generation, transmission and distribution capacity, strengthen existing systems or perform crucial maintenance work.  

The PERMIT Act would improve permitting under the Clean Water Act by cutting red tape and providing greater regulatory certainty for co-ops that obtain permits. 

Westerman, who worked as an engineer and forester before going into politics, was also a lead sponsor of the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act. The NRECA-backed bill—which the House passed last year—would expedite federal approvals to allow co-ops to harden their grids against wildfires and remove the hazardous vegetation that fuels blazes. 

He urged co-op leaders to press the Senate to pass the bills.

“If we’re going to step up to meet the growing demand for energy, we desperately need permitting reform,” Westerman said. “The timing is right. What we don’t want to do is miss this opportunity.”

CEQ chairman cites permitting progress, underscores need for lasting reform

While Congress works to pass permitting reform, the Trump administration is doing what it can to streamline the process, said Katherine Scarlett, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

She said her job is to coordinate federal agencies to make sure they are all on the same page and aren’t forcing electric co-ops and other businesses to jump through more hoops than necessary to get permits.

The environmental reviews required to build a transmission line are moving much faster now, Scarlett said.

“We’ve stripped it down to what the statute requires,” she said. “We want to allow for the most expeditious route possible.”

Still, she said, lasting reform will only come if Congress passes it into law.

“On the Hill, they are right in the heat of permitting changes, so keep advocating,” she said. “Right now, I’m more optimistic about a permitting deal than I ever have been.”

Colorado congressman: Give lawmakers a reality check

Rep. Jeff Hurd, R-Colo., said the best way for co-ops to persuade lawmakers to support their priorities is to focus on the realities of how federal policies are affecting them.

“Tell them: ‘Here’s my project. Here’s the delay. Here’s what it’s costing us. Here’s what would fix it,’” said Hurd, who was an attorney representing several electric co-ops in rural Colorado before being elected to Congress in 2024.

“The most effective advocacy I have seen is grounded in reality. It’s better than any single statistic. It helps me convince my colleagues to support the bills you need to help you do your job.”

In addition to supporting permitting reform and wildfire mitigation bills, Hurd is co-sponsoring the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act. The legislation, passed by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last fall, would streamline FEMA and dramatically speed up delivery of crucial disaster relief funds to co-ops devastated by wildfires, hurricanes, ice storms and other natural disasters. 

“You are all responsible for something most of us take for granted: reliability,” Hurd said. “When people flip a switch, they expect the lights to come on. Our job in Congress is to make sure the process works.”

North Dakota congresswoman: Data centers should pay their way

Rep. Julie Fedorchak, R-N.D., said she is especially sensitive to keeping consumers’ electricity rates down as a former member of the North Dakota Public Utilities Commission.

Despite rising demand from data centers that serve artificial intelligence, Fedorchak believes that electric co-ops and other utilities can keep rates down for existing customers by holding big tech companies responsible for paying for the extra power and infrastructure they need.

“We can generate enough power to meet their demand and keep rates down,” she told Matheson as they discussed the issue on stage. “Whoever needs [the energy] needs to pay for it.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

After decades of stagnant growth, U.S. power demand is set to jump in the years ahead.

Data centers will be a big part of the increase, but sources like transportation electrification could rival those gains. Some states and regions are also primed for more dramatic growth, depending on incentives and other support for data centers and electric vehicles.

On this episode of Along Those Lines, we’ll examine these trends with Lidija Sekaric, NRECA’s vice president of innovation and emerging technology, and David Porter, vice president of electrification and sustainable energy strategy at EPRI.

Lidija and David will take a closer look at these growth drivers and possible disruptions to demand outlooks. They’ll also discuss tools from NRECA and EPRI to break down potential demand growth and help co-ops and other utilities plan. 

Listen to the episode below:

You can also listen and subscribe to Along Those Lines on your preferred podcast service, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Find out more about NRECA’s podcast. Questions or suggestions? Email us at AlongThoseLines@nreca.coop.

NRECA is supporting efforts to halt an Oregon District Court decision that the federal government says will cause “irreparable harm” to electricity consumers in the Pacific Northwest, including cooperatives served by the Lower Snake River dams.

The association filed an amicus brief April 8 backing the government’s request to stay the court injunction, which limits dam operations along the Columbia and Snake River dams. Almost 90% of the federal Bonneville Power Administration’s electricity supply comes from the Columbia River hydropower system, which serves over 50 electric co-ops across eight states.

“Increases in BPA’s operational and environmental compliance costs and disruptions in power supply will increase costs of electricity and threaten some of the most cost-sensitive regions in the nation,” NRECA said in its amicus brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit.

The Trump administration estimates that the District Court injunction will increase BPA’s electricity rates by more than 6% and raise the risk of blackouts by up to 13% during peak demand periods. Such costs are “shouldered by the rural Americans NRECA’s members serve,” the filing stated, calling the lower court’s action “unlawful” and urging the 9^th Circuit to stay the injunction.

Earlier this year, the District Court granted a request from environmental groups, tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon to change operations along the dams to protect fish species in the river system. According to the Department of Justice’s stay request, the District Court required “high, continuous” water releases, or spills, at eight dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, including elevated spills through August and September.

Spill is water released from a dam through the spillway instead of through powerhouses.

BPA expects the court’s ordered spill levels will result in a loss of 1,000 megawatts on average in August and 500 MW in September.

“Absent a stay, the elevated spill levels will cause irreparable harm to the public by increasing the cost of electricity, reducing grid stability, and substantially increasing the risk of blackouts,” the Department of Justice said. “Blackouts in neighborhoods disrupt communities, blackouts in hospitals cost lives, and blackouts in military installations threaten national security.”

NRECA echoed the Justice Department, stating that the District Court lacked the authority to design and impose a new operations plan for the dams and that the court-imposed operational limits violated with the Administrative Procedures Act.

“The District Court approved mandates that may undermine a system powering 4.9 million homes—relief that could never be granted on the merits of the underlying APA and [Endangered Species Act] claims,” NRECA said in its amicus brief.

The brief is the latest step in NRECA and Pacific Northwest co-ops’ work to protect the Lower Snake River dams, which together can produce over 3,000 MW of reliable, affordable and carbon-free hydropower capacity.

In December, NRECA filed an amicus brief with the Oregon District Court in support of the government and our members.

The association has also frequently engaged with President Donald Trump’s team and federal agencies, including the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the National Energy Dominance Council, on the need to preserve the dams. That advocacy was instrumental in overturning a 2023 memorandum from the Biden administration that paved the way for breaching the dams.

CEO Jim Matheson has also testified before Congress on the importance of the dams, highlighting their value to energy production, agriculture, transportation and rural communities. And grassroots network Voices for Cooperative Power engaged co-op consumer-members in the Pacific Northwest to advocate for the dams.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Updated: April 15, 2 p.m. ET

Nearly 140 members of Congress have signed onto bipartisan letters urging appropriators to approve “the highest possible funding” for the Rural Utilities Service Electric Loan Program amid electric cooperatives’ “unprecedented demand” for loans.

The RUS letters—circulated by key congressional leaders in both chambers—reflect a new urgency this year amid growing demand for power from huge data centers that support artificial intelligence and from companies bringing their manufacturing plants back to the U.S.

At the same time, the supply chain for some transformers and other electric grid equipment has tightened, driving up costs for co-ops as they upgrade aging infrastructure and build new systems.

RUS is authorized to make $7 billion in loans for rural electric infrastructure in 2026, but expected demand already exceeds that level. NRECA supports increased funding and flexibility for fiscal year 2027 to meet rapidly growing system needs.

“Demand for electricity continues to increase and so does the cost to electric cooperatives to serve that demand,” said Jason Cooke, a legislative affairs director at NRECA. “We are grateful that members of Congress recognized the situation electric co-ops face and advocated for the RUS Electric Loan Program to grow to meet those escalating needs.”

House Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., and ranking member Angie Craig, D-Minn., led the effort in their chamber, sending a letter to leaders of the House Appropriations subcommittee that has jurisdiction over funding for rural development programs. A total of 113 House members, representing both parties, signed the request.

“As you may know, the RUS Electric Loan Program is experiencing unprecedented demand as electric cooperatives replace existing infrastructure and make upgrades to meet the growing need for electricity across the country,” the letter says.

“We respectfully request the highest possible funding for the RUS Electric program in fiscal year 2027 to meet this growing demand.”

The Senate letter, led by Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., makes an identical request to Senate appropriators and had 25 signers as of Wednesday.

Co-ops use RUS electric loans to finance electricity distribution, transmission and generation to provide affordable, reliable electric service to approximately 42 million people, the letters say.

They also point out that electric co-ops repay RUS loans with interest, helping to reduce the federal deficit.

“In fiscal year 2024, electric loans netted $179 million to the U.S. Treasury,” the letters say.

Signers of the letters also called for RUS to support a wide range of projects.

“We urge that RUS lending continue to be driven by the needs of the borrower rather than limiting the types of projects eligible,” the letters say. “This flexibility will help meet the diverse challenges of RUS electric borrowers and ensure loans are available to support distribution projects, transmission projects, environmental upgrades or the construction of new generation sources.”

The letters conclude that “lowering the U.S. deficit and keeping co-op consumers’ electric bills affordable are mutually beneficial goals we can all support.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson has asked the Forest Service to speed permitting and approval of wildfire mitigation projects for all electric cooperatives across the national forest system after the agency agreed to help one co-op with its years-long push to obtain such permits.

The recent breakthrough for Midstate Electric Cooperative in Oregon came after CEO Jim Anderson testified before a House committee about the hurdles Midstate has experienced while conducting wildfire mitigation on federally managed lands. Following the hearing, Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Michael Boren reached out to Anderson to discuss Midstate’s challenges and pledged that the Forest Service would quickly get the co-op its permits.

To build on the momentum from the congressional hearing, NRECA is urging the Forest Service to expedite wildfire mitigation permitting and approvals for every co-op that is operating in the national forest system.

“Cooperatives across the nation commonly encounter similar challenges [to Midstate Electric] when operating on National Forest lands,” Matheson said in a March 26 letter to Boren. “We urge the Forest Service to implement the expedited utility permitting and approval processes used for Midstate consistently across the entire National Forest System.”

For the past several years, La Pine-based Midstate Electric has tried to expand clearance around its power line through the Deschutes National Forest. But the co-op had made no real progress in getting Forest Service approvals, even though trees in some areas are six feet or less from the line, Anderson told the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries at a February hearing.

With co-ops across the country facing similar challenges, NRECA is asking the Forest Service to provide the same support to every co-op so they can efficiently manage vegetation, remove timber, underground lines, replace poles, expand rights of way, and site new transmission and distribution lines.

Along with urging the agency to expedite such permitting for all co-ops operating on national forest lands, Matheson asked the Forest Service in his March 26 letter to reduce or eliminate strict liability requirements that hold co-ops accountable for up to $1 million, plus fire suppression costs and natural resources damage, for fires on public lands even if the co-ops don’t cause them.

Such actions would reduce the risk of wildfires on national forest lands while helping co-ops deliver reliable, affordable power to rural Americans, Matheson said. He noted that NRECA has long asked for such reforms, including backing related legislation in Congress.

“Ensuring that utilities can conduct effective and timely wildfire mitigation of federally managed lands is crucial for our nation’s energy reliability and affordability,” the letter concluded.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Regulatory approval of a large solar-plus-storage energy project moves Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative significantly closer to achieving Hawaii’s requirement for 100% renewable generation by 2045—all while saving members hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission on March 5 greenlighted AES Hawaiʻi’s Kaawanui Solar project. The Lihue-based cooperative has signed a 25-year fixed-price power purchase agreement with AES for the project to meet 17.5% of its annual load, which equates to powering about 16,000 homes.

KIUC estimates that the PPA will save the co-op and its members $365 million over the course of the contract.

Beginning in 2030, residential co-op members can expect to see their bill reduced by $4.26 per month, a savings that will rise to about $21.08 per month in the last year of the PPA.

David Bissell, KIUC president and CEO, sees the agreement as key to delivering affordable and reliable energy to co-op members while meeting its renewable energy goals.

“When KIUC was formed in 2002, our rates were by far the highest in the state of Hawaii and among the highest in the nation,” Bissell said. “Due to our journey to achieve 100% renewable generation, our rates are now often some of the lowest in the state of Hawaii, and are much more stable. The Kaawanui Solar project will contribute even further to this progress.”

AES Hawaiʻi will build and operate the project, KIUC’s largest to date. It involves a 43-megawatt photovoltaic array and four hours of lithium-ion battery energy storage systems that can store 172 megawatt-hours of dispatchable energy.

Bissell said KIUC routinely operates solely on renewables on sunny days, but its “main challenge in reaching the state’s mandate of 100% renewable by 2045 is eliminating our fossil fuel use during non-solar periods. Projects like this are critical to reaching that goal.”

KIUC will decommission two outdated substations and build a modern switchyard, Kaawanui Substation, to connect the new solar-plus-storage project to the grid.

Making members aware of the numerous benefits of meeting demand by low emission resources goes a long way toward taking a project such as this to the finish line, said Bissell.

“Large-scale renewable projects such as this one can also help to stabilize rates, provide jobs, improve economic activity, and support local agriculture,” he said. “KIUC and AES Hawaiʻi have held multiple outreach events to gather input from community members and answer questions about the project, which has helped inform the best approach for success.”

The co-op projects that more than 179 million gallons of fossil fuel will be offset through the life of the PPA and about 2.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be avoided. 

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

Congress must pass permitting reform legislation to give electric cooperatives the certainty they need to invest in new transmission lines and power plants to meet growing demand for power, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie said Wednesday.

“We absolutely have to make sure we have dispatchable, reliable and affordable power,” the Kentucky Republican told Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman at a newsmaker event sponsored by NRECA. “People want to have the lights come on when they turn the lights on.”

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said artificial intelligence and other technology is rapidly increasing demand for electricity. More transmission and generation infrastructure must be built as quickly as possible to meet that demand and ensure reliable power, he said.

“These are capital-intensive investments with long lead times for assets with 30- to 50- to 80-year lives,” Matheson said. “We see this huge demand coming over the next five to 10 years and we’ve got to start building now.”

Guthrie said his committee is looking at ways to expedite the cumbersome federal permitting process that co-ops and other businesses must go through to comply with clean air and clean water regulations. He said litigation challenging federal permitting decisions should have reasonable time limits so that it doesn’t delay crucial infrastructure projects for years.

“We don’t want to change the standards, we just want to speed the process,” Guthrie said.

Matheson said co-ops need the kind of regulatory certainty that permitting reform would bring.

“We need to put this in statute,” Matheson said. “We can’t have a policy environment where every time we have a new person come to the White House, we boomerang back and forth.

“Congress has failed to do its job in terms of setting policy where we have greater certainty. And in an industry like ours, we need that long-term certainty.”

Since solar and wind energy are intermittent sources of power, utilities need to be able to build nuclear, hydropower or fossil fuel plants to ensure the power stays on no matter what the weather is like, Guthrie said.

“It’s difficult to build a nuclear plant or a natural gas plant,” he said. “Permitting reform speeds that process up.”

After months of advocacy by NRECA and Michigan electric cooperatives, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has made two co-ops in the state eligible to receive additional funding to cover restoration efforts for a massive March 2025 ice storm.

At the direction of President Donald Trump, FEMA recently approved the state of Michigan’s request for Category F funding under the agency’s public assistance program to cover permanent repairs to utility infrastructure from the historic storm. The decision enables eligible utilities to seek reimbursement for up to 75% of qualifying expenses.

Access to Category F public assistance could provide more federal support for both Great Lakes Energy and Presque Isle Electric & Gas Co-op, helping the co-ops to offset storm recovery costs, reduce pressure for future rate adjustments and harden their systems against future disasters.

“For co-ops, FEMA’s Public Assistance Category F is a lifeline; it’s the key that unlocks federal funding to permanently rebuild critical infrastructure after disasters,” NRECA Regulatory Affairs Director Kelli Phillips said. “NRECA advocates for this—and for smart FEMA policy that help keep recovery costs down to protect and strengthen the resilience of the communities our members serve.”

FEMA’s March 13 decision “is an important step for the electric cooperatives and communities still recovering from the devastating 2025 ice storm,” Michigan Electric Cooperative Association CEO John Kran said.

“This progress did not happen by accident. It reflects strong coordination among Michigan’s electric cooperatives, MECA, NRECA, elected officials, and co-op consumer-members who spoke up and helped keep attention on the need in northern Michigan. That partnership mattered.”

Kran said there is still more to learn about what funding will ultimately be approved and how long reimbursement will take, but “this decision is a meaningful step toward reducing the long-term financial impact of the storm on the cooperatives and the members they serve.”

In late March 2025, a multiday ice storm caused widespread outages across 13 northern Michigan counties. The storm knocked out power to nearly 100,000 customers of Boyne City-based GLE and Onaway-based PIE&G for periods of four to 20 days and forced the co-ops to rebuild major parts of their systems.

Altogether, the weather event affected 8,116 miles of power line and required the repair or replacement of many substations and transformers. GLE also had to replace over 3,155 poles, well above its annual average of 800. PIE&G replaced 2,700 poles compared with a yearly average of 500.

Each of the co-ops have spent roughly $150 million on restoration, not including interest on recovery loans.

In July, the president declared a major disaster declaration and authorized reimbursement of emergency power restoration work related to the storm. But at the time, the administration did not approve the state of Michigan’s request for Category F support.

Since the storm, NRECA has partnered with the co-ops, MECA, lawmakers and other partners to rally for access to increased FEMA funding. As not-for-profit utilities, co-ops must pass any costs to their consumer-members.

Last September, Voices for Cooperative Power—a grassroots network of co-op advocates—asked Michiganders in GLE and PIE&G’s service territories to sign a petition urging Trump to approve funding for permanent repairs. Altogether, 10,400 people from the two co-ops’ territories signed the petition, along with 2,022 concerned citizens in other parts of the country.

Following this multipronged effort, FEMA on March 13 amended its major disaster declaration for Michigan’s ice storm to include Category F funding after approval from the president.

Although the decision marks a major step in Michigan co-ops’ efforts to rebuild, NRECA is seeking broader reforms at FEMA to make the agency’s public assistance program more efficient for all co-ops.

The association is lobbying to advance legislation in Congress called the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans (FEMA) Act, which would speed up delivery of disaster relief funds to co-ops and allow them to be reimbursed on interest for recovery loans they take out while awaiting FEMA funds.

“Congress, and particularly Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), has been a key partner in securing the additional public assistance designation for northern Michigan and advocating for broader FEMA reform efforts to help his affected co-ops,” said NRECA Legislative Affairs Director Will Mitchell, who lobbies Congress on FEMA issues.

“The FEMA Act’s clarity around loan interest reimbursement would be particularly helpful for GLE and PIE&G, so we will be continuing to make a strong push for the bill and comprehensive FEMA reform heading into NRECA’s Legislative Conference in late April,” Mitchell added.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday repealed a 2024 rule regulating mercury and particulate matter emissions from power plants, eliminating a significant regulatory threat to electric cooperatives.

The Biden administration’s mercury and air rule would have required co-ops to shut down or add expensive emissions controls at many coal-fired units but offered no meaningful public health benefits, according to NRECA. It was part of a suite of EPA rules, including regulations for greenhouse gas emissions, designed to force the premature closure of coal-fired power plants.

The rule was among those that NRECA asked the EPA to review after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.

“The reliability of the electric grid is in a better place because of the administration’s swift repeal of this rule,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “As crafted, the rule would have dealt a crippling blow to power plants that are essential to maintaining grid reliability.”

In June 2025, the Trump administration proposed to repeal key requirements of the Biden-era rule and revert to prior emissions standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that the EPA adopted in 2012.

Overturning the 2024 rule will eliminate $670 million in regulatory costs over a decade starting in 2028, the EPA estimates.

NRECA filed comments supporting the proposed repeal. It said the 2024 rule was not cost-effective and posed major financial harm to co-op-owned coal plants that supply crucial, always-available power. The rule, if left on the books, would have led to power plant closures, lost jobs and higher electricity costs, compounding the strain on the power grid at a time of skyrocketing demand.

The Biden regulation was also technically and legally unsound, according to NRECA.

The 2024 rule “would have required co-ops to install exorbitantly expensive emission controls or prepare to shut down critical plants,” Matheson said. “Either choice would impose higher costs on consumers without any meaningful benefit.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA is moving into 2026 with a list of legislative and regulatory priorities aimed at making it easier for electric cooperatives throughout the nation to provide reliable, affordable power to their consumer-members.

“We are listening and hearing from our members about what is most important to them and where policy changes can improve the business environment for co-ops and improve the lives of the people in the communities they serve,” said Louis Finkel, NRECA’s senior vice president of Government Relations.

Here’s what Finkel had to say about NRECA’s federal priorities for 2026.

What are NRECA’s top legislative priorities for this year and why?

Finkel: There are several places where Congress can make changes that would be incredibly impactful. We are focused on giving co-ops the tools they need to keep the lights on at a cost their members can afford, and there are three areas that I think about a lot.

First, we need more generation, not less, and we need to improve our resiliency. And to do that, we need to make the investments necessary to keep the lights on at a cost our members can afford, which means we need to be able to build more. And to do that, you need to expedite the permitting process.

We’re dealing with a federal permitting process that was developed more than 40 years ago. It has only been updated marginally over the course of the last 40 to 50 years. And we live at a very different time.

And to add more generation, you need more transmission. We also need the ability to improve our distribution and transmission systems.

We have aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced, and we need to add increased resiliency. And, so, we need to first and foremost reform our permitting process.

Secondly, for the last several years, we’ve talked about the need to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency and ensure that cooperatives can receive the support they need from the federal government on their worst days. The FEMA process is cumbersome, it’s difficult, it’s inconsistent. We need a FEMA that works for our cooperatives and the communities they serve.

We need predictability and we need to know that when a disaster strikes—whether that is an ice storm or a hurricane or a wildfire or a flood—that we have a strong federal partner in FEMA that will be there to support our cooperatives and their communities.

The other thing we need to do, and this kind of fits into the issue of permitting reform, is improve our co-ops’ ability to mitigate against the threats of wildfires. We need quality vegetation management. The Fix Our Forests Act has been something we’ve been pushing for several years, and we need the ability to finally see that through.

And, lastly, our co-ops need the tools and partnerships to support both their system improvements and their routine maintenance. The Rural Utilities Service is an incredibly important partner for us.

And as supply chain costs rise, inflationary pressures rise, and the needs for more generation, more transmission and distribution continue to grow, we need to be able to borrow from RUS. That means supporting both continued appropriations from Congress and thinking about RUS growing the portfolio of loans that they can make on an annual basis.

We’ve seen improvements there. But each year for the last several years, RUS has hit their loan cap. They have the ability to increase it, but we need to make sure cooperatives demonstrate how they are effectively using the loans provided by RUS to support these annual increases.

You mentioned FEMA reform as a top priority. As you know, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed the bipartisan Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act last year. What’s the next step on that?

Finkel: Our objective is to make sure that the FEMA bill hits the House floor as soon as possible and that we continue to build the momentum and support for it. Every time there’s a storm and the FEMA process doesn’t work, it’s a reminder that there’s a need to reform it. We’ll continue to carry that message over and over again.

There was some good news for NRECA on permitting reform late last year when the House passed the SPEED Act and the PERMIT Act to streamline the process. Do you think the Senate will act on those bills?

Finkel: I think there’s broad recognition that the process needs to be reformed. There is still a question of what exactly does that look like and what shape does it take and how long does it take to get done. The House has completed their work and there continue to be discussions in the Senate. We will continue to push for progress in those discussions.

Congress increased the RUS Electric Loan Program from $6.5 billion to $7 billion for this fiscal year. Do you think they’ll boost it again for 2027?

Finkel: We think there’s a continued opportunity to have conversations with policymakers about the value that the RUS Electric Loan Program brings to the communities we serve.

And as electric demand grows and as system maintenance and improvement continues to be important for resiliency, we believe that there’s a need to continue to have that conversation about growing the RUS lending authority. The fact is that the federal government makes $500 million a year in interest that co-ops pay on those loans, so there is a direct benefit to the government. Not to mention the co-op communities that benefit from the investments being made.

Shifting gears beyond Congress, what are NRECA’s top regulatory priorities at agencies for 2026?

Finkel: For several years, we have advocated for repealing unlawful, unrealistic and unreasonable regulations finalized by the Biden administration.

We continue to be optimistic that the Environmental Protection Agency will continue to walk back the power plant rule and the series of other regulations promulgated by the Biden administration that hamper always-available power. We need more generation, not less. And forcing the premature retirement of existing generation and making it impossible, if not cost-prohibitive, to build new generation should not be our energy policy.

We continue to work with the Department of Energy on implementation of really important infrastructure investments that make our systems more resilient to disaster, that improve the reliability of the electric grid and enhance cybersecurity.

So, we will continue to work constructively with DOE to maximize the opportunities, to maximize the programs that the Department of Energy manages on infrastructure, and we’ll do the same for the Department of Agriculture.

What’s the status of EPA’s regulatory rollbacks for the power sector?

Finkel: They’re all at different stages. EPA has begun the process of walking back all those regulations, notably the power plant rule. They’ve announced that they’re going to repeal many of these regulations finalized by the Biden administration, whether it is for greenhouse gases … or wastewater for power plants, coal residuals and a series of other air regulations that would make it cost-prohibitive to continue to run coal plants and make it really difficult to build new gas plants.

The EPA is working through their process to not only repeal them but make those repeals durable, which I think is really important.

Giving a greater degree of certainty to our asset owners is important as they continue to make decisions on generation investments and what their generation mix should look like.

Electric co-ops have sought to tap federal infrastructure funding through the New ERA program and some of the bipartisan infrastructure law initiatives. What’s the status of that funding?

Finkel: We continue to engage constructively with federal agencies about infrastructure investment programs and the value that they bring to the rural communities served by our members. Those investments have outsized impact on economic growth and stability, but also on the reliability and affordability of the power delivered in those communities.

As long as we continue to tell our story, it enables us to have a constructive conversation with administration officials.

Data centers and other large loads are a huge source of demand growth for the power sector, including electric co-ops. What’s happening on the policy front there?

Finkel: These are new, really large loads that are coming onto the system, and they’re important. They’re an important part of our day-to-day lives, in our electronic commerce, in our data-driven economy.

In order to meet this growing demand, you need a permitting process that moves quicker and faster. Today, it’s much faster to build a data center than it is to build a power plant.

If the load is moving faster than the generation, you obviously are going to be a little bit out of sync. Having federal policies that make it easier to build more generation faster, I think is really important.

What’s the regulatory outlook for broadband?

Finkel: There has been a fair amount of work by the Federal Communications Commission to reduce the regulatory burden on broadband providers, especially on small providers. And we greatly appreciate those steps that they’ve taken.

At the same time, the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program is the largest single investment in unserved broadband deployment in our nation’s history.

The challenge has been that the rules have continually changed. It makes it really difficult to make decisions on whether or not you want to participate when the rules are always changing. That’s really not the best model.

We’re hopeful that things can stabilize and these programs can execute with a clear set of rules and metrics where the bar doesn’t keep rising and the rules keep changing. We need to make sure this program works for co-ops and doesn’t favor other providers.

Erin Kelly and Molly Christian are staff writers for NRECA.

The U.S. grid reliability outlook is “worsening” amid projections for more power plant retirements and surging demand from data centers and other large loads in the next decade, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said on Thursday. 

NERC’s latest Long-Term Reliability Assessment reinforces the need for smart energy policies that support reliable, affordable generation for electric cooperatives, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. 

“Today’s report is yet another stark warning about the intensifying reliability risks facing America’s electric grid,” Matheson said. “This report clearly highlights the need for smart, swift actions and serious conversations about how we will meet tomorrow’s energy needs as a country.” 

Over half the areas that NERC analyzed in its latest long-term assessment are expected to face resource adequacy challenges in the coming decade. 

In the next five years, areas at high risk of energy supply shortfalls include Texas and parts of the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northwest. Regions at elevated risk of shortfalls—meaning demand could exceed supply during extreme conditions such as above-normal temperatures or fuel supply disruptions—include New England, New York and parts of the Southeast and Southwest Power Pool. 

The loss of always-available generation is one key risk. Although expected plant retirements have shrunk from last year’s long-term assessment, NERC said closures could total over 105 gigawatts of peak seasonal capacity in the next 10 years—enough energy to power up to 100 million homes. 

At the same time, aggregated peak demand is expected to soar by more than 224 GW for summer and 245 GW for winter over the 10-year period, up by 69% and 65% from last year’s 10-year growth projections, respectively.  

Power demand from data centers and other large industrial and commercial loads is driving much of that increase, particularly in Texas, the PJM Interconnection and the West. 

Grid operations are also becoming more complex due to rising deployment of inverter-based, weather-dependent resources such as battery storage and solar energy, NERC said. 

“The overall resource adequacy outlook for the North American [bulk power system] is worsening,” the new report said. “Projections for resource and transmission growth lag what is needed to support new data centers and other large loads that drive escalating demand forecasts.” 

NERC called on industry, regulators and policymakers to speed the addition of new energy resources, manage the reliability risks of large load growth, improve coordination between electric and natural gas systems, and streamline siting and permitting of energy and transmission resources, among other recommendations. 

NRECA has advocated for such policy reforms. The association has backed legislation in Congress to ease the federal permitting process for energy projects and urged key agencies to remove regulatory threats to power generation and help electric cooperatives serve data centers and other large load growth. 

“Reliable and affordable electricity is the cornerstone of America’s national security and our economy,” Matheson said. “As electricity demand skyrockets, we urge policymakers to continue working with electric cooperatives to prioritize grid reliability and pursue smart energy policies that help set our nation on a more stable path.” 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Amid skyrocketing demand from residential growth and large industrial loads, an electric cooperative near Atlanta is helping test advanced long-duration energy storage technology to enhance reliability, maintain affordability and support new energy resources.

Covington, Georgia-based Snapping Shoals EMC welcomed the opportunity from technology developer Stryten Energy in neighboring Alpharetta to demonstrate a small vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) for safely storing electricity for up to six hours.

“The state of the electric grid today is evolving every day, and our equipment has to be able to change and respond much quicker than electric systems in the past,” said Shaun Mock, CEO of Snapping Shoals EMC.

“The Holy Grail is long-duration energy storage. Having a piece of equipment like a long-duration battery can help stabilize fluctuations and enable us to provide better service and manage costs.”

The VRFB system at Snapping Shoals is the first system manufactured and installed in the state of Georgia. While VRFB is in use in Australia and China, there are only a handful of such systems in the United States, making the co-op’s pilot significant to the advancement of the technology, Stryten said.

“Snapping Shoals has just been a tremendous help to us to take that first step and the second step and start to prove to the world that we need a new technology,” said Scott Childers, vice president of essential power at Stryten.

So how does VRFB work and what makes it different from the lithium-ion batteries that utilities across the country are using to run microgrids, shave energy demand peaks and fill in generation gaps?

The completely liquid-based VRFB is composed of two tanks of electrolytes—one positively charged, the other negatively charged—and a stack assembly where ion exchange and electron movement from one tank charges the system. The battery’s power is determined by the quantity of stacks, and its duration is based on tank size.

Childers likens the VRFB’s setup to that of an automobile. “If you want more horsepower, you get a bigger engine. Here, the number of stacks that you have in the system gives you your power that can be discharged at a given time,” he said. “If you want longer duration or more total energy, you just get bigger tanks filled up with more liquid.”

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, a VRFB is scalable to meet a utility’s growing needs. Stacks and tanks can be reconfigured independently to increase the amount of power and storage duration for up to 10 hours. A lithium-ion battery can store electricity for one to four hours and must be fully replaced with a larger one or multiple batteries to increase energy storage capacity.

Another significant difference is that a VRFB can last up to 20 years without losing capacity despite multiple daily charges and discharges. Lithium-ion batteries tend to be replaced within four years due to more wear-and-tear with each use.

“There’s really no limit to VRFB’s capacity,” said Childers. “It’s really kind of a question of how big a field do you have to put tanks in.”

Snapping Shoals offered clean concrete generation pads for the company to install a 20- kilowatt/120 kilowatt-hour system when it agreed to pilot the battery technology last August.

“This is what cooperative innovation looks like when the grid has no time to wait,” said Jennah Denney, senior program manager of technology integration at NRECA. “As demand accelerates from growth, electrification and large loads, co-ops are actively testing solutions that can scale, adapt and perform over decades.”

As new houses, businesses, rooftop solar, electric vehicles and large industrials, including data centers, proliferate across the co-op’s system, Mock envisions multiple applications of the technology to reduce the strain on the grid.

VFRB may provide prepacked solutions for redundancy to hospitals, schools or large industrial or commercial consumers. It can also help reduce outage times, blunt power market price spikes and back up intermittent renewables, he said.

“The flexibility of our power supply structure enables us to explore new technologies,” said Mock. “The world is changing, and we all need to have every available resource to us in order to meet the demand.”

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

The House has passed two significant permitting reform bills that would help protect affordable power nationwide by reducing delays for electric cooperatives making crucial improvements to their systems.

“Federal environmental permitting has become increasingly complex, unpredictable and unworkable over time,” said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. “It interferes with co-op efforts to maintain the infrastructure that is essential to keeping the lights on and build new infrastructure to meet growing demand. These hurdles delay critical projects and can significantly increase costs for electric co-op consumers.” 

But bills passed by the House over the past eight days offer solutions to those problems, Matheson said.  

House members voted 221-196 on Dec. 18 to approve the bipartisan Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, which would streamline the requirements imposed by the National Environmental Policy Act on electric co-ops applying for federal permits to build new generation, transmission and distribution capacity, strengthen existing systems or perform crucial maintenance work.  

The bill’s lead sponsors, House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., and Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, say it would shorten permitting timelines and reduce the frequency of “frivolous litigation” that stymies construction of vital infrastructure.  

In another important change, co-ops would no longer have to go through the NEPA review process every time they get federal grants or other types of funding for an improvement project.

“The passage of the SPEED Act is a win for America,” Westerman said. “For too long, America’s broken permitting process has stifled economic growth and innovation. To build the infrastructure needed to deliver affordable energy to American families and defend against 21st-century threats, we must fix this process. The SPEED Act will encourage investment, bring certainty to permitting, end abusive litigation, and allow America to build again.”

The House also voted 221-205 on Dec. 11 to pass the Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today (PERMIT) Act, which was introduced by House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo., and Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga. The NRECA-supported bill would improve permitting under the Clean Water Act by cutting red tape and providing greater regulatory certainty for co-ops that obtain permits. 

“The PERMIT Act is a package of commonsense reforms to Clean Water Act permitting processes that will help lower construction costs and utility bills, speed up infrastructure project timelines and provide greater regulatory certainty,” Graves said after the bill passed.  

“The reforms in the PERMIT Act will have immediate impact on energy producers, the agriculture industry, home and road builders, water utilities, and everyday Americans who have to navigate complex and confusing permitting processes.” 

Both bills must still be passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump. 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright reiterated the Trump administration’s support for the Lower Snake River dams in a visit to Washington state, highlighting the dams’ ability to provide affordable power to millions of Americans, including electric cooperative consumer-members. 

On Dec. 4, Wright traveled to the Ice Harbor Dam in southeastern Washington, where he emphasized the importance of hydroelectric power. Together, the four Lower Snake River dams can generate over 3,000 megawatts of reliable, affordable and carbon-free electricity and supply power to 52 electric co-ops in eight Western states. 

The last visit from a top government official to the dams was from President George W. Bush in 2003, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Walla Walla district office. 

“The hydropower assets in Washington state and the Pacific Northwest are why you’ve got well below national average electricity prices here,” Wright said during his visit, which included a stop at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The Trump administration wants to do everything we can to keep it that way. We want the thriving economy in Washington state and affordable electricity prices everywhere and always.” 

After extensive advocacy by NRECA, President Donald Trump in June revoked a Biden administration agreement from 2023 that paved the way for breaching the federally owned Lower Snake River dams over concerns about their impacts on endangered salmon populations. 

Among other things, the Biden-era memorandum required the dams to decrease electric output and allocated millions of dollars in funding for pro-breach studies, mitigation and replacement power. However, the ultimate authority to breach the dams lies with Congress. 

The dams are a major source of low-cost, reliable, carbon-free power at a time of growing electricity demand in the region. They also provide navigation, irrigation and recreation benefits, and breaching the dams would adversely affect farmers, the transportation sector and economically disadvantaged rural communities, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson has testified in Congress. 

“The Lower Snake River dams are essential to keeping the lights on across the northwest United States,” Matheson said Dec. 4. “Secretary Wright’s visit to the Lower Snake River dams reflects this administration’s acute understanding of the critical role the dams play in supporting the region’s economy.” 

“We thank President Trump and Secretary Wright for prioritizing smart energy policies that keep the lights on at a cost people can afford.” 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Smart, cross-government policies are essential for electric cooperatives’ ability to serve growing demand from data centers and other large loads while keeping energy affordable and reliable for consumer-members, NRECA told federal regulators Nov. 21. 

Co-ops’ ability to meet that demand “is vital to ensuring America wins the race to be the world’s leader in artificial intelligence,” the association said in separate comments to the Department of Energy and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 

NRECA provided input on the DOE’s Speed-to-Power Initiative, which aims to accelerate the addition of electricity resources to serve large energy users. 

The comments highlighted how co-ops are “at the heart of data center development,” often serving rural areas with large tracts of land that can accommodate those facilities. Co-ops also offer essential electric, water and fiber network infrastructure at much lower costs than suburban providers. 

But the swift rise in demand from data centers and other large loads is challenging co-ops. Many generation and transmission co-ops serve annual peak loads of 1,000-2,000 megawatts. But co-ops are being approached to serve new loads of 500-1,000 MW each, with some fielding multiple requests. 

Building new generation and transmission to meet that demand is difficult, with co-ops facing a host of permitting, planning and supply chain challenges. They’re also at risk of stranded investments if large loads do not come to fruition or fail to use as much electricity as expected. 

NRECA called for policies that address those risks and to maintain co-op access to federal tax incentives and government funding for infrastructure projects. 

“We urge a whole-of-government approach to ensure the federal regulations, policies and incentives are aligned to enable cooperatives and other utilities to make the investments needed to not only serve large loads at the scale and pace required for the U.S. to win the AI race, but to also protect affordability and reliability on the grid for all Americans,” NRECA told the DOE. 

NRECA also filed comments Nov. 21 on a separate rulemaking at FERC to standardize the commission’s policies for connecting large loads to the grid. Such policies must support bulk power system reliability and respect the importance of local control to electric co-ops, the association said. 

NRECA asked FERC not to intrude on state and local authority over retail electric sales to large loads. If FERC seeks new authority there, it should allow for regional flexibility on how to serve those customers, the comments stated. 

The association also said large loads should “pay their own way” when connecting to the interstate transmission system and that other transmission customers should not be saddled with stranded costs—expenses that would ultimately be borne by co-op consumer-members. 

“Other transmission customers should not bear stranded transmission costs for upgrades made to accommodate the interconnection of a large load that fails to materialize, does not operate as anticipated, or ceases operation,” NRECA told FERC. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Soaring power demand, including from data centers and the electrification of the economy, could contribute to energy supply shortfalls in some areas during extreme weather this winter, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned on Tuesday. 

The report echoed other recent assessments from NERC, including longer-term outlooks, that expect sufficient energy resources during normal conditions but potential supply shortfalls and power outages under more intense weather. Those threats to reliability stem partly from a large number of fossil fuel power plant retirements in the U.S., as well as surging demand from data centers and other large loads. 

“This report clearly shows that demand for electricity is skyrocketing—especially in areas serving new data centers—and reliability is still at risk,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “The addition of new resources, though significant, isn’t keeping up. Now more than ever, we need smart energy policies that keep the lights on and address this growing energy deficit.” 

In NERC’s winter reliability report released Nov. 18, all areas assessed by the grid watchdog are expected to have adequate energy resources during normal winter weather conditions.  

But amid shrinking power supply margins, more severe cold or wintry weather over a wide area could result in supply shortages, according to NERC. 

“Record-setting demand is anticipated for some areas and may strain the grid in areas with double-digit growth rates,” the grid watchdog said in a video on its new report. 

Areas at elevated risk of electricity supply shortfalls during extreme conditions this winter include the Pacific Northwest, Texas, New England and much of the Southeast. New England also faces risks to natural gas pipeline capacity in the event of extreme weather. 

Peak demand for all areas NERC assesses has increased by 20 gigawatts, or 2.5%, since the previous winter, surpassing a 9.4 GW net gain in bulk power system resources. The vast majority of net capacity additions—or 8.1 GW—is from demand response resources, which can encourage customers to reduce their energy usage, rather than generation. 

Some of the regions in NERC’s assessment are forecasting almost 10% demand growth. Areas with the biggest forecasted peak demand increases include the Southeast, parts of the West and the PJM Interconnection, which spans sections of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. 

NERC noted that freezing temperatures can threaten natural gas-based generation and fuel supplies, particularly in the South. It urged natural gas utilities to prepare for severe cold and advised utilities and grid operators to require freeze protection measures and other cold weather preparedness plans. 

“Electricity demand continues to grow faster than the resources being added to the grid, especially during the most extreme winter conditions where actual demand can topple forecasts,” said John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessments and performance analysis. “This latest assessment highlights progress on cold weather readiness but underscores that more work remains to ensure energy and fuel supplies can be reliably delivered even during the harshest conditions.” 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Congress has increased funding from $6.5 billion to $7 billion for the Rural Utilities Service Electric Loan Program, which helps electric cooperatives pay for construction, improvement and modernization of their systems.  

The $500 million boost was approved as part of the deal that Congress reached to reopen the federal government after a record 45-day shutdown. Lawmakers passed fiscal 2026 spending bills for three federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its RUS programs. President Donald Trump signed the package into law Nov. 12. 

NRECA and electric co-ops pushed for the funding increase and will continue to advocate for more money for the program after the current spending bill ends on Sept. 30, said Hill Thomas, NRECA vice president for legislative affairs. 

“Electric co-ops use RUS loans to help finance infrastructure that provides reliable, affordable service to more than 42 million consumer-members in rural communities throughout America,” Thomas said. “The funding increase approved by Congress will help co-ops expand their systems to keep up with rising demand for electricity.” 

Co-ops also help reduce the federal deficit by paying interest on those loans to the U.S. Treasury, Thomas said. In 2024, they paid nearly $200 million in interest. 

The RUS Electric Loan Program dates back to 1936, when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act that created electric co-ops. RUS offers loans to not-for-profit co-ops at low interest rates. 

“Many co-ops rely on these loans to modernize their systems without having to raise rates dramatically to pay for the improvements,” Thomas said. 

As part of the deal to reopen the government, Congress also extended the existing Farm Bill for another year, through Sept. 30, 2026. Lawmakers last passed a five-year Farm Bill in 2018. They have been unable to agree on a new one, opting instead to extend the 2018 legislation each year for the past three years.  

The Farm Bill authorizes crucial RUS funding for co-ops and helps accelerate broadband deployment across rural America. 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Great River Energy’s Priti Patel was standing in a Minnesota cornfield, the ground matted and ready for seven big cement trucks to pour the foundation for a 180-mile high-voltage transmission line, when she fully realized the project’s promise.  

“It really hit me as I was in the middle of this field—in the middle of someone’s property—that we’re all in this together to build and ensure the future grid,” said Patel, vice president and chief transmission officer for the Maple Grove-based generation and transmission cooperative. 

After over five years of study, public meetings and achieving regulatory approvals, the $1.4 billion Northland Reliability Project is being built across northern and central Minnesota to deliver 3,000 megawatts to the power-hungry Midwest by 2030.  

This double-circuit-capable, 345-kV transmission line will carry electricity from a wide energy portfolio across the region to serve Great River Energy’s 26 member distribution cooperatives and the entire Midwest. 

“This project will move energy from natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar batteries, to where it’s needed and when,” said Patel. “It will keep the lights on across the Midwest and enhance the stability of the grid as well.” 

Patel and other officials from Great River Energy and investor-owned Minnesota Power broke ground in October on the historic project that will connect to substation assets owned by both utilities. 

“We’ve had a collaborative relationship for a long time to help serve customers together,” said Dan Gunderson, vice president of transmission and distribution at Minnesota Power. 

“That relationship really leads to sometimes larger, more robust solutions for transmission planning, which essentially that’s what the Northland Reliability Project is. It’s connecting two disparate regions together to solve some important problems related to reliability.” 

The project is the first to launch under the regional transmission operator MISO’s long-range plan for 18 projects in nine states to bolster grid reliability.  

“Because of the new backbone we’re building to meet the evolution of generation and increased demand, power will flow from Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Illinois—all the states with these initial MISO-approved transmission projects—to support reliability not only in northern Minnesota but the broader region,” said Patel.   

Benefits to Great River Energy member co-ops and their consumer-members are expected to more than compensate for the project’s cost, which will be spread across the MISO RTO territory. 

According to an economic impact study from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, the project will add $705.3 million in employee wages and benefits and produce more than $1 billion in value-added spending, such as taxes, labor and capital, statewide from 2023 to 2030. On average, 246 jobs will be directly supported by the Northland Reliability Project each year.  

The six-county region hosting the project will also see a significant economic boost, including $366.3 million in increased employee wages and benefits, the study said.  

The G&T locally hired labor and resourced materials, where possible, to aid impacted communities. “To us, they represent families, they represent small business, and we’ve been really intentional about creating positive economic benefits wherever we can,” said Patel. 

Just as it’s geared to handle escalating demand from large industrial loads and overall electrification, the Northland Reliability Project is also being built to endure increasingly extreme weather sweeping the Midwest. The conductor is more resistant to icing, one of the biggest threats to transmission line resiliency in Minnesota, and the project’s overall structures and foundations are designed to withstand extraordinary wind speeds. 

But long before the project’s engineering, Great River Energy was building a foundation of public trust and engagement with members at the end of the line. The G&T went beyond the regulatory requirement for public hearings and held at least 20 open houses, where challenges and solutions were discussed among a wide array of stakeholders. 

“The key to future success is early-and-often engagement in the impacted communities,” said Patel. “We met with every county board, township, snowmobile organization, ATV club, mountain biking club. If any landowner wanted to meet with us one-on-one, we met with them on their terms.” 

As evidence, surrounded by cornstalks, she witnessed the launch of the largest coordinated transmission buildout since the electrification of the Midwest. 

“Success with projects like this start and end with communities.” Patel said. “But for the grace of our communities and our landowners are we able to build for the reliability of the future.”  

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

Leaders from several electric cooperatives gathered at the Department of the Interior on Monday as the Trump administration announced new steps to bolster energy reliability and affordability amid climbing power demand. 

As part of the actions, the Environmental Protection Agency will propose extending compliance timelines for its power plant wastewater rule. The EPA will also seek public input on how to streamline implementation of its regional haze rule. 

Both rules pose operational and cost challenges for some co-ops and risk the premature retirement of needed generation. 

“As electricity demand skyrockets, smart energy policies that help keep the lights on are more important than ever,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “Today’s announcements give electric co-ops important flexibility to reliably meet growing energy needs at a cost local families and businesses can afford.” 

The wastewater rule requires plants to install unproven and prohibitively expensive technologies after utilities have already made substantial investments to comply with prior standards. 

The rule was among those that NRECA asked the EPA to reconsider after President Donald Trump took office in January, with the EPA already taking action this year to roll back or revise the Biden administration’s power plant greenhouse gas rule and emissions standards for mercury and nitrogen oxide. 

Also on Monday, the Department of Energy said it will provide $625 million to support coal-fired power plants. More than half the funding is set aside to recommission or modernize existing units, with the rest available for advanced wastewater management systems and enabling coal plants to co-fire with other fuels.  

The Interior Department also said it will open more federal lands for coal production leases.  

The agency actions come as the North American Electric Reliability Corp. projects peak power demand to jump 17% in the next decade while over 115,000 megawatts of always-available generation—enough to power about 100 million homes—is expected to retire. Demand growth in the coming years could be further accelerated as new data centers come online. 

“In recent years, misguided energy policies have forced essential power plants off the grid, while electricity demand surged,” Matheson said. “We thank the administration for moving swiftly to respond to growing energy needs with an emphasis on new tools, flexibility and a pro-energy policy agenda.”  

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

When an unusually disastrous ice storm hit Northern Michigan in late March, Cherryland Electric Cooperative was ready to help its hard-hit co-op neighbors with line crews, engineers, communicators—and drones. 

“The affected co-ops were telling us, ‘We can’t even get around our territory, the damage is just so devastating, literally you’ll drive into an area and five trees will fall down behind you and you’re having to turn around and cut your way back out,’” Cherryland CEO Rachel Johnson said. “At that point, I said, ‘Hey, we have drones.’” 

The Grawn-based co-op’s Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) program proved pivotal for safe and efficient mutual aid to Boyne City-based Great Lakes Energy Cooperative, Onaway-based Presque Isle Electric & Gas Co-op and Cadillac-based Wolverine Power Cooperative, the wholesale generation and transmission provider. 

Having drones “let us accelerate the pace of their damage assessment about threefold,” said Johnson. “When there’s a storm where it’s really hard to move vehicles and people around, having a person stand in one place and inspect miles of line clearly has both a timing and safety advantage.”  

Cherryland, working with Northwestern Michigan College, launched drones over a two-week period along rugged rights of way deep into ice-coated forests to spot widespread ruin after the unseasonable winter blast. The school’s “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLS) federal flight exemption allowed the drones to capture images of 50 poles on average per flight with zoom and infrared capability cameras on 25-minute batteries.   

“It was a very, very new experience for the co-ops up here to utilize drones in that manner,” said Zach Endres, Cherryland’s communications control field engineer who piloted a drone during the initial mutual aid recovery effort. Later, armed with maps, Endres guided the NMC pilots through the co-ops’ territory and drafted damage reports.  

“The first couple days of the storm was definitely the most dangerous,” Endres said. “There was still a lot of ice holding on the lines and poles and trees, and branches were breaking off. You’re flying the drone and all of a sudden you just hear a crack. You always had to keep your head on a swivel and pay attention to your surroundings.” 

Cherryland first digitized its power line and pole inspection reports in 2019, then tested the use of drones for aerial maintenance shots and got five staff UAS licensed at the college, which has a robust drone pilot training program. The co-op began testing the program in 2022. 

Last year, Cherryland and NMC entered an agreement in which college trainees conduct aerial inspections of the co-op’s transmission infrastructure and take up to 40 images of poles. The school’s BVLS exemption allows their pilots to fly drones farther and inspect dozens of poles in a single day. A contractor downloads the data for the co-op’s reports.  

The results to date show that Cherryland is meeting its goals of greater safety, efficiency and reliability: Nearly 7,000 poles have been inspected with 40% less field work at an annual savings of $45,000. The co-op is on target to eventually cut in half its 14-year pole and line inspection cycle.  

Endres foresees a time when drones can be strategically placed on the co-op’s system and deployed from the office and artificial intelligence will analyze the images captured by the drone and provide a damage assessment within minutes. “That’s kind of where I imagine the drone program going,” he said. “You won’t need a physical pilot in the field.” 

That could be especially useful for co-ops, where drone pilot may be one too many roles for staff to play. Cherryland temporarily shelved its drone program before partnering with NMC and seeing it bloom.  

“We realized we couldn’t possibly do what we needed to do with our internal staff and the program just kind of sat for a couple years,” said Johnson, who credits “the scrappy, gritty creativeness” of the co-op team with bringing it back to life.  

Cherryland also uses its UAS operations to help grow the next-generation co-op workforce. The co-op finds that its drones with their video game-like controls captivate middle and high schoolers at career fairs.  

“Everybody’s like, ‘Wait a minute, now that looks like a job I could get excited about because it doesn’t seem stodgy and old; it feels fun and cutting edge,’” Johnson said. “It helps us with setting up a longer-term talent pipeline of people who might think a little differently about coming to work for their local co-op.” 

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson issued the following statement on today’s actions by the Trump administration to protect grid reliability by safeguarding reliable and affordable power.

“As electricity demand skyrockets, smart energy policies that help keep the lights on are more important than ever,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “Today’s announcements give electric co-ops important flexibility to reliably meet growing energy needs at a cost local families and businesses can afford. In recent years, misguided energy policies have forced essential power plants off the grid, while electricity demand surged. We thank the administration for moving swiftly to respond to growing energy needs with an emphasis on new tools, flexibility and a pro-energy policy agenda.” 

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation projected that peak power needs are expected to increase 17% over the next 10 years, and newly announced projects—particularly data centers—will drive that number even higher. In the meantime, more than 115,000 megawatts of always-available generation—enough to power about 100 million homes—is expected to retire over the next decade.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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Electric cooperatives need sound land management policies and continued federal investment in wildfire mitigation to help combat the growing threat of wildfires, a Montana co-op leader told lawmakers Sept. 17 at a Capitol Hill briefing. 

Missoula Electric Cooperative General Manager Mark Hayden joined other electric utility leaders to brief the Congressional Western Caucus on the challenge of wildfires. 

Hayden, whose Missoula-based co-op serves 14,000 members, said the threat of wildfires is “becoming more and more urgent” as new homes and businesses come to the region. The co-op’s territory is adjacent to forested federal lands, and Missoula County has a higher wildfire risk than 96% of U.S. counties. 

But wildfires are not just a Western problem, the utility executives observed. 

“I’m here today to represent not just Missoula Electric, but roughly 900 other co-ops situated across the country,” Hayden said. 

He called on Congress to extend strict liability caps for utilities for wildfire incidents on federal lands that are set to expire in 2028. Hayden also recommended codifying Trump administration policies to expedite approval of wildfire prevention projects, such as hazard tree removals and undergrounding power lines, so those processes remain in place under future administrations.  

He also underscored the value of federal infrastructure investment authorized by the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 for co-op projects to address wildfire risk. 

Once those projects are completed, “my cooperative and several others will be better positioned to address fire risk for decades to come,” he said. 

The Trump administration and Congress have taken steps this year to make it easier for electric co-ops to harden their systems against wildfires and remove trees and other vegetation that can fuel fires. 

President Donald Trump ordered land management agencies to expedite wildfire mitigation permitting and approvals. The House passed the Fix Our Forests Act in January, and the Senate introduced its version of the bill in April, both of which would make the expedited permitting processes law. 

Hayden also urged support for the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, which would streamline National Environmental Policy Act requirements for co-op generation, transmission, distribution and system maintenance projects that need federal permits. 

Further relief is necessary to support co-ops, he emphasized. 

“I was out here in 2015 to talk about permitting reform and vegetation management,” Hayden said. “We’ve made progress, but that progress has been very, very slow over those years.” 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA is urging the Environmental Protection Agency to move quickly on its proposed repeal of the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas rule for power plants, citing the steep costs and reliability risks that electric cooperatives face under the regulation.

NRECA filed comments Aug. 7 with the EPA supporting the agency’s June proposal to roll back the 2024 power plant rule as well as all previous greenhouse gas standards for fossil fuel power plants.

“Repealing the unlawful power plant rule is an essential step to ensure the reliability of the electric grid and meet skyrocketing energy demands,” said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. “Always-available generation is critical to keeping the lights on at a cost local families and businesses can afford. And until the Biden rule is repealed, it remains in effect and is a source of severe uncertainty for electric cooperatives.”

He urged the Trump administration “to move swiftly to finalize this proposed repeal.”

The Biden-era standards require existing coal-fired plants and many new natural gas plants to eventually capture 90% of carbon emissions. The 2024 rule also requires certain existing coal plants to be 40% co-fired with natural gas by 2030.

Those requirements are unachievable and unlawful and will force the early retirement of needed generation while limiting new natural gas capacity at a time of climbing electricity demand, NRECA says.

Swiftly finalizing the proposed repeal “would help alleviate the substantial challenges electric cooperatives continue to encounter as they attempt to navigate [the 2024 rule’s] compliance requirements while reliably and affordably meeting skyrocketing demand growth,” NRECA’s comments stated.

“If [the rule] is allowed to remain in effect, the result would be significant curtailment of reliable, dispatchable resources” and “significant hurdles to the financing and permitting of much-needed new natural gas generation,” NRECA said. “The sooner the administration can alleviate these hurdles, the sooner more generation can be added to the system to preserve affordable and reliable electricity.”

The Trump administration’s June proposal included an alternative plan for regulating greenhouse gas emissions that would repeal most of the Biden rule, including the 90% carbon capture and storage requirements, which NRECA supports. But it would maintain non-CCS-based emissions limits for new natural gas plants, which NRECA opposes.

“These emissions standards are not achievable in real world operation and will only become less achievable as natural gas plants increasingly cycle with greater frequency to support intermittent generation and support data centers and other large loads,” NRECA said. “Retaining these standards is diametrically opposed to the administration’s vision of unleashing American energy, as the unachievable emissions standards would arbitrarily cap how often new natural gas plants can operate.”

NRECA staff writer Erin Kelly contributed to this report.

A new permitting reform bill introduced in the House would help protect reliable power nationwide by reducing delays for electric cooperatives making improvements to their systems, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said in a letter to congressional leaders supporting the legislation. 

The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act would streamline the requirements imposed by the National Environmental Policy Act on electric co-ops applying for federal permits to build new generation, transmission and distribution capacity, strengthen existing systems or perform crucial maintenance work. 

The lead sponsors of the bill, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., and Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, say it would shorten permitting timelines and reduce the frequency of “frivolous litigation” that holds up construction of crucial infrastructure. 

One of the big changes in the bill is that receiving federal grants or other types of funding would no longer automatically trigger NEPA, meaning co-ops wouldn’t have to go through the review process every time they get federal money for an improvement project. 

“NEPA has become increasingly complex, unpredictable, and unworkable over time,” Matheson wrote in a July 30 letter to Westerman and Golden. 

“The SPEED Act includes much-needed reforms to modernize environmental permitting and support electric co-ops’ energy development … Prolonged environmental reviews and legal challenges not only delay these new projects but also hinder vegetation management and routine maintenance for existing systems.” 

The delays and hurdles created by NEPA increase costs for not-for-profit co-ops, which are forced to pass them on to consumer-members, Matheson said. He urged Congress to pass the bill. 

“The SPEED Act offers meaningful solutions … These reforms would ensure agencies concentrate on direct, foreseeable environmental impacts within their expertise and legal mandate.” 

The bill’s introduction comes as federal agencies under the Trump administration are releasing new NEPA procedures that will simplify the permitting process for co-ops’ energy and broadband projects. 

NRECA has welcomed those changes while also lobbying Congress to update the law for a more permanent fix. 

NEPA is well-intentioned, Westerman said, but it has become “bad for both our environment and the economy.” 

“With commonsense upgrades, we can cut red tape and enable the United States to build once again while setting the standard for environmental stewardship,” the chairman said.  

“The SPEED Act will help launch America into a future where we can effectively innovate and implement to revitalize our infrastructure, meet skyrocketing energy demands, lead the world in the AI race and work in harmony with our natural environment.” 

Golden said that “being a good steward of our environment doesn’t mean we must tolerate a yearslong permitting process that is onerous, overly complex and ripe for litigation abuse.” 

“America must get back into the business of building,” the congressman said. “We need modern infrastructure. We need robust power production that does not discriminate between energy sources. These investments will create jobs, support our economy, keep prices down and help us maintain energy independence.” 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Streamlining the federal permitting process is crucial to ensuring that electric cooperatives can modernize their systems to meet rising demand for electricity and broadband in America’s rural communities, a Kentucky co-op leader told a House panel Tuesday.

“Without permitting reform, it is increasingly likely that our communities will experience more rolling blackouts—something that was unthinkable when I began my career in this industry—while also being forced to pay the costs of project delays,” Tony Campbell, CEO of East Kentucky Power Cooperative, told the House Natural Resources Committee.

“For the people who use the electricity EKPC generates and transmits, power outages mean they are left in the dark and exposed to the cold or heat … Certainly, extended outages during extreme temperatures can become matters of public health and safety, resulting in pain and suffering for the most vulnerable populations.”

Campbell praised the committee for its leadership in passing improvements to the National Environmental Policy Act permitting process as part of the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act.

That bill, Campbell noted, included enforceable deadlines for environmental reviews, greater opportunities for co-ops to engage with federal agencies about their projects and a more streamlined process to build projects that are deemed to have a low impact on the environment.

“These changes represent a significant step toward improving the efficiency and predictability of the federal permitting process, helping to accelerate critical infrastructure development,” Campbell told the lawmakers.

Recently, there was more progress on permitting reform as federal agencies—reflecting reforms by Congress and court rulings—released new NEPA procedures that will simplify the process for co-ops to get permits for energy and broadband projects. The changes reflect years of advocacy by NRECA and electric co-ops.

Still, Campbell said, more needs to be done to bolster the impact of those changes. Among the recommendations that Campbell offered on behalf of NRECA:

• Limit unnecessary litigation of NEPA reviews. Currently, anyone who wants to file a lawsuit to challenge a project has up to six years to do so after an agency has given its final approval. This long statute of limitations has been used to block infrastructure investment projects indefinitely, Campbell said. He urged Congress to impose reasonable time limits on litigation.

• Keep NEPA neutral on procedures and technology. As the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced in a recent ruling on NEPA, the law was never intended to dictate policy outcomes, only to ensure an informed decision-making process, Campbell said. Agencies should not be compelled to favor one energy source over another unless required by statute, he said.

• Further clarify the scope of NEPA reviews. NEPA reviews should focus on direct, foreseeable environmental effects that are within an agency’s legal jurisdiction, Campbell said. In the past, he said, agencies too often expanded their reviews far beyond the scope of their authority.

Addressing these problems is important for America’s economy, said Campbell, whose Winchester-based generation and transmission co-op provides power to 16 distribution co-ops that serve over 1 million consumer-members across 89 Kentucky counties.

“There is no scenario in which the United States remains the premier innovator in technology development, the leader in state-of-the-art health care, or the home of industrial strength that is not predicated upon an open, robust and resilient energy infrastructure,” he said. “But accomplishing these things requires using commonsense governance to encourage investment in our energy future.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA is urging the Treasury Department to maintain its current rules for determining whether electric cooperatives and other utilities have started construction on new wind and solar projects in time to qualify for crucial federal tax credits. 

Any changes to Treasury’s “beginning of construction” rules would complicate co-ops’ ability to access the credits, raising costs or forcing co-ops to abandon projects at a time of growing electricity demand, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson warned. 

“The tax credits help to make projects possible for electric cooperatives that would otherwise not pencil out or would result in steep rate hikes for their consumer-members,” Matheson said in a July 15 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law July 4, moved up deadlines for wind and solar projects to start construction in order to qualify for energy tax incentives but did not take away co-ops’ ability to access those credits through an elective-pay option. 

NRECA asked Treasury to implement the new law without changing its existing start-of-construction rules, which consider construction to have begun if significant physical work on the project has started or the developer meets a “safe harbor” test where it has paid or incurred at least 5% of the total project cost. 

In an executive order on July 7, the White House directed Treasury to restrict safe harbors for wind and solar facilities “unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.” The order gave Treasury 45 days from the new law’s signing to issue guidance. 

Matheson said keeping Treasury’s current start-of-construction rules is “critical to mitigating the inevitable risk that comes with building any energy infrastructure—from permitting delays to supply chain challenges to severe weather—all of which can impact construction schedules.” 

“Changing the rules now would significantly alter the financing structures for these long-planned projects and likely result in cooperatives abandoning the projects or incurring more debt to cover the increased costs—which must ultimately be passed on to their consumer-members,” Matheson said. 

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar projects can qualify for the full value of the current tax credits if they are already under construction or start construction within a year of the bill’s signing. Projects that begin construction after that 12-month window must be placed in service by the end of 2027 to be eligible for a tax credit. 

The new law maintains credits past 2030 for nuclear energy, carbon capture, batteries and hydropower. 

“At a time when the grid needs every megawatt possible, these tax credits provide a critical tool to America’s electric cooperatives as they strive to add energy to the grid and support President Trump’s vision for Unleashing American Energy,” Matheson concluded. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

After years of advocacy by NRECA and electric co-ops, federal agencies are releasing new National Environmental Policy Act procedures that will simplify permitting of cooperatives’ energy and broadband projects. 

The Trump administration’s new procedures, which reflect recent NEPA reforms from Congress and court rulings on the law, will benefit a wide range of co-op projects. Reviews under NEPA frequently take years to complete and are required when a project needs a government permit or receives federal grants or loans. 

“The announcements deliver what we’ve been requesting for years—simplified, streamlined agency procedures that will allow us to more quickly get projects reviewed and approved,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “This change will benefit all 900 electric cooperatives and will help streamline many co-op projects from Rural Utilities Service loan applications, building new generation, expanding new distribution infrastructure and more.” 

On July 1, updated NEPA procedures were released by the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, the Interior, Energy, Transportation and Defense, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

The reforms will help expedite infrastructure development and cut project costs by: 

• Setting deadlines and page limits on NEPA environmental reviews, as required by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (two years and 150 pages for environmental impact statements; one year and 75 pages for environmental assessments). 

• Clarifying that NEPA does not apply to every federal action. 

• Allowing agencies to more easily create and adopt “categorical exclusions” for activities that do not have significant environmental impacts. 

The NEPA changes will take some time to play out as agencies work to implement them over the coming weeks and months. 

The new actions came after President Donald Trump directed the White House Council on Environmental Quality in January to provide guidance to agencies on simplifying and expediting the NEPA permitting process.  

The new procedures also follow a recent Supreme Court decision clarifying that agencies generally must only consider the environmental effects of the project they are reviewing rather than study indirect impacts beyond their authority.  

NRECA had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case urging better guardrails around the law’s application. 

“For years NRECA has advocated for more efficient and predictable NEPA reviews and permitting processes that are essential for modernizing our nation’s infrastructure,” NRECA Regulatory Affairs Director Viktoria Seale said. “This overhaul implements bipartisan amendments to NEPA in 2023 that will focus the scope of environmental reviews and expedite them.” 

Co-ops have testified before Congress on the need for permitting reforms to help them meet growing demand for reliable, affordable power and high-speed internet service. Many of their recommended reforms were included in the new agency procedures, including the time limits for NEPA reviews. 

But more changes are needed to speed infrastructure development, including policies to limit litigation that could delay crucial projects, Seale said. 

 “NRECA will continue to advocate for common-sense reforms such as reasonable time limits for filing lawsuits and requiring parties wishing to challenge a NEPA review to have raised their concerns during the public comment period,” she said.  

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

As nationwide demand for electricity skyrockets, a wide variety of energy sources—including coal—are crucial to keeping the lights on, an Arizona electric cooperative leader told a House panel Thursday.

“Communities throughout our service territory experience extremely hot summers that cause a high demand for electricity,” Michelle Freeark, executive director of regulatory affairs and corporate services at Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment.

“Energy market prices often soar due to high demand or during adverse reliability events, such as wildfires.”

The ability to use coal as part of its energy mix ensures that AEPCO can meet summer demand at affordable rates, she testified at the hearing on the beneficial uses of coal ash.

“The cost of electricity is of particular concern to AEPCO because roughly one-third of our members’ residential consumers live below the federal poverty line,” Freeark said.

The generation and transmission co-op, which serves distribution co-ops and other customers in Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico, is building new natural gas units and solar-plus-battery energy storage systems to expand and diversify its generation portfolio, Freeark said.

“Renewable energy sources … can play a strategic role in the Western energy grid, but reliable and dispatchable generation sources, including coal and natural gas, are necessary to carry out our mission of providing safe, reliable, competitively priced power to electric co-ops in the Southwest,” she said.

“Coal also offers energy security benefits because the fuel is readily available on the ground as opposed to pipeline fuel or intermittent renewable resources.”

The Benson-based co-op owns and operates a coal-fired generating facility, Apache Generating Station, in Cochise, Arizona.

Freeark said a regulation known as the “legacy rule” that was finalized last year by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate coal ash “adopts a one-size-fits-all approach that is not supported by EPA’s risk analyses and will result in massive costs to the utility industry.”

“These costs will eventually be borne by rural end-users in cooperative service areas. EPA’s approach and the associated costs and regulatory requirements will exacerbate challenges to the reliable delivery of electricity.”

Freeark commended the EPA’s recent decision to reconsider the coal ash rule and said the co-op hopes to work with the Trump administration “to develop workable and cost-effective revisions.”

 “In the meantime, we support an immediate delay of the legacy rule compliance deadlines,” she said.

Freeark said AEPCO’s Apache coal-fired plant has worked closely with the EPA over the years to comply with regulations for disposing of coal ash. A majority of the fly ash is sold to a tribal-owned entity, which recycles it into cement.

“By doing so, AEPCO reduces the amount of [coal ash] that is disposed in its regulated impoundments,” she said. “AEPCO supports this safe, alternative use of coal ash.”

Freeark cited a recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. forecasting that, over the next five years, all or parts of several states are at high risk of rolling blackouts during normal peak conditions.

“Flawed public policies that force the premature closure of existing power plants are a big reason for this threat.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision is expected to benefit electric cooperatives by making National Environmental Policy Act reviews of energy and broadband projects more predictable, NRECA says.

The ruling, which complements Congress’ 2023 changes to NEPA and the Trump administration’s efforts to expedite NEPA reviews and permitting, will help co-ops modernize their infrastructure to meet higher electricity demand and provide high-speed internet to more areas. 

NEPA reviews are often required for projects that need a permit or right-of-way authorization from the federal government or receive federal funding. Examples include generation and broadband projects that receive Department of Agriculture grants or loans, transmission lines that cross federal lands, or vegetation management in federal areas that can reduce wildfire risk. 

The Supreme Court’s May 29 unanimous decision could make NEPA reviews more focused and efficient by clarifying that agencies generally must only consider the environmental effects of the project they are reviewing, rather than study indirect impacts beyond their authority, NRECA Regulatory Affairs Director Viktoria Seale said. 

“The Supreme Court rightly recognized that a course correction on NEPA was needed and is providing much needed clarity,” Seale said.  

Seven County Infrastructure v. Eagle County —the first NEPA case that the court had taken up in 20 years—concerned a NEPA review conducted by the federal Surface Transportation Board for a new 88-mile rail line in Utah that would transport crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries. 

The D.C. Circuit had ruled that the board violated NEPA by limiting its analysis of the rail line’s upstream environmental impacts from oil drilling and downstream impacts from oil refining. 

But the Supreme Court last month said the board only had to address the environmental effects of constructing and operating the rail line. The decision also emphasized that courts should defer to agencies’ judgments on the scope and contents of NEPA documents. 

The court’s ruling, along with NEPA reforms included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, should help tighten environmental reviews and expedite permitting for many large co-op projects, Seale said. 

NRECA had filed a friend-of-the-court brief with other energy and business trade associations in the case describing how the NEPA process has stymied critical energy projects. 

The Seven County Infrastructure v. Eagle County ruling “is a major victory for commonsense and making NEPA reviews more predictable and efficient,” she said. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The Trump administration announced June 12 that it will halt efforts to breach the Lower Snake River dams in Washington state, helping protect over 3,000 megawatts of always-available, carbon-free hydropower that serves dozens of electric cooperatives in the West. 

President Donald Trump revoked a 2023 memorandum from former President Joe Biden that paved the way for breaching the dams and obligated Bonneville Power Administration ratepayers, including co-ops, to fund millions of dollars in pro-breach studies, mitigation and replacement power. Trump also rescinded the Biden administration’s Environmental Impact Statement process for reviewing dam operations and set the stage for a more inclusive review that involves all stakeholders, including co-ops. 

“President Trump’s announcement smartly helps preserve affordable, reliable electricity for families and businesses across the Pacific Northwest,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “Hydroelectric power is the reason the lights stay on in the region. And as demand for electricity surges across the nation, preserving access to always-available energy resources like hydropower is absolutely crucial.” 

The Lower Snake River dams supply power to 52 electric co-ops in eight Western states served by the BPA and produce enough electricity to power 2.4 million homes.  

While the ultimate authority to breach the dams stands with Congress, actions under the Biden administration paved the way to make the case for it. 

In late 2023, the Biden administration reached an agreement with environmental groups and tribal and state leaders that allocated millions of dollars and other federal resources toward the creation of renewable energy replacement projects. The pact stemmed from environmental and tribal plaintiffs’ concerns in a 2021 lawsuit that the dams threaten endangered salmon in the Columbia River System. 

Breaching the dams would take away a key source of reliable electricity in the Pacific Northwest at a time of growing power demand, Matheson testified to Congress in early 2024. It would also adversely impact agricultural producers, the transportation sector and disadvantaged rural communities, he said. 

“We appreciate the administration’s continuing commitment to smart energy policies and unleashing American energy,” Matheson said. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday proposed to repeal power sector greenhouse gas and mercury emissions rules that NRECA says threaten grid reliability and affordability for electric cooperatives and their members. 

The rules, which the Biden administration finalized in 2024, “are unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “And they will jeopardize the reliability of the electric grid for as long as they remain in effect.” 

The proposed repeals “are a welcome course correction that will help electric co-ops reliably meet skyrocketing energy needs and keep the lights on at a cost local families and businesses can afford,” Matheson said. 

The Trump administration’s main proposal for the greenhouse gas rule would repeal the 2024 regulation, which required many existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas-fueled plants to either install carbon capture and storage technologies, run at lower capacity or shut down. This proposal would also repeal all previously finalized greenhouse gas standards for fossil fuel power plants. 

NRECA and its members fought the 2024 regulation in court, saying the Biden-era rule exceeded the EPA’s authority and required the use of inadequately demonstrated CCS technology. Four large electric grid operators echoed NRECA’s concerns, stating in a friend-of-the-court brief that the rule will drive the early closure of crucial generation sources. 

The EPA on Wednesday also proposed repealing the Biden administration’s mercury and air rule. NRECA has called the rule a costly mandate with no appreciable health benefits that would force the premature retirement of some coal-fired units that are critical to electric reliability. 

Comments are due Aug. 7 for the greenhouse gas proposal and Aug. 11 for the proposed mercury and air rule repeal. 

“These rules force power plants into premature retirement and handcuff how often new natural gas plants can run,” Matheson said. “Both of them are textbook examples of a bad energy policy that compounds today’s reliability challenges.” 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Huge, electricity-gobbling data centers are being developed faster than the generation and transmission infrastructure needed to support them—a dilemma that threatens grid reliability, according to the 2025 State of Reliability assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. 

“A significant near-term reliability challenge … is the size and speed at which large data centers, typically developed to support the computing needs for AI and cryptocurrency mining, are expanding across the country,” the report says. 

Data centers are often built within two years—much faster than traditional industrial loads, the June 12 NERC report says.  

Electric cooperatives are increasingly seeing data centers coming into their rural territories, asking for large amounts of power to flow into their businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Many of them are owned by tech giants, including Google, Amazon and Meta. 

“Planning generation and transmission to accommodate such large step-changes in load is made even more complicated by the speculative nature of where and if these new facilities will be built,” NERC’s assessment says. 

At NRECA’s PowerXchange in March, co-op leaders who have dealt with data centers warned their colleagues to beware of real estate developers and other speculators who try to get a deal on power costs in order to attract a data center as a client. 

Unpredictable power usage by data centers underscores the need for more accurate tools to help grid operators prevent instability, the NERC report says. 

“Model analysis tools are used when planning to identify things like worst-case scenarios and how to deal with them … Better models of data center loads are needed to improve planning and preparations.” 

A 2024 report by the Department of Energy said data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to use up to 12% by 2028.  

“As more of this load interconnects [to the grid], the risk will continue to grow,” Jack Norris, an electrical engineer in performance analysis at NERC, said during a June 12 webinar on the State of Reliability assessment. 

NERC’s Large Load Task Force will recommend mitigation measures in a report to be released this fall.  

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency should improve its disaster response and recovery programs to better help electric cooperatives bounce back from floods, hurricanes and other catastrophes, NRECA told the agency on May 15. 

But with the future of the agency uncertain due to recent political decisions and leadership changes, NRECA emphasized that FEMA public assistance programs are crucial to ensure reliable and affordable power for co-op consumer-members in rural America and must be preserved. 

President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have both made statements questioning the future of FEMA, saying that states may be better positioned to handle natural disasters on their own. 

Removing access to federal resources from FEMA “would undermine power restoration efforts, negatively affect reliability, and ultimately increase the cost of electricity,” NRECA said in comments filed with the agency. “States play a vital role in disaster response, but they cannot replace FEMA’s essential function in delivering federal assistance.” 

However, the association outlined ways that FEMA could improve and speed co-op access to disaster relief funding. 

“The federal disaster assistance process needs to be more efficient and effective,” NRECA added. “The current timeline for FEMA reimbursement for co-ops is measured in years, not months. And, in some cases, it takes more than five years for electric co-ops to be reimbursed for disaster costs.” 

NRECA filed its comments after a FEMA review council in March asked for feedback on the public’s experiences with the agency during disasters. 

NRECA said FEMA should lower its per capita threshold for determining eligibility for public assistance. Co-ops must often build more infrastructure per consumer than utilities serving urban areas. Raising the per capita thresholds “would make it harder for cooperatives to qualify for federal aid, straining their limited resources and slowing disaster recovery,” NRECA stated. 

The association also urged FEMA to reduce delays in disbursing public assistance funds and reimburse interest on loans that co-ops and other parties need to recover from disasters until FEMA makes payments. 

FEMA should also extend protections to co-ops and other private nonprofits against unreasonable clawing back of public assistance funds and give eligible nonprofits direct access to FEMA resiliency funding programs, NRECA said. Access to those programs would allow co-ops to better strengthen their electric systems and reduce outages during disasters. 

Although improvements are needed, “eliminating FEMA would significantly hinder cooperatives’ ability to recover from disasters and keep electric costs affordable,” NRECA asserted. 

“Through reform, we can achieve President Trump’s vision of a resilient nation that uses taxpayer dollars efficiently and effectively,” NRECA concluded. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. is warning of potential energy supply shortfalls in parts of the U.S. this summer during periods of extreme weather amid climbing electricity demand and a changing resource mix. 

The warnings were part of NERC’s 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment released May 14, which evaluated generation resource and transmission system adequacy for June through September. 

All areas studied by NERC are expected to have adequate resources for normal summer peak load conditions. But several regions are at risk of electricity supply shortfalls during periods of more extreme summer weather, including New England, parts of the Midwest, the Southwest Power Pool and Texas. 

According to the report, weather services anticipate above-average temperatures across much of North America this summer and below-average precipitation in the Northwest and Midwest. 

Total peak electricity demand for the areas that NERC assesses has risen by over 10 gigawatts since last summer, more than double the previous year-to-year increase. At the same time, more than 7.4 GW of generator capacity has retired or become inactive for the upcoming summer, most of it natural gas- and coal-fired generation. 

Those losses are offset by over 40 GW in on-peak capacity gains from new solar, battery and wind installations, but “operators in many parts of the [bulk power system] face challenges in meeting higher demand this summer with a resource mix that, in general, has less flexibility and more variability,” the report noted.

“ As demand expands, grid planners and operators are doing more than ever, but they’re doing it under tighter reserve margins,” said John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment and performance analysis, in a May 14 webinar on the report. “While we’re adding a lot more resources—solar, batteries and other emerging technologies—the pace and performance of that buildout doesn’t yet fully align with the reliability needs of a rapidly electrifying economy.” 

To address potential electricity supply shortfalls, NERC encouraged transmission owners and relevant grid authorities to review their operating plans and operate conservatively to ensure adequate resource availability. 

The report also urged grid operators to be prepared for the potential of inverter-based resources including solar photovoltaic and battery capacity to unexpectedly trip during grid disturbances, such as short circuits or line breaks. 

“Once again, NERC identifies continuing threats to the electric grid that leave a large area of the country vulnerable to power supply disruptions during periods of extreme summer conditions,” said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. “Demand is surging, supply isn’t keeping up, and the resources being added to the grid aren’t as flexible and reliable as the always available generation they’re replacing. 

“Now more than ever, we need smart energy policies that prioritize reliability, affordability and put American consumers first. We look forward to continuing to work with policymakers to meet this challenge and keep the lights on across the nation.”

Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection has also warned of potential reliability issues in the event of higher-than-normal demand scenarios this summer. On May 9, PJM said it may need to reduce loads in the region by relying on contracted demand response resources if demand hits record levels. Demand response pays customers to reduce their electricity use in times of system emergencies. 

PJM’s summer assessment is the grid operator’s first where it sees available generation capacity in the area possibly falling short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario. 

NERC said its summer findings are consistent with risks and issues that it observed in its latest Long-Term Reliability Assessment, released in December. 

That report said that over half of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls in the next 10 years amid surging electricity demand and thermal plant retirements. NERC projected that capacity additions to the bulk power system in the next decade will fall short of demand growth. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Electric cooperatives are starting to receive the value of federal tax credits for innovative energy projects, helping them provide affordable, reliable power to their members and leveling the playing field with other utilities that already had access to such incentives. 

With input from NRECA and after years of advocacy, Congress in 2022 passed legislation enabling co-ops and other tax-exempt entities to access federal tax credits for certain energy projects through an elective-pay option. The incentives can sharply reduce costs for co-ops to build, own and operate eligible generation and energy storage projects. 

The credits also put co-ops on more even footing with energy developers that have long been able to tap federal tax credits for many of those resources. 

“Having access to these incentives levels the playing field so cooperatives can meet the evolving needs of our members, just like investor-owned utilities have been able to do for their customers,” said Doug Browne, chief financial officer for North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives. “Co-op members deserve innovation that strengthens the grid and provides benefits to rural communities, and these incentives allow us to do that while protecting affordability.” 

The Treasury Department issued a final rule on elective pay in 2024. Raleigh-based NCEMC then applied for and received a direct payment of $10.4 million to support the costs of the first tranche of battery energy storage systems that NCEMC and 10 of its distribution co-ops are building at substations. 

The battery storage systems total 40 megawatt/80 megawatt-hours and will enhance grid resilience in rural communities. 

The elective-pay credits reduced total project costs by more than 20%, “a benefit shared by all NCEMC members and their consumers,” Browne said. “Investment tax credits like these provide significant value to the 2.8 million North Carolinians served by the state’s electric cooperatives.” 

Co-ops can also use elective pay to access nuclear power production tax credits through 2032. NCEMC is a co-owner of the Catawba nuclear plant in South Carolina and expects to claim about $18 million for its share of the facility with this year’s filing of its 2024 Form 990, Browne explained. 

Although future tax credit amounts may vary, “we will continue to apply for these credits through 2032 to manage costs to our members and their consumers,” he said. 

‘An important thing’ 

Before Congress authorized elective pay, co-ops often turned to third-party energy developers with tax liabilities to build wind and solar power and other innovative resources. Co-ops would then contract for that electricity through power purchase agreements. 

Having access to federal tax credits not only enables co-ops to build and own more of that capacity, it will allow them to negotiate better rates on PPAs, said Chris Jimenez, chief development officer at Arizona G&T Cooperatives. 

“In the past as a co-op, we didn’t have that mechanism… so the developer didn’t really have an incentive to pass on that benefit to [us],” Jimenez said. “Now they do.” 

Sierra Southwest Cooperative Services Inc., a subsidiary of the Benson, Arizona-based G&T, recently completed battery storage projects on behalf of three members that are estimated to be eligible for 40% investment tax credits through elective pay. The projects will help the co-ops rely more on solar power as Arizona grapples with limited natural gas import capacity. 

Arizona G&T will file for the tax credits as part of its 2024 tax filing and expects to get those benefits in 2026, CFO Pete Scott said. 

“The credits really help bring the levelized costs of energy for these resources down to an area where we can actually include them in the portfolio,” Jimenez said. 

The tax credits, which can be stacked with federal grants and loans, “really provide for an environment where our members and we as a G&T can really develop competitive resources,” Jimenez said. 

“Without those two things in place, it becomes a difficult situation for folks to finance these types of projects,” he said, adding that elective pay is “an important thing to keep in place.” 

Lowering costs, improving reliability 

The state of Colorado is working to transition to 100% clean electricity by 2040. For Delta-Montrose Electric Association, access to elective-pay credits is crucial to reaching that goal affordably and reliably. 

“These tax credits are really meaningful and absolutely necessary for us to make this happen in that kind of timeframe,” said Kent Blackwell, chief administrative officer of the Montrose, Colorado-based co-op. 

DMEA is planning to use elective-pay investment tax credits to help fund a $96 million project that includes a 20-MW solar photovoltaic array with an additional 80 MWh of battery storage. 

Without the tax credits, “there’s just no way this project would be financially viable for an entity like us,” Blackwell said. 

Reliability and cost are also behind two projects that Pahrump, Nevada-based Valley Electric Association is pursuing with help from federal tax incentives.  

VEA is planning to build a 35-MW energy storage system in Pahrump to hedge its power market exposure by allowing the co-op to procure power when prices are low and discharge power at higher-priced times. 

The second project is a 1-MW solar power/1-MW, four-hour battery storage project that will improve reliability in VEA’s remote Fish Lake Valley region. The area is currently served by a 55-kilovolt radial line that crosses an area of extreme wildfire risk, raising the potential for blackouts. 

The co-op is looking to start commercial operations on the projects near the end of 2026, after which it can file for elective-pay credits. 

“For a rural cooperative, we typically don’t have access to this kind of technology, whether it’s due to cost [or] other factors,” said Gabe De Guzman, VEA’s director of transmission services and load management. “Having this elective-pay tax credit essentially will pay off this project much sooner, and it will impact members less from that perspective.” 

Listen to a related podcast episode on elective-pay credits:

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

As Congress considers energy legislation, it’s essential that lawmakers understand that “electric reliability is non-negotiable,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told a House panel Wednesday. 

“A resilient, reliable and affordable electric grid is the mission of every electric co-op and the cornerstone of our nation’s economy and energy security,” Matheson told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy at a hearing on “Assuring Abundant, Reliable American Energy to Power Innovation.” 

“A diverse energy portfolio—but one that is anchored by always-available power generation—is essential to this commitment and critical to meet skyrocketing electricity demand.”  

Critical electric generation resources are being retired faster than they can be reliably replaced, Matheson said. 

“Among the biggest drivers of this is the power plant rule that EPA finalized last year,” he said. “This rule targeting coal and natural gas power plants will reduce available electricity at the same time demand is rising. 

“Even hydroelectric power—a reliable, abundant source of carbon-free, affordable electricity—is under attack. As I testified to this committee last year, a Biden administration agreement, negotiated without any electric utility provider in the room, aims to breach four Lower Snake River hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest, which provide 3,000 megawatts of power and underpin the electric reliability of the entire region.” 

Matheson urged Congress to support the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the power plant rule and withdraw from the Lower Snake River dam agreement. 

At the same time, Matheson said, “new, reliable, always-available generation needs to quickly come online to meet skyrocketing electricity demand.” 

“Congress should improve and modernize outdated and dysfunctional permitting processes for all types of projects with an eye toward the scale and scope required to meet this challenge,” he said.  

Matheson told committee members that co-ops look forward to working with them and others in Congress to help shape energy legislation. 

“Providing reliable, affordable, and safe electricity is the shared commitment of all NRECA’s members.” 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson outlined electric cooperatives’ top legislative priorities as more than 2,000 co-op leaders converged on Capitol Hill this week during the association’s Legislative Conference. 

“Our desire as electric co-ops is to make sure we have smart energy policies that help us meet the challenge of growing electric demand,” Matheson said Monday during a teleconference with reporters. 

Matheson, who was joined by CEOs of co-ops in Oregon and Georgia at the teleconference, said the key issues that co-op leaders are urging their members of Congress to champion include these crucial five: 

• Passing permitting reform. He said the overly bureaucratic federal permitting process imposes unreasonable delays and drives up costs for co-ops seeking to build essential electric infrastructure.  

• Repealing the EPA power plant rule. Matheson said the power plant rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden administration jeopardizes grid reliability by forcing the premature closure of coal-fired plants, imposing unworkable emissions reductions on new natural gas plants, and mandating unproven technologies to replace reliable generation. 

“In Georgia, our energy demands and needs are skyrocketing, and Oglethorpe Power is helping to meet that demand by building, right now, more than 1,600 megawatts of clean-burning natural gas,” said Annalisa Bloodworth, CEO of Oglethorpe Power Corp. in Georgia. 

“We need the power plant rule to be repealed so that we can fairly and fully utilize these new natural gas resources and so that we can avoid a premature retirement of more than 1,000 megawatts of critical clean coal.” 

• Protecting hydropower. Co-ops are calling on Congress to rescind a memorandum of understanding issued by the Biden administration that set the stage to breach four Lower Snake River dams that provide clean, carbon-free power to more than 50 co-ops in the West. 

Keith Brooks, general manager of Douglas Electric Cooperative in Roseburg, Oregon, said reliable hydropower from the dams helped his co-op keep the power on during record-shattering cold in January 2024 for four straight days in the Pacific Northwest. 

“During that time, when wind and solar went to zero, the Snake River kept churning out thousands of megawatt hours a day, keeping hundreds of thousands of homes in heat. I really believe without those dams in place we would have lost lives.” 

• Defending against wildfires. Matheson said there’s “a massive backlog” of permit requests from co-ops seeking to remove hazardous trees that are in danger of falling from federal land onto electric lines and sparking fires. The House has passed the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act, which would make it much easier for co-ops to remove those trees. Co-ops are urging the Senate to pass the bill now. 

• Support funding for RUS Electric Loans. Co-op leaders are asking their lawmakers to support full funding for the Rural Utilities Service Electric Loan program, which finances construction of electric infrastructure in rural communities. Matheson noted that the program actually makes money for the federal government since co-ops repay the loans with interest. 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

More News From Legislative Conference:

Lawmakers Back Co-ops’ Push for Smart Energy Policies
Co-ops Get Policy, Funding Insights From Federal Agencies 

WASHINGTON—More than 2,000 electric cooperative leaders gathered this week at NRECA’s Legislative Conference to engage key congressional leaders and advocate for smart energy policies on Capitol Hill. 

Six members of Congress from both political parties addressed the conference Monday, emphasizing the need for bipartisan energy solutions and pledging to work with co-ops to ensure that local consumer-members keep getting reliable, affordable power. 

“Electric co-ops understand what we need to do to meet growing electricity demand and keep the lights on at a price our members can afford,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told conference attendees Monday. “And from permitting reform to unwinding bad EPA regulations, protecting hydropower to defending against wildfires, there are a number of smart energy policies that are needed across the board.”  

“There are no better advocates for these policies than the co-op leaders in Washington today. They know the challenges. They know the stakes.” 

While the political winds shift in Washington, D.C., NRECA’s message hasn’t changed, Matheson said. 

“Our message and our priority is always about what’s best for that member at the end of the line.” 

Sen. Capito: Real Chance for Permitting Reform  

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said she believes “there’s a bipartisan fix coming” on environmental permitting reform in this session of Congress. 

She said permitting reform, which NRECA and its members have been urging lawmakers to pass, would provide shorter timelines for federal approvals of electric infrastructure projects, more predictability and judicial reform so that someone “cannot sue and sue and sue” to delay construction. 

“We can achieve this with a legislative product that benefits projects of all types and provides clarity without weakening environmental and public health protections.”  

Rep. Craig: Bipartisan Farm Bill Needed 

Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, said she is pushing for a bipartisan five-year Farm Bill but believes it’s going to be an uphill battle. 

The Farm Bill authorizes crucial funding for electric co-ops through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, which provides grants and loans to modernize rural electric systems and bring broadband service to rural communities. 

“America needs a bipartisan Farm Bill,” she said. 

Unfortunately, Craig said, “you don’t hear a lot about an effort to craft bipartisan legislation. You hear a lot about pulling the Farm Bill apart [into separate sections.]” 

The congresswoman, who represents corn and soybean farmers in Minnesota, urged co-ops to press their House members and senators to pass the crucial bill. 

“What we need from all of you is to make sure we don’t give up.”  

Energy and Commerce Members: Bipartisanship Isn’t Dead 

Despite deep political divisions in Congress, most lawmakers actually want to work together to find solutions, said a Republican and a Democrat who serve together on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

“I came here to Washington, D.C., to solve problems, not to be a showboat,” said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa.  

Similarly, Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., said “the vast majority of us came here to help our communities, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.” 

New members of Congress should start getting to know their colleagues from the opposite party at freshman orientation and keep those connections going, Miller-Meeks said. Some of the lawmakers everyone sees being bombastic on TV turn out to be “just as nice as can be” when you meet them in the elevator, she said. 

Peters said members of Congress should also be willing “to talk back to your own people” and “take a little grumbling” from colleagues in your political party when you think they need to compromise on an issue.  

“You came here for a reason,” Peters said. “People want you to be solving problems.” 

The congressman worked with Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, to pass the Fix Our Forests Act in the House this January. The bill would make it easier for co-ops to remove hazard trees that fall from federal land onto electric lines and spark wildfires. 

Rep. Guthrie: More Energy Needed for AI 

Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said America must meet the growing demand for electricity to power artificial intelligence or risk losing “the battle with China over who controls AI.” 

“This is a colossal battle that the American people cannot afford to lose,” he said. 

“Now, you’re on the front lines. And we can’t do it without you.” 

The congressman said he is going to do everything he can to build a bipartisan coalition for energy “to make sure we win.” 

Rep. Emmer: Americans Need Stability 

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said Americans don’t mind if the political party in the White House shifts back and forth but “what the American public is sick of is the rules changing every four years.” 

“It’s time to bring some stability,” he said.  

While President Donald Trump has issued more than 120 executive orders covering a wide variety of topics, “I think Congress should actually be taking action,” Emmer said. 

He said congressional leaders plan to tackle permitting reform, EPA regulations and “everything else that’s important to you.” 

“I’m so pleased that the rural electric folks are in Washington to make your voices heard.” 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

More News From Legislative Conference:

Co-ops Get Policy, Funding Insights From Federal Agencies 
Matheson Details Electric Co-ops’ Top Legislative Goals

A Biden administration proposal to regulate nitrogen oxide emissions from new and upgraded natural gas-fired plants is flawed and will pose reliability and cost challenges for electric cooperatives, NRECA said in comments filed to the Environmental Protection Agency on April 15. 

The proposed rule would modify new source performance standards for nitrogen oxide from new, modified and reconstructed combustion turbines (CTs) under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act.  

NRECA asked the EPA to revise the Biden-era proposal or find that no updates to the current standards are necessary. The agency is under a court order to finalize a rule by November. 

The proposal “would constrain how cooperatives operate their CTs with significant impacts on reliability and would increase costs to cooperatives’ end-of-the-line consumer-members,” NRECA said in its comments. “It also does not align with the Trump administration’s vision of American energy dominance.” 

Combustion turbines are “an essential generation source” for grid reliability as power demand rises from growth in data centers, industrialization and electrification, the comments stated. 

CTs can quickly start up and shut down, helping stabilize the grid during high-demand periods or unplanned outages. They are also ideal for supporting weather-dependent renewable energy resources, NRECA said. 

In 2023, natural gas-fired generation made up the single largest share of U.S. electric output at 43%, according to Energy Information Administration data. Simple cycle and combined cycle CTs made up 84% of the country’s gas-fired generation capacity in 2022. 

“These units provide versatile, dispatchable power to the grid and can ramp up and down as needed to meet demand,” NRECA said. “These attributes will only make CTs more critical as electricity demand continues to skyrocket. Their essential nature is exemplified by several projects underway at [generation and transmission] cooperatives across the country.” 

But the EPA’s December 2024 proposal contained a “major flaw” that would limit co-op use of gas turbines, the comments asserted. 

NRECA said the agency “substantially underestimated” the cost of required emissions control technology for several types of CTs under the rule and that the technology “is not cost effective for many of the units to which it would apply.” 

As a result, “many new and existing CTs that will be vital to sustaining the electric grid and meeting future demand growth would be arbitrarily limited to run less often than makes sense—and does not justify the assumed benefits.”  

NRECA said the EPA “should reevaluate the proposed rule’s impacts on the electric utility sector and its barriers to the administration’s vision of American energy dominance.” The association highlighted several executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that clearly demonstrate his administration’s desire to remove regulatory barriers to affordable, reliable energy. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The heads of nine electric cooperatives attended an April 8 event at the White House where President Donald Trump signed executive actions to support coal-fired power plants and other crucial generation sources. East Kentucky Power Cooperative President and CEO Tony Campbell spoke at the event, emphasizing the importance of reliable electricity to co-op members.

Below, several other co-op leaders reflect on what it was like to be part of this event and what the administration’s actions mean for grid reliability going forward.

Buddy Hasten

President and CEO, Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp./Arkansas Electric Cooperatives Inc.

“This was my first ever visit to the White House and first time in the presence of the president. I think it is amazing that this memorable experience coincided with the announcement of a shift in federal energy policy to support a more balanced approach to our national electric power supply.

“I retired from the nuclear Navy in 2007 and entered the electric utility business as coal plant manager in rural Iowa … Every announcement, new rule, or regulation from the federal government for the last 18 years has been a continued assault on reliable and dispatchable generation resources that power America. President Trump’s executive orders are the first good news in a long time, like a nice soaking rain after a drought.”

David J. Tudor

CEO and General Manager, Associated Electric Cooperative

“The experience and coordination by NRECA, including navigating three levels of security to reach a room clearly ready for the president, was amazing.

“After fighting for reliability against so many critics and then to hear the word reliability over and over in person from the president was epic and redeeming … These orders enable the use of coal generation further into the future. Our member-owners will benefit from the reliability and affordability of keeping coal as a key part of the generation fleet.”

Todd Brickhouse

CEO and General Manager, Basin Electric Power Cooperative

“It was an honor to represent Basin Electric at the White House for the signing of the recent executive orders. It was gratifying to be in the company of cooperative leaders from across the country.

“As the largest electric utility in the United States by service territory, Basin Electric is exposed to severe climates and weather events that require an all-of-the-above energy strategy. Basin Electric’s coal fleet is a key component of this strategy. We fully support the administration’s efforts to secure the future of dispatchable generation.”

Craig Grooms

President and CEO, Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives

“It was a great honor to attend the executive order signing at the White House. The event’s atmosphere was positive, and we valued the shift in tone toward the coal industry and the emphasis on retaining resources for grid reliability.

“Ohio’s electric cooperatives and the 1 million people they serve depend on Buckeye Power to deliver reliable, affordable electricity—especially during Ohio’s cold winters and hot summers. Coal-fired power generation is at the core of keeping that promise. OEC is pleased to work with an administration that makes the reliability of electricity a priority.”

Mac McLennan

President and CEO, Minnkota Power Cooperative

“The president’s signing of these executive orders marks an important and encouraging step toward strengthening the reliability of our nation’s electric grid. It was an honor to be at the White House to witness this renewed focus on an energy strategy that values coal’s essential role in providing dependable, around-the-clock power.

“In Minnkota’s region, reliability isn’t optional—it’s an absolute necessity, especially during stretches of extreme cold in North Dakota and Minnesota. These executive actions help significantly reduce regulatory pressure facing coal-based generation, which continues to serve as the backbone of Minnkota’s power supply and delivers the stability our members count on every day.

“As electricity demand grows and our economy becomes driven by data and digital infrastructure, the need for always-available, resilient power has never been greater. We are grateful for the administration’s leadership and its clear understanding that grid reliability must remain central to national energy policy. This action reinforces coal’s critical role in securing a strong, stable energy future for Minnkota and electric cooperatives across the nation.”

Annalisa Bloodworth

President and CEO, Oglethorpe Power Corp.

“I was pleased to be invited to the White House to participate in a ceremony with President Trump to support the U.S. coal fleet. The energy in the room was electric, and we felt an overwhelming sense of relief, vindication, joy and pride when President Trump proclaimed, ‘Coal-fired electricity generation is essential to ensuring that our nation’s grid is reliable and that electricity is affordable for the American people, and to promoting our nation’s energy security.’

“Oglethorpe Power’s mission is to generate safe, reliable and affordable power for our members. President Trump’s actions cleared the way for us to achieve our mission using a resource in which we’ve invested billions in environmental controls. Sadly, we’ve watched needless shutdowns of productive coal generation facilities across the U.S., but thanks to these actions, rural electric cooperatives can live free, at least for now, of governmental pressure to prematurely retire reliable coal assets.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA is working to protect a federal program that provides critical home heating and cooling assistance to millions of vulnerable American families.

On April 10, NRECA joined the American Public Power Association in urging Senate leaders to ensure that recent staffing cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services do not prevent the agency from administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

LIHEAP gives funding to states to defray consumers’ utility bills. Typically, consumers apply for assistance through their local LIHEAP office. If approved, they are granted credits on their energy bill, with the funds paid directly to the utility.

The program helps electric cooperatives meet the needs of their members. Co-ops serve over 90% of persistent poverty counties in the United States.

“Cuts to LIHEAP will impact those Americans who are least able to afford interruptions in energy services,” NRECA and APPA said in a letter to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the committee’s ranking member.

“We support efforts to improve efficiency within the federal government, especially if it means that more appropriated dollars will be available for energy assistance,” the letter stated. “But we urge your rigorous oversight of HHS to ensure that the recent elimination of staff from the energy assistance division does not mean that LIHEAP comes to a halt.”

In the short term, the two groups asked that HHS release about $400 million in remaining LIHEAP money appropriated to states for fiscal year 2025.

“Time is of the essence for those states that provide cooling assistance as we are quickly entering the warmer summer months,” the letter said. “Failure to release these funds in a timely way will mean that life-saving assistance dollars will sit at the U.S. Treasury rather than keeping service flowing uninterrupted to Americans in need.”

Both renters and owners are eligible for LIHEAP assistance, as long as they are responsible for paying utility bills. Higher benefits are given to households with the greatest home energy needs relative to income and the number of household members.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

This week at an event in the East Room of the White House, East Kentucky Power Cooperative President and CEO Tony Campbell joined President Donald Trump for a ceremony to sign four major actions to increase power reliability and affordability in the U.S.

One was a proclamation to grant temporary exemptions from the mercury and air rule for coal power plants. The others were executive orders directing the Energy secretary to use emergency authorities if necessary to keep power generating units operating; one targeting certain states’ renewable portfolio standards; and one supporting coal mining and production.

Campbell’s invitation to speak at this event is a high-profile recognition of the role that co-ops have played in shaping the national conversation about the need for reliable and affordable power. And the actions signed by Trump are directly linked to the sustained message that co-ops have delivered about the dangers of poorly thought-out energy policies.

Hear from Campbell as well as NRECA CEO Jim Matheson about the White House event and the impact these executive actions will have on co-ops.

Listen to the episode below:

You can also listen and subscribe to Along Those Lines on your preferred podcast service, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Find out more about NRECA’s podcast. Questions or suggestions? Email us at AlongThoseLines@nreca.coop.

Electric cooperative leaders joined President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday as he announced several executive actions aimed at protecting crucial coal-fired power plants and other always-available energy generating resources.

The actions will prevent the premature closure of essential generation, helping co-ops meet tomorrow’s energy needs and provide reliable, safe and affordable electricity as demand for power increases, said Tony Campbell, president and CEO of Winchester-based East Kentucky Power Cooperative.

“On behalf of East Kentucky Power Cooperative, NRECA and electric co-ops across America, thank you for your leadership to restore American energy dominance,” Campbell told the president during remarks at the event.

“America must keep coal plants open and running to ensure reliable electricity when we need it most,” he said. “To meet growing demand over the next decade and ensure fuel security, America will need more always-available power, such as coal.”

Campbell was joined at the White House by NRECA CEO Jim Matheson, Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. President and CEO Vernon “Buddy” Hasten, Associated Electric Cooperative CEO and General Manager David Tudor, Basin Electric Power Cooperative CEO and General Manager Todd Brickhouse, Minnkota Power Cooperative President and CEO Mac McLennan, Oglethorpe Power Corp. President and CEO Annalisa Bloodworth, Old Dominion Electric Cooperative President and CEO Chris Cosby, Seminole Electric Cooperative CEO and General Manager Lisa Johnson, Buckeye Power Cooperative President and CEO Craig Grooms and Kentucky Association of Electric Cooperatives President and CEO Chris Perry.

One of Trump’s actions would grant coal plants up to a two-year exemption from the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury and air rule for utilities that have submitted an exemption request to EPA. The Clean Air Act authorizes the president to grant an exemption from this rule if the technology to implement the standard is unavailable and it is in the national security interest of the United States.

The mercury and air rule requires a 67% cut in filterable particulate matter for all coal-fired plants but does not identify new cost-effective technologies to meet that goal. If the standards can’t be met, some power plants would need to retire, threatening reliability at a time when demand for electricity is growing, according to NRECA.

NRECA has also said the mercury and air rule will be extremely costly and have no appreciable health benefits.

“Thank you in particular for providing immediate, much needed relief from the Biden [administration] EPA regulations that would force the shutdown of critical coal units,” Campbell said.

Trump also directed the secretary of Energy to evaluate the nation’s electric reliability and use all available authorities, including emergency powers, to keep electric generating units operating and maintain reliability. The order is resource-neutral but could help preserve coal, natural gas and nuclear units at risk of premature closure.

Matheson said the president and National Energy Dominance Council “are making good on their commitment to pursue a pro-energy policy agenda that prioritizes reliable power.”

“Today’s announcements help drive home smart energy policies that will support efforts to keep the lights on at a price families and businesses can afford,” he added. “We thank the administration for recognizing the continued importance of always-available resources in the nation’s energy mix.”

Several other co-ops praised the announcements.

“We commend the administration for recognizing the importance of a reliable and resilient electric grid and for embracing an all-of-the-above energy strategy to meet the demands of our growing, data-driven world,” Minnkota Power’s McLennan said.

Associated Electric Cooperative’s Tudor said Trump’s actions will help the country “continue to thrive without the constant threat of energy scarcity and cost increases to rural cooperative member-owners. I applaud President Trump for his bold actions today to keep our electricity supply reliable and affordable.”

Arkansas faces possible long-term energy capacity issues due to the scheduled loss of low-cost, dispatchable generation assets, Hasten said. The new executive actions could “ensure that electric cooperative members will continue to power the economy with a diversified and balanced portfolio of 24/7/365 generation resources,” he emphasized.

Across the country, 79 coal units are wholly or partially owned by 31 NRECA member co-ops.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Listen to a podcast episode with Campbell and Matheson discussing the executive actions and White House event:

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson and several NRECA member CEOs today expressed appreciation for President Trump’s announcement recognizing the critical role played by always available energy generating resources, including coal-fired power plants, in maintaining a reliable and resilient electric grid.

Matheson and co-op executives were on hand for a White House event where the President signed and discussed the new executive actions.

“President Trump and his National Energy Dominance Council are making good on their commitment to pursue a pro-energy policy agenda that prioritizes reliable power,” Matheson said. “At a time when electricity demand is skyrocketing, we need to be adding more always available energy to the grid, not shutting down power plants that have useful life left. Electric co-ops provide reliable power to communities across the country. Today’s announcements help drive home smart energy policies that will support efforts to keep the lights on at a price families and businesses can afford. We thank the administration for recognizing the continued importance of always-available resources in the nation’s energy mix.”

Electric cooperatives wholly or partially own 79 coal units with a total capacity of about 21 gigawatts. Eleven of these units, about 3 GW of capacity, are scheduled to be retired between 2025 and 2030. Three GW is enough to power roughly 2.5 million homes.

Co-op leaders welcome Executive Orders

Tony Campbell, CEO of East Kentucky Power Cooperative, spoke alongside the President and thanked him for partnering with electric co-ops to power America’s future.

“America must keep coal plants open and running to ensure reliable electricity when we need it most,” Campbell said. “To meet growing demand over the next decade and ensure fuel security, America will need more always available power, such as coal.”

Several other electric co-op leaders attended the White House ceremony. Their co-ops would benefit from the proclamation and executive order in a variety of ways.

Mac McLennan, president and CEO, Minnkota Power Cooperative: “We commend the Administration for recognizing the importance of a reliable and resilient electric grid and for embracing an all-of-the-above energy strategy to meet the demands of our growing, data-driven world. Coal remains a vital part of that mix, providing dependable, around-the-clock power. As electricity usage continues to rise, especially with the rapid expansion of digital infrastructure, it’s essential to invest in technologies that support and strengthen coal’s role on the grid. That commitment will be key to ensuring a stable and secure energy future for our nation.”

David J. Tudor, CEO and general manager, Associated Electric Cooperative: “Coal and natural gas continue to be the backbone of electric reliability for America and the rural heartland served by Associated Electric Cooperative. I am encouraged by the efforts of this administration to keep it that way, so that our country and its citizens can continue to thrive without the constant threat of energy scarcity and cost increases to rural cooperative member-owners. I applaud President Trump for his bold actions today to keep our electricity supply reliable and affordable.”

Vernon “Buddy” Hasten, president and CEO, Arkansas Electric Cooperatives: “Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation, the generation and transmission cooperative for Arkansas’ electric cooperatives, is a longtime advocate for ensuring the electric cooperative members have access to reliable, affordable energy. For the past few years, we have stressed the importance of a balanced power approach that includes all available energy sources to power the state and our nation. Arkansas is addressing potential long-term energy capacity issues due to the scheduled closure of low-cost, dispatchable generation assets. Thank you to President Trump for working to assist Arkansas and the nation to ensure that electric cooperative members will continue to power the economy with a diversified and balanced portfolio of 24/7/365 generation resources.”

Annalisa M. Bloodworth, president and CEO, Oglethorpe Power Corporation: Oglethorpe Power’s mission is to safely provide affordable and reliable energy to the rural Georgia electric cooperatives we serve. We value every resource in our diverse energy portfolio. Today the nation’s electric grid is under tremendous pressure from increasing demand, and we need to use every generation source available.  Oglethorpe Power’s co-owned units at Plant Scherer, a coal-fired facility, provide an important source of generation with 50+ days of fuel stored on site, ready to be used on a moment’s notice. Coal plants keep the lights on in a crisis, and they enhance the reliability and resiliency of our electric grid.

Todd Brickhouse, CEO and general manager, Basin Electric Power Cooperative: “Basin Electric supports an all-of-the-above energy strategy, with coal remaining a vital part of that approach. Our coal fleet continues to deliver reliable, affordable, and dispatchable power—ensuring grid stability for our members and region. We’re grateful for President Trump’s leadership in advancing this mission and helping safeguard the long-term energy needs of rural America.”

Craig Grooms, president and CEO, Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives: “Ohio’s electric cooperatives and the 1 million people they serve, depend on Buckeye Power to deliver reliable, affordable electricity—especially during Ohio’s cold winters and hot summers. Coal-fired power generation is at the core of keeping that promise. OEC is pleased to work with an administration that makes the reliability of electricity a priority.”

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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The Department of Agriculture on March 25 announced next steps to release previously obligated funding under key programs that will help electric cooperatives modernize their systems.

The announcement advances the Trump administration’s review of funds awarded through the USDA’s Empowering Rural America (New ERA), Powering Affordable Clean Energy (PACE) and Rural Energy for America (REAP) programs. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is giving co-ops 30 days to review and make voluntary changes to New ERA and PACE project plans so that they better align with the letter of the law and President Donald Trump’s policy agenda.

“These programs provide important tools for co-ops to invest in their systems, unleash American energy and help meet skyrocketing energy needs,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “We thank Secretary Rollins and the Trump administration for recognizing the importance of these programs and outlining next steps to release these funds.”

The move comes after NRECA and over 40 co-ops delivered nearly 50 letters to Rollins on March 20 describing energy projects that will benefit from the $9.7 billion New ERA and $1 billion PACE programs. The programs, which Trump paused as part of a Jan. 20 executive order, provide grants and low-interest loans for co-ops to pursue generation, energy storage and other projects to provide reliable, affordable power.

The letters followed Rollins’ appearance at NRECA’s PowerXchange and TechAdvantage in Atlanta earlier in the month, where she vowed to move quickly on the program reviews.

The New ERA and PACE projects “will help electric cooperatives leverage diverse energy portfolios to reduce costs and meet the future energy demands of rural communities,” the co-ops said in their letters. The projects will also “address growing power supply needs in rural areas by creating a more reliable power grid,” they added.

Bloomington, Indiana-based Hoosier Energy and Wolverine Power Cooperative in Cadillac, Michigan, were awarded New ERA grants to help cover power purchase agreements with the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. The PPAs will help plant owner Holtec International restart the idled 800-megawatt nuclear facility and provide reliable baseload power to Midwestern consumers.

“Palisades’ restart is vital to electric reliability in the Michigan region and will demonstrate a proven path to U.S. energy dominance,” Wolverine Power CEO Eric Baker said. “The essential baseload energy produced at Palisades will power nearly 100 rural counties in Michigan and Indiana.”

Hoosier said the PPAs will also give Holtec the confidence to proceed with developing small modular reactors at the site, with Hoosier and Wolverine holding the rights to power from the planned SMRs.

“The certainty required by Hoosier Energy, Wolverine Power, and Holtec International to continue making these investments is bolstered by continued federal support through the New ERA program and awards like ours,” Hoosier Energy CEO Donna Walker said in her letter.

Since its selection for a New ERA grant, the Indiana co-op has also moved forward with other generation investments for its system.

“Hoosier Energy’s New ERA award allows us the freedom to invest even more in what America needs: an affordable, reliable, and resilient electric grid,” Walker said.

New ERA funding would also help Grand Forks, North Dakota-based Minnkota Power Cooperative deploy a “world-leading” carbon capture and storage project. Project Tundra is aimed at capturing and permanently storing 4 million tons per year of carbon dioxide and could help maximize use of coal reserves while furthering efforts to use captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery in North Dakota’s Bakken oil formation.

“Projects like [Tundra] would strengthen U.S. energy security, create jobs and fuel economic growth in energy-producing regions,” Minnkota CEO Mac McLennan said.

Altogether, the co-op projects highlighted in the March 20 letters will unleash over 13 GW of energy in rural communities and “help realize the Trump administration’s goal of American energy dominance,” Matheson said.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson today issued the following statement after U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced next steps to release previously obligated funding under the Rural Energy For America Program (REAP), Empowering Rural America (New ERA) and Powering Affordable Clean Energy (PACE) programs. 

“These programs provide important tools for co-ops to invest in their systems, unleash American energy and help meet skyrocketing energy needs,” Matheson said. “We thank Secretary Rollins and the Trump administration for recognizing the importance of these programs and outlining next steps to release these funds. ” 

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities. 

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Department of Energy infrastructure programs are crucial to building electric cooperative projects that will ensure reliable power for rural America, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told Energy Secretary Chris Wright at a Thursday meeting.

Matheson gave Wright nearly 90 letters from 75 co-ops selected to receive DOE infrastructure funding for a range of projects, from wildfire mitigation to new transmission and microgrids. The letters highlighted how the projects will help provide safe, reliable and affordable power.

“These vital projects advance the Trump administration’s priority of unleashing American energy and will help electric cooperatives keep the lights on in homes and businesses across America,” Matheson told Wright. “In short, they will help to realize the Trump administration’s goal of American energy dominance.”

But without DOE funding, “many of these projects would not be affordable for our members and would hamper critical grid investments to improve service for the rural Americans they serve,” Matheson warned.

Co-ops have been awarded grants and other financial support for infrastructure projects through DOE initiatives funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, known as the bipartisan infrastructure law.

On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that paused disbursement of infrastructure law funding for 90 days while the administration reviews those programs for consistency with energy-focused executive orders, a decision that created uncertainty for many co-op projects .

After advocacy from NRECA, the DOE has started to release funding under some key infrastructure programs and told certain co-op recipients to continue moving forward with their projects.

In early February, NRECA gave Wright a roadmap of co-op policy priorities, which included effective use of DOE funds for projects that bolster grid resilience and reliability and support for the completion of co-op projects already underway.

‘Essential grid improvements’

Thirty-seven co-ops and rural utilities were tapped for nearly $100 million in funding for the Wildfire Assessment and Resilience for Networks (WARN) project.

Rapid City, South Dakota-based Rushmore Electric Power Cooperative plans to harden critical areas of the state’s rural grid against wildfires with help from a $12.1 million WARN grant.

That and other DOE-backed grid improvements “will enhance grid resilience, reduce outages, meet increasing electricity demand, and keep costs low for our rural consumer-members,” Rushmore CEO Kory Hammerbeck said in the co-op’s letter to Wright.

Twelve co-ops and rural utilities were selected for over $97 million in funding under the Smart Technology for Advanced Resilient Transmission (START) consortium project. The START initiative will involve 13 transmission upgrades and new build projects incorporating advanced overhead conductors (AOHC), which can increase transmission system resilience and transfer capacity.

“By installing and familiarizing utilities across the nation with AOHC, the START consortium will develop an on-ramp for widespread adoption of the technology throughout the industry,” Georgia Transmission Corp. CEO Barbara Hampton said in her letter. Tucker, Georgia-based GTC is a lead member of the START consortium.

Several co-ops also urged support for a microgrid consortium effort that won $45.2 million in DOE infrastructure law funding.

The microgrid projects “are critical to ensuring adequate power supply at a time when capacity is tight” and will help improve reliability, said Brian Heithoff, CEO of Trico Electric Cooperative in Marana, Arizona.

“America’s electric cooperatives are critical partners in the Trump administration’s commitment to jumpstart the American economy,” Heithoff and other co-op leaders said in their letters. “Thank you for your support of DOE’s infrastructure programs.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson applauded a series of actions the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that would alleviate reliability and cost challenges for electric co-ops.

The agency said it will review and reconsider the Biden administration’s power plant greenhouse gas rule. The EPA also plans to reconsider other rules hindering America’s energy dominance, including the mercury and air rule, ozone transport rule and power plant wastewater rule. The agency will also address a number of fundamental problems with the coal ash program and take other actions to unleash American energy while protecting the environment.

NRECA flagged concerns with these rules in a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in January, and Matheson met with Zeldin at EPA’s headquarters to discuss these issues. The letter served as a policy roadmap recommending ways the EPA could address harmful regulations for co-ops while ensuring reliable and affordable power and promoting a healthy environment.

“Today’s EPA announcements are another critical step that puts our nation on a path towards a more reliable and resilient electric grid—and not a moment too soon,” Matheson said. “Electricity demand is skyrocketing, yet bad public policy decisions are forcing always-available generation resources to retire faster than they can be reliably replaced.”

The EPA also pledged to revise its Waters of the United States rule to lawfully define which water bodies are subject to Clean Water Act permitting. NRECA has said the Biden administration’s WOTUS rule took an overly broad approach to defining federal waters, creating significant regulatory uncertainty for co-ops.

“We deeply appreciate this administration’s commitment to American energy dominance and sound policies that protect our environment, without leaving American consumers in the dark,” Matheson said.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

ATLANTA—Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is pushing to quickly wrap up the Trump administration’s review of infrastructure project funding for co-ops, including the New ERA program, she told electric cooperative leaders at PowerXchange.

“I’m pressing to wrap up the review of the obligated New ERA, PACE, and REAP projects … as quickly as possible,” she said in her remarks during the closing general session of NRECA’s annual meeting on March 12. “I know this is very important to a lot of you and my team is working day and night with the goal of bringing you the certainty you deserve.”

Co-ops that were selected for funding from those programs are waiting to find out if they can proceed with their projects.

New ERA is a $9.7 billion voluntary energy innovation program created exclusively for co-ops. The funding will help co-ops invest in new energy resources to meet tomorrow’s energy needs.

The Powering Affordable Clean Energy (PACE) program provides partially forgivable loans for co-op energy projects in rural areas. The Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) funds renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.

Less than two months after the start of the second Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service has already approved 14 “core” Rural Electrification Loans valued at more than $1.27 billion, Rollins said.

“These projects include investments in a natural gas plant, upgrades to an existing coal facility, transmission and distribution infrastructure,” she said.

Rollins also announced a new initiative aimed at boosting the economies of rural communities.

“You’re the first Americans to hear this, and I’m excited to share it with you: We’re working with our federal, state and local partners to develop a bold strategy to revive rural America,” she said. “You’ll be hearing more from us on this in the weeks to come.”

Rollins, who served as director of the Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump administration, said she will continue to support the USDA’s ReConnect program to help rural communities get connected to high-speed internet service. The program began during President Donald Trump’s first term and “has proven to be a tremendous success,” she said.

“Your rural electric cooperatives were essential to this success” by bringing broadband to consumer-members, Rollins said.

The USDA is also “actively cutting red tape and leveraging the president’s executive order on the energy emergency to expedite electrical generation and infrastructure projects of direct concern to both rural America and your cooperatives,” she said.

“We are furthermore speeding the turnaround time for environmental and historic preservation reviews, knowing full well that bureaucratic delay is not just morally unacceptable—it risks crippling American vitality if unchecked.”

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson praised Rollins’ support for speeding up the permitting process.

“We especially appreciate Secretary Rollins’ commitment to cutting bureaucratic red tape by expediting environmental permitting reviews for infrastructure projects that allow cooperatives to maintain and expand their energy systems,” he said. “We look forward to working with the secretary to achieve these goals and to our continued partnership with USDA under her leadership.”

Matheson told co-op leaders that the fact that Rollins came to PowerXchange as one of her first official acts as secretary proves just how important electric co-ops are to the nation.

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

America is at an “energy crossroads,” and leadership by Congress is more critical than ever to ensure reliable, affordable power, the CEO of Basin Electric Power Cooperative told a House panel Wednesday.

“American families and businesses expect the lights to stay on at a cost they can afford,” Todd Brickhouse, CEO and general manager of the North Dakota-based generation and transmission co-op, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy at a hearing on reliability. “Our nation’s energy policies must meet this fundamental expectation.”

He said Basin Electric, NRECA and America’s electric cooperatives “stand ready to work with Congress and the Trump administration on smart energy policies that advance safe, reliable and affordable power.” Specifically, Brickhouse said, co-ops are urging policymakers to:

• Support a diverse supply of energy resources to meet escalating demand for U.S. energy production and manufacturing, especially in rural areas. Basin Electric, for example, has planned new natural gas power plants, wind turbine repowering and transmission projects to serve high-growth areas in its service territory. “This balanced approach ensures reliable, affordable and environmentally responsible energy for its members,” Brickhouse said.
• Improve environmental permitting processes and cut costly, burdensome regulations—including the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule—to accelerate deployment and maintenance of critical electric infrastructure.
• Ensure federal programs and resources that support electric co-op energy projects are run efficiently and effectively as co-ops invest to meet the needs of the communities they serve.

Brickhouse urged Congress to enact permitting reform that will cut down the long delays that co-ops face getting federal approval to build infrastructure and meet growing demand for electricity.

Congress passed legislation in 2023 to speed up the process for environmental reviews and allow greater applicant involvement, but more needs to be done, he said.

“Congress should also curb lengthy, costly litigation that can cause unnecessary and often indefinite delays that hold up projects that communities badly need,” Brickhouse said.

He said Basin Electric “plans to invest $12 billion in capital expenditures—more than doubling its balance sheet of assets—over the next decade.” Those investments are being made, Brickhouse said, because the co-op’s load growth over the next 10 years is projected to be about 3.3%—significantly higher than the national average of about 2.4%.

“Key developments include increased demand from cryptocurrency and data center operations, the anticipated rise of ethanol-related carbon capture and sequestration projects, and ongoing economic development in western North Dakota,” he said.

Brickhouse called on Congress to support efforts by new EPA leaders to repeal the power plant rule. The EPA rule, finalized in May 2024, seeks to aggressively limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and new natural gas power plants.

NRECA has criticized the rule for mandating unproven technology and unachievable emissions limits, jeopardizing affordable, reliable electricity by forcing premature plant closures while making it tougher to build new power plants.

“Basin Electric has estimated that regulatory compliance with this rule may necessitate nearly $10 billion in incremental capital expenditures, in addition to approximately $12 billion needed to meet new load growth by 2035,” Brickhouse said. “These compliance costs would lead to an estimated 60% rate increase for Basin Electric members by 2035.”

He also asked Congress to protect co-ops’ access to direct-pay tax credits, which allow Basin Electric and others to leverage federal energy incentives that help fund innovative infrastructure projects. Investor-owned utilities have long benefited from such tax incentives.

“Co-ops across the country, including Basin Electric, also participate in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s New Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program, a voluntary grant and loan program designed specifically for electric co-ops as they deploy new nuclear, carbon capture, batteries, renewables and other technologies that make sense for local communities,” Brickhouse said.

“We are in an era of energy expansion, not just a transition, and every available electron will be needed to meet growing demands of our membership and power rural America,” he said. “Congress should support USDA and co-ops as they deploy these projects and oppose any cuts to the New ERA program.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Despite deep political divisions, lawmakers said Tuesday they believe Congress can reach bipartisan consensus on permitting reform legislation that could make it easier for electric cooperatives to modernize their systems to meet growing demand for electricity.

“The talks have begun,” Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, said at a POLITICO energy policy event sponsored by NRECA.

“If we put it off for another Congress, we’re going to fall way behind the rest of the world [in generating power]. And the United States has got to lead, not follow.”

It can take six or seven years to get a permit to build a new power plant, said Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, vice chairman of the energy subcommittee.

“Our grid needs to be bolstered up,” he said.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said reform is drawing increased support from both political parties as lawmakers realize that permitting delays affect all types of energy projects, whether it’s building a solar facility or a natural gas plant.

“We’ve got to make the process more rational and reasonable,” he said. “For co-ops, it’s our North Star to provide reliable, affordable power for everybody.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said Democrats and Republicans agree that America needs to generate more power to meet increasing demand, which is coming from big data centers, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and more.

“We don’t have the grid to get power where we need it,” he said. “We all have the self-interest to accelerate that.”

He said senators came “very close” to reaching a deal on permitting reform in the last Congress and are taking it up again.

“I feel pretty optimistic,” said Hickenlooper, who serves on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Along with permitting reform, Congress and the Trump administration must get rid of unworkable regulations that hinder the ability to generate enough power to meet the nation’s needs, Matheson said. The worst one of those, he said, is the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule.

The EPA rule seeks to aggressively limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and new natural gas power plants. NRECA believes it mandates inadequately demonstrated technology and unachievable emissions limits, jeopardizing affordable, reliable electricity by forcing premature plant closures while making it harder to permit, site and build critical new power plants.

“We think it puts electric co-ops and our electric grid in extreme jeopardy,” Matheson said. “The sooner we get that rule off the books, the better.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA welcomes the confirmation of key Trump administration officials and will work with them to advance policies that support electric cooperatives and the 42 million Americans they serve.

In congratulatory letters to the agency heads, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson recommended ways they could improve electric reliability and resilience and remove regulations that threaten co-op operations, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule to control power plant greenhouse gas emissions.

“President Trump’s pledge to dramatically increase U.S. energy supply and achieve energy dominance resonates strongly with electric cooperatives,” Matheson said. “We look forward to working with him to implement a pro-energy agenda that prioritizes electric reliability and affordability and strengthens the nation’s grid.”

Over the past two weeks, the U.S. Senate has confirmed Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, Doug Burgum as secretary of the Interior, Chris Wright as Energy secretary and Brooke Rollins as Agriculture secretary.

In its letters to these new officials, NRECA encouraged policies that benefit rural communities and co-ops, including actions that:

• Eliminate what NRECA believes are unlawful and unachievable regulations, including the EPA power plant greenhouse gas rule.
• Address skyrocketing power demand.
• Make effective and efficient use of remaining infrastructure funding from Congress and maintain other key federal funding programs for co-ops.
• Cut red tape at land and species management agencies that hinders co-ops’ work to build and maintain electric systems in federal areas.
• Streamline environmental reviews that delay energy projects.

Repealing and replacing the EPA’s power plant greenhouse gas rule “is a top priority” for co-ops, Matheson said in a press release about EPA Administrator Zeldin’s confirmation. The rule would require many existing coal plants and new natural gas-fired facilities to install costly carbon capture technology, which has not been adequately demonstrated or deployed on a commercial scale.

“Cost-effective and lawful federal regulations that minimize unnecessary burdens are critical to cooperatives’ ability to provide affordable, reliable and safe electricity to their consumer-members,” he said in a Jan. 30 letter to Zeldin.

Matheson’s letters to the Energy, Interior and Agriculture departments also listed policies that could better support co-ops, including easier permitting of electric infrastructure. NRECA also stressed the value of existing programs to fund co-op energy and grid modernization projects.

That money “supports investments in electric infrastructure and helps co-ops harden their systems,” Matheson said.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The 2024 elections were pivotal for policies affecting electric cooperatives. President Donald Trump’s victory and Republicans’ majorities in Congress could bring major changes to environmental rules, permitting requirements, funding programs and tax incentives that touch on co-ops’ daily operations.

On this episode of Along Those Lines, we’ll talk with Louis Finkel, NRECA’s senior vice president of Government Relations, about what those changes could be and what they mean for co-ops. He also offers tips on how co-op leaders can engage with policymakers and ventures a guess on where we could be a year from now in the policy space.

Listen to the episode below:

You can also listen and subscribe to Along Those Lines on your preferred podcast service:
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Find out more about NRECA’s podcast. Questions or suggestions? Email us at AlongThoseLines@nreca.coop.

Senators have introduced bipartisan legislation to try to boost production of distribution transformers by providing a 10% tax credit to U.S. manufacturers of the crucial equipment. 

Electric cooperatives depend on an adequate supply of transformers to restore power after natural disasters, replace aging equipment and meet growing demand for electricity from data centers, electric vehicles and large apartment and housing developments, said Will Mitchell, a legislative affairs director at NRECA. 

“There’s a huge need to replace what’s on the grid now combined with a big increase in demand for electricity expected in the coming years,” he said. 

The Credit Incentives for Resilient Critical Utility Infrastructure and Transformers (CIRCUIT) Act, offered Thursday by Sens. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., would extend the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit to U.S. companies that produce distribution transformers.  

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said the bill would “help give domestic manufacturers needed certainty as they work to ensure a resilient national supply chain for electric cooperatives and other utilities.” 

“We thank Sens. Moran and Cortez Masto for introducing this legislation, which is critical to strengthening the domestic energy economy and assisting co-ops in their mission to provide safe, reliable and affordable power to their members,” he said. 

Tim Mills, president and CEO of ERMCO Inc., which manufacturers distribution transformers used by more than 90% of the nation’s electric co-ops, said he would definitely use the tax credit to step up production if Congress passes the bill. The Dyersburg, Tennessee-based company manufactured over 650,000 transformers last year and has the capacity to produce up to about 750,000. 

“I think the chances for this tax credit to work are tremendous,” Mills said. “We’d redeploy this capital immediately into strategic investments to grow our output.” 

The wait for co-ops and other utilities to receive single phase pole-mounted distribution and small pad-mounted transformers is largely back to normal levels now that the COVID-19 supply chain crisis has eased, he said. However, it can still take quite a while to get larger, three-phase transformers that serve data centers, factories or big apartment complexes. 

“Those are still tight,” he said. “Supply is still being outstripped by demand.” 

Demand for electricity is going to continue to grow, making the tax credit an important step to boost the supply of transformers for the future, Mills said. 

“These investment funds are critical,” he said. “They will help us, and the entire industry, better evaluate supply and demand to ensure we build a long-term, sustainable electrical grid.” 

Moran said the bill will “help the United States move closer to energy independence, provide jobs and keep up with rising demands.” 

Cortez Masto said it “is critical for lowering energy costs, supporting energy resiliency, and strengthening our national security.” 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Wisconsin-based Dairyland Power Cooperative is upgrading its system with a slate of new investments to bolster electric reliability and affordability, including a recently completed major transmission line that will improve grid flexibility in the Midwest.

The projects underscore Dairyland’s commitment to growth and innovation while mitigating financial risk, said Brent Ridge, president and CEO of the La Crosse-based co-op, which serves 24 distribution cooperatives and 27 municipal utilities.

In late September, the 102-mile Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line entered service after more than a decade of planning and construction. The 345-kilovolt power line, which Dairyland co-owns with ITC Midwest and American Transmission Co., will reduce grid congestion in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region and improve system reliability and flexibility as fossil fuel plants retire.

“The safe completion of Cardinal-Hickory Creek is a victory for energy consumers and the environment,” Ridge said. “As a backbone interconnection, the line will finally serve as the vital link to a long waiting list of regional renewable energy projects. [It] also strengthens grid reliability and resilience at a time of great change in the energy industry.”

As of June 2024, 160 renewable generation projects totaling 24.5 gigawatts across Wisconsin, Iowa and the Upper Midwest were depending on completion of the line to deliver power. That is enough energy to power millions of homes and businesses, according to Dairyland.

The line is “a huge boon to reliability,” said Kevin Nordt, Dairyland executive vice president and chief strategy officer. “By expanding and beefing up the transmission networks across MISO, that is also a very important contributor to the overall reliability of MISO and the Eastern Interconnection and all MISO’s members.”

The project, which involved over 10 years of planning and construction, is a success story for Dairyland and the power sector broadly. Many high-voltage transmission lines can take a decade or longer to complete or are scrapped due to permitting and cost allocation challenges. Those hurdles are slowing efforts to expand the nation’s transmission capacity, which some experts say may need to double or triple by 2050 to meet power demand growth forecasts and accommodate more weather-dependent energy resources such as wind and solar.

To ease permitting challenges, more than 95% of the Cardinal-Hickory Creek line in Wisconsin was co-located within existing infrastructure rights of way. Dairyland and its utility partners also provided opportunity for public comment and sought to minimize environmental impacts to the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, including using a robust set of mitigation and restoration measures.

“Getting Cardinal-Hickory Creek approved and bringing it to fruition took longer than we expected,” Ridge said. “Despite litigation that delayed progress, I applaud our teams for being focused on our end goal of building a transmission line to enable the development of more clean, reliable energy and growth for our communities.”

The transmission line isn’t the only new development for Dairyland, which provides power to about 700,000 people through the co-ops and municipal utilities it serves.

Dairyland is part of an NRECA consortium that, along with Georgia Transmission Corp., is negotiating $97.9 million in Department of Energy funding for transmission upgrades, including use of advanced overhead conductors to increase line capacity.

Also last fall, the co-op was tapped for a $15.6 million loan from the Department of Agriculture to build solar-and-storage facilities and $28 million in DOE funding to develop three long-duration battery storage facilities in rural parts of Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin.

The co-op’s biggest funding award, announced in September, was $579 million from USDA to help Dairyland purchase over 1,000 megawatts of wind and solar power, and battery energy storage. It will also allow Dairyland to refinance existing coal assets at low interest rates to help pay them off.

The renewable and storage assets will help serve significant demand growth, including from new data center loads, while providing flexible, competitively priced power, said Nordt. They will also make renewable energy represent more than half of Dairyland’s resource mix within the next decade compared with roughly a quarter now.

“Renewables in particular are very nicely priced for us, so much more so with the grant,” he said. And with new storage capacity, “we’re able to store lower-priced energy and avoid having to make a higher-priced purchase to serve our members during peak time. That is a huge economic benefit.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

President Donald Trump’s initial actions on energy “will help keep the lights on,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said Monday as the newly inaugurated president signed a flurry of executive orders. 

Trump’s Day One actions included declaring a “national energy emergency” and signing an “Unleashing American Energy” executive order. Among other things, the orders set the stage to accelerate oil and gas drilling, expedite the approval of energy development projects, and remove red tape surrounding the federal permitting process. 

“As electricity demand skyrockets, America is facing major electric reliability challenges that require bold and decisive action,” Matheson said. “President Trump’s swift reset of American energy policy appropriately prioritizes smart energy policies.  

“In recent years, federal agencies have taken numerous policy actions that jeopardize the nation’s grid and hamper the ability of electric cooperatives to keep the lights on across rural America. We need more power, not less. These early Trump actions help put our nation on a better path by acknowledging this simple fact.” 

In declaring an energy emergency, Trump’s executive order called U.S. energy production “inadequate to meet our nation’s needs” and said the reliability of the electric grid must be strengthened. 

“The policies of the previous administration have driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action,” the executive order says. “Without immediate remedy, this situation will dramatically deteriorate in the near future due to a high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology.”   

Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” order calls on the heads of federal agencies to review all existing regulations that “impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources—with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” 

Matheson said electric co-ops “appreciate the president’s recognition that the nation’s permitting system must be modernized if we are to address today’s energy challenges and meet tomorrow’s energy needs.”  

He said NRECA understands the Trump administration’s goal to make government spending more efficient. The president issued an executive order Monday officially creating a Department of Government Efficiency advisory group that aims to slash government spending and regulations.  

Electric co-ops have a strong case to make that they are using the federal funds they receive to bolster grid reliability, Matheson said. 

“We look forward to discussing how electric co-ops are leveraging numerous federal programs to shore up the electric grid in local communities across the nation,” he said. 

Some of Trump’s executive orders are expected to face legal and legislative challenges.  

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Electric cooperatives served by Basin Electric say the generation and transmission co-op’s efficient work to get a new 345-kilovolt power line up and running will help them meet existing and future demand with greater reliability.

The Bismarck, North Dakota-based G&T recently completed a 33-mile transmission line within the state to connect the Roundup substation near Killdeer and the Kummer Ridge substation near Johnson’s Corner.

“The strength this line adds to McKenzie County and the surrounding region will increase existing member reliability and voltage strength and will help accommodate future load growth,” said Jeremy Mahowald, general manager of Sidney, Montana-based Upper Missouri Power Cooperative.

Basin Electric initiated the project to enhance reliability and reduce the risk of load loss due to a transmission line failure, said Philip Westby, the G&T’s manager of transmission services.

The power line will also address regional grid congestion and cost inefficiencies to better serve local businesses and residents, he said.

“The completion of the Roundup-to-Kummer Ridge transmission line bolsters the reliability to a significant amount of McKenzie Electric’s membership by closing the path on what was previously a radial line,” said Matt Hanson, CEO of the Watford City, North Dakota-based co-op.  “It also provides an additional feed into the McKenzie Electric service area, providing contingency benefits to both McKenzie Electric and other surrounding utilities.”

Basin Electric provides energy to 140 electric co-ops in nine Western states that serve more than 3 million members.

Construction of the transmission line, which uses an aluminum-encapsulated carbon core conductor, began in April 2024. It was energized in December, five months ahead of schedule. Reclamation work around the project is ongoing.

Gavin McCollam, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Basin Electric, attributed the quick progress on the power line to McKenzie and Dunn counties and the North Dakota Public Service Commission “for recognizing the importance of this project and providing necessary approvals.”

He also credited McKenzie Electric and area pipeline operators for their help in navigating the project around existing utilities, and the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation leadership for their assistance during design and construction.

“Together, we have developed a solution for a safe and reliable transmission line that provides critical power delivery needs,” McCollam said.

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

A new generation and transmission cooperative is open for business in Louisiana, where five electric distribution co-ops worked for more than two years on a power supply solution that cuts costs, offers flexibility and improves reliability.

1803 Electric Cooperative, named for the year the Louisiana Purchase was ratified, began serving Winnsboro-based Northeast Louisiana Power Cooperative on Jan. 1.

Deridder-based Beauregard Electric Cooperative, Homer-based Claiborne Electric Cooperative, Houma-based South Louisiana Electric Cooperative Association and Franklinton-based Washington-St. Tammany Electric Cooperative are the other founding co-ops. They will start taking power from 1803 in April after their current contracts with a for-profit supplier expire. New Roads-based Pointe Coupee EMC has joined 1803 as a transmission-only member.

“Our desire is to take control of our own future and make power supply decisions that best fit our needs,” said Michael Marcotte, CEO and general manager of Claiborne Electric.

“We believe that forming our own generation and transmission cooperative will lead to several benefits, including more flexibility, reduced costs, direct decision-making control, more proactive management and an increased focus on reliability and affordability.”

Headquartered in Baton Rouge, 1803 will purchase more than 1,000 megawatts to serve about 120,000 co-op members.

The G&T, certified by the Louisiana Public Service Commission in 2022, engaged ACES Power, which is owned by 24 other G&Ts and a distribution co-op, to help with its request for proposal process for energy contracts.

“We got a very robust response: 20-plus unique companies with well over 100 different options for supply and structure,” said 1803 CEO Brian Hobbs, a veteran of the legal and corporate services division of Anadarko, Oklahoma-based Western Farmers Electric Cooperative.

“Just by virtue of running the RFP, they saw a 20% reduction in a bid submitted by their incumbent provider, and the portfolio that we’ve put together is still lower in cost than that.”

1803 members say they were driven to replace their existing provider with a G&T by a host of member-focused needs and challenges, including greater cost efficiency and reliability.

“There’s no problem we can’t solve, because we all work together to solve them,” said SLECA General Manager Matthew Peters. “We have the same mindset, values and view to always make sure that members of all the co-ops are getting the best deal possible in this ever-changing industry.”

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

Over half of North America is at risk of energy shortfalls in the next 10 years amid surging electricity demand and thermal plant retirements, according to a new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

Less overall capacity will enter the bulk power system in the next 10 years than NERC previously projected, particularly from always-available resources. And that new capacity will fall short of future demand growth, the grid watchdog said in its latest annual Long-Term Reliability Assessment, released Dec. 17.

“The trends point to critical reliability challenges facing the industry: satisfying escalating energy growth, managing generator retirements, and accelerating resource and transmission development,” the nearly 150-page report said.

Swift load growth, including from electrification of the economy and data centers, is expected to surpass increases in dispatchable resources, NERC observed.

NERC expects summer peak demand for assessed areas to rise by 15% across the next 10 years, while winter peak demand is forecasted to jump by around 18%. Those trends, along with rising plant retirements, signal a need for substantial generation and transmission growth in the next 10 years.

But much of the new capacity entering interconnection queues is solar photovoltaic, battery and hybrid resources, which are “more variable and weather-dependent than the generators they are replacing,” NERC said.

“Our infrastructure is not being built fast enough to keep up with the rising demand,” said John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment and performance analysis. “Policymakers, industry leaders and stakeholders across North America must work together to ensure the expansion of the bulk power system, ensure new resources can interconnect effectively and reliably, and also maintain reliability that our society depends on.”

NERC recommended that market operators and relevant authorities carefully manage generator deactivations and ensure sufficient reliability services. The report also called on policymakers to streamline siting and permitting of energy resources and transmission to support higher demand.

“NERC’s latest assessment continues painting a grim picture of our nation’s energy future and growing threats to reliable electricity,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “This report points directly to the need for a pro-energy policy agenda that prioritizes reliability and affordability for American families and businesses.”

In the next five years, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region is the most vulnerable under the new NERC assessment. The report placed MISO at high risk of energy shortfalls in 2025-2029, meaning it is likely to have inadequate electricity supplies at the peak of an average summer or winter season.

Many other parts of the U.S. are at elevated risk of shortfalls, meaning they would have adequate energy resources for normal peak conditions but likely experience shortfalls during extreme weather. Areas at elevated risk include the PJM Interconnection (Mid-Atlantic), New England, the Southwest Power Pool, Texas, California and part of the Southeast.

Those risks highlight the need to educate policymakers and regulators on the reliability implications of policy-driven energy transitions, NERC said.

In a letter this month to President-Elect Donald Trump, Matheson pledged to work with the incoming administration to advance policies that support energy production, manufacturing and infrastructure that are crucial to the well-being of rural communities.

“We urge President Trump and congressional leaders to prioritize reliability right out of the gate next year before it’s too late,” Matheson said.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson today issued the following statement on the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment.

“NERC’s latest assessment continues painting a grim picture of our nation’s energy future and growing threats to reliable electricity,” Matheson said. “This report points directly to the need for a pro-energy policy agenda that prioritizes reliability and affordability for American families and businesses. We urge President Trump and congressional leaders to prioritize reliability right out of the gate next year before it’s too late.”

Matheson sent a letter to President Trump earlier this month pledging to work with his administration to advance these goals. “Policies that prioritize investment in American energy production, manufacturing and infrastructure are crucial for the wellbeing of rural communities. We urge you to take a coordinated approach which ensures that energy projects can be built efficiently, effectively, and at reasonable cost.”

Consistent with last year’s long-term reliability assessment, NERC’s latest report finds that much of the country faces an increasing risk of energy shortfalls over the next 10 years under both normal and extreme conditions.

In a separate report last year on reliability risk priorities, NERC for the first time identified U.S. energy policy itself a top threat to electric reliability.

“Ensuring reliability during and after policy driven transitions should be a key consideration in setting Energy Policy,” NERC said. “Education for policymakers and regulators to increase awareness of the reliability implications of policy decisions is a critical need.”

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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The restarting of a decommissioned nuclear power plant is an unprecedented achievement in the United States, where cost, permitting and safety concerns have marginalized the industry since the early 1980s.  

But a groundswell of new support for nuclear energy, driven by increasing demand for power combined with an ongoing rush to close or curtail fossil fuel generation, has put the mothballed Palisades nuclear station in southwest Michigan on an ambitious path to be repowered by late 2025. 

The 800-megawatt plant, located on the banks of Lake Michigan, was shut down in May 2022 after nearly 50 years of service. But new clean energy funding and other support from the state of Michigan and the U.S. Department of Energy convinced Holtec International, the plant’s owner, to pursue recommissioning of the facility.

The linchpin in this historic project was finding a buyer for the power Palisades would generate. That came in late 2023, when Wolverine Power Cooperative and later Hoosier Energy signed long-term power purchase agreements with Holtec.

On this episode, we’re joined by Eric Baker, CEO of Wolverine Power Cooperative, and Donna Walker, CEO of Hoosier Energy, to talk about how co-ops became involved in this project and how this kind of co-op vision, creativity and leadership is starting to garner worldwide attention.

Listen to the episode below:

You can also listen and subscribe to Along Those Lines on your preferred podcast service:
Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Find out more about NRECA’s podcast. Questions or suggestions? Email us at AlongThoseLines@nreca.coop.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson urged President-elect Donald Trump to help electric cooperatives deliver affordable, reliable power to rural communities in a Dec. 4 letter to Trump’s transition office.

The letter outlined high-priority actions the new administration can take to support a pro-energy policy agenda that will help meet skyrocketing U.S. electricity demand, remove regulatory burdens for co-ops, and promote the well-being of rural communities.

“Our nation is at an energy crossroads. And your leadership in our nation’s energy policy is more critical than ever,” Matheson told Trump.

Matheson said reliability is under threat from “flawed public policies” that are forcing the premature closure of power plants. That’s a key reason the North American Electric Reliability Corp. expects many states to be at high risk of rolling blackouts in the next five years during normal peak demand conditions. And the problem is exacerbated by increasing demand from data centers, which could consume nearly 10% of all U.S. electric output by 2030, the letter stated.

Matheson listed seven key actions that Trump can take to address these challenges:

• Repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas rule for existing coal-fired and new natural gas plants, as well as other EPA regulations threatening electric reliability.
• Streamline and accelerate federal permitting reviews of energy projects.
• Roll back public lands and species conservation rules that inhibit operation and maintenance of power lines on federal lands and hurt wildfire mitigation efforts.
• Reverse plans that imperil hydroelectric output from the Lower Snake River dams in the Pacific Northwest.
• Effectively use remaining funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to improve electric infrastructure and enhance grid resilience and reliability.
• Ensure access to important federal programs used by electric co-ops to benefit rural communities, including grant programs at the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy and for broadband deployment.
• Support the Treasury Department in administering crucial direct-pay tax credits that co-ops can use to invest in energy technologies.

“We urge you to take a coordinated approach which ensures that energy projects can be built efficiently, effectively, and at reasonable cost,” Matheson concluded. “And we look forward to supporting your administration’s efforts to cut costly and burdensome regulations that would otherwise undermine affordability and reliability.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

East Kentucky Power Cooperative is investing more than $2 billion to build nearly 2,000 megawatts of new generation and convert about 1,700 MW of existing coal-based units to co-fire with natural gas to ensure long-term reliability.

“EKPC is blazing a bold path to ensure reliable, cost-competitive and sustainable electricity for rural Kentucky in coming decades,” said Tony Campbell, president and CEO of the generation and transmission cooperative, which supplies 16 electric co-ops that serve 1.1 million Kentuckians.

“EKPC is building for the future, protecting reliable plants, hedging against high energy costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Winchester-based G&T recently filed with the state public service commission for several significant projects that are targeted to be online in Kentucky by 2030. They include:

• A new $500 million 214-MW, 12-unit gas power plant called Liberty Station.
• A new $1.32 billion 745-MW gas unit at EKPC’s 341-MW Cooper Station.
• A $74 million retrofit of the 225-MW Cooper Unit 2 to generate power from either coal or gas.
• A $187 million retrofit of the 1,340-MW, four-unit Spurlock Station to generate power from either coal or gas.

In addition, about 757 MW of renewables also are planned for development by 2031.

Campbell said EKPC is on target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 35% by 2035, and these investments will safeguard its supply under the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule, which would otherwise shutter its coal units by 2032.

The G&T also plans to double its investment in demand-side management and energy efficiency with four new initiatives and enhancements to three current programs, including incentives to help reduce energy use by almost 70,000 megawatt-hours and cut winter peak by 38 MW.

EKPC ramped up its plant upgrade plans after it discovered a “hidden load” of about 300 MW caused by multiday winter storms that hit its member co-ops with lingering icy temperatures and skyrocketing home heating demand.

“It surprised us all,” said Don Mosier, EKPC’s chief operating officer and executive vice president. “A couple of severe events—Winter Storm Gerri this year and Elliott in 2022—demonstrated to us and our board why we just cannot let go of coal yet.”

The planned generation projects will be “a tremendous game changer for us in the decades to come,” he said. “It really starts that glide path, that transition, towards a less carbon-intensive fleet, and we think that is the best hedge against future regulations.”

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

Many U.S. regions are at elevated risk of electricity supply shortfalls in the event of extreme weather this winter, reflecting growing challenges for the power grid as substantial always-available generation is retired, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said in a new report. 

In its Winter Reliability Assessment, released Nov. 14, NERC said all assessed areas should have adequate resources for normal peak winter load. But much of the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast—as well as Texas—are at risk of energy shortfalls or natural gas pipeline capacity constraints if there is a prolonged cold snap. 

Those risks stem partly from growing power demand and the loss of capacity from retired coal-fired and older gas-fired plants, according to the report. 

 Challenges tied to higher demand are compounded by “flawed public policies” that are shutting down always-available power generation, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. 

“This growing threat to reliable electricity jeopardizes the health of local communities and undermines the American economy,” Matheson said. “This report clearly highlights the need to swiftly implement a pro-energy policy agenda with a focus on affordability and reliability for American families and businesses. Smart energy policies that keep the lights on are more important than ever.” 

Ongoing industry efforts to bolster winter reliability have made the grid better prepared for the coming months, according to NERC. 

But demand is growing from new data centers and increased electrification of home heating and transportation. Meeting that demand has become “more challenging and complex as coal-fired and older natural gas-fired generators retire and are replaced by variable and energy-limited resources,” NERC said. 

Infrastructure damage from Hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier this fall could also make the grid less resilient to extreme winter storms while recovery efforts continue, according to the report. 

Severe arctic storms have extended across much of North America in three of the past five winters. 

Areas at elevated risk of electricity supply or gas pipeline capacity shortfalls during extreme weather this winter include: 

• Midcontinent ISO: The region’s coal and gas-fired generation has fallen by more than 5 gigawatts since last winter, partially offset by a 2 GW increase in firm capacity imports. Capacity margins will be helped by a decline of more than 4 GW in forecasted peak demand since last winter. 

• New England: Dispatchable thermal generation capacity has dropped by 2.6 GW, while forecasted peak demand has grown by 0.6 GW, or 3%. 

• New York: Anticipated reserve margins are expected to be well above the installed margin, which measures how much generating capacity exceeds expected load. But operators will likely be challenged during periods of extreme cold if non-firm gas supplies are interrupted. 

• PJM Interconnection (Mid-Atlantic): No reliability issues are anticipated for PJM’s bulk power system. But some gas infrastructure facilities may have to shut down as part of legal proceedings related to a gas pipeline expansion project. As much as 20 GW of generation capacity is directly or indirectly served by the pipeline at the center of the proceedings. 

• SERC Reliability Corp.-East: Lower forecasted peak demand is slightly expanding expected reserve margins compared to 2023. However, dispatchable thermal resources have declined by nearly 1 GW, and growth in solar capacity “does little to help meet peak winter demand,” NERC said. 

• Southwest Power Pool: Anticipated reserve margins are up, largely due to increased demand-response resources. But forecasted peak demand has risen for this winter by 1.8 GW year-over-year while total generation capacity has dropped by over 4 GW. 

• Electric Reliability Council of Texas: Risk of reserve shortage remains elevated, largely due to strong load growth that exceeds gains in dispatchable resources. 

NERC recommended ways that grid operators, generation owners and government authorities can prevent energy emergencies and minimize potential power shutoffs. Those actions include preparing for high electricity demand and low wind conditions, winterizing generation units, and increasing operational coordination around generation fuels. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson today issued the following statement on the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s winter 2024-25 reliability assessment.

“Demand for electricity is skyrocketing across America and supply is not keeping pace. And flawed public policies that focus on shutting down always available power generation are compounding this problem,” Matheson said. “This growing threat to reliable electricity jeopardizes the health of local communities and undermines the American economy. This report clearly highlights the need to swiftly implement a pro-energy policy agenda with a focus on affordability and reliability for American families and businesses. Smart energy policies that keep the lights on are more important than ever.”

NERC is the nation’s grid watchdog. Its assessment finds that more than half the country is at risk of energy shortfalls under extreme winter conditions. It also warns, “Winter electric load is growing in most areas as the grid increasingly powers heating, transportation systems, and new data centers. Serving winter load is becoming more challenging and complex as coal-fired and older natural gas-fired generators retire and are replaced by variable and energy-limited resources.”

A previous NERC report listed energy policy as a threat to reliability. Another NERC report from last December emphasized that over the next five years, all or parts of 19 states are at high risk of rolling blackouts during normal peak demand for electricity as demand outpaces supply.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson issued the following statement on the election results.

“We congratulate President Trump on his election, and we look forward to working with him and Congress on a pro-energy agenda that protects affordability and reliability,” Matheson said. “America is at an energy crossroads and the reliability of the electric grid hangs in the balance. Critical generation resources are being retired faster than they can be reliably replaced. At the same time, electricity demand is skyrocketing as power-hungry data centers and new manufacturing facilities come online. Smart energy policies that keep the lights on are more important than ever.”

Among electric co-ops’ ongoing policy priorities:

• Safeguarding Electric Reliability. Protecting the electric grid from increasing threats to reliability, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s Power Plant Rule.

• Reforming Federal Permitting. Modernizing and streamlining the federal permitting and siting process in a manner that eliminates excessive regulatory burdens and ensures more predictable and timely decisions from federal agencies.

• Enhancing Wildfire Protection. Passage of legislation such as the Fix Our Forests Act (H.R. 8790) that includes crucial improvements to grid hardening and wildfire mitigation procedures that will help co-ops better address wildfire hazards on utility rights-of-way.

• Protecting the Lower Snake River Dams. Preserving the Lower Snake River dams, which provide a critical source of reliable and affordable carbon-free electricity in the Pacific Northwest.

• Defending Direct Pay. Maintaining direct pay tax credits, which provide direct federal payments to electric co-ops when they deploy new energy technologies, including carbon capture, nuclear, energy storage, renewables and more.

• Maintaining New ERA Funding. Protecting funding for innovative energy projects from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Empowering Rural America (“New ERA”) Program.

• Promoting Infrastructure Modernization. Improving the nation’s electric infrastructure, including transmission facilities critical to maintaining a reliable electric grid.

• Deploying Rural Broadband. Delivering quality, affordable broadband to rural communities through programs such as the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. says it’s investing nearly $1 billion in over 1,000 megawatts of new natural gas generation to ensure cost-effective reliability and future equity for its 17 distribution member cooperatives.

AECC recently bought 100 acres outside Naples, Texas, where it will break ground in 2026 on a roughly $850 million gas plant, which will be its biggest generating facility and its first outside Arkansas.

The 900-MW, two-turbine, simple-cycle plant will be near three existing pipelines and electric transmission to facilitate its commercial startup in November 2028, said Jonathan Oliver, AECC’s chief operations officer. It will operate in the Southwest Power Pool’s wholesale electricity market.

AECC is also investing $93 million to expand its Thomas B. Fitzhugh Generating Station from 170 MW to 270 MW to help address a forecasted capacity shortage in SPP in 2025 and 2026. Construction began in September.

Adding two units at the gas plant in Ozark, Arkansas, with its existing pipelines and transmission, will make the project cost-effective and ready for commercial operation late next year, said Oliver.

“Making these investments ensures reliability for our members, and it ensures low costs for our members for the long term, not just a few months or a few years,” he said. “We are building equity for our members that will pay returns over time.”

The new units will join the Little Rock-based generation and transmission co-op’s fleet of nearly 4,300 MW of gas, coal, hydro, wind and solar resources.

The primary drivers for building new generation are the region’s “steady, normal consumer load growth” of about 1.5% to 2% each year and the planned retirement of about 1,200 MW of coal by 2030, Oliver said.

“Natural gas is an accessible, dispatchable resource we can rely on, and it gets full accreditation in SPP to meet capacity to serve the market,” he said. “Plus, gas prices are fairly stable now, offering members a least-cost reliable resource.”

AECC is also building solar to meet demand. The G&T’s 122-MW Woodruff County Solar Project began operation in early October, adjacent to the retired Carl Bailey Generation Station. The solar array’s capacity is identical to the gas plant output.

“By taking advantage of our owned interconnection at the Bailey plant, we’re maintaining a diverse portfolio of resources for members,” said Oliver.

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

Electric cooperatives and other rural utilities won substantial funding to better protect their systems against extreme weather, meet growing demand and lower costs for consumers under a new $2 billion round of a major Department of Energy program.

The funding will be provided through the DOE’s $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, which was created through the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 to enhance grid flexibility while ensuring access to affordable, reliable power.

As part of the new GRIP round, NRECA and 12 electric rural utilities led by Georgia Transmission Corp. were picked to negotiate $97.9 million in funding for new and upgraded transmission infrastructure, part of rural utility efforts to strengthen grid resilience using advanced technologies. The money will support the Smart Technology for Advanced Resilient Transmission (START) project, which seeks to build, rebuild or reconductor transmission infrastructure and increase electric transfer capacity, including through use of advanced overhead conductors.

The consortium funding will support 13 transmission projects across 11 states.

“Electric cooperatives are leaders in finding innovative ways to reliably power their communities,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “This federal funding is an important tool as they work to meet tomorrow’s energy needs.”

Rural utilities getting the GRIP funds could help meet the growing need for transmission capacity amid new sources of demand and an aging grid. The U.S. must replace 200,000 miles of existing transmission lines over the next decade, according to some estimates.

“As electricity demand in the U.S. continues to increase, upgrading and building new transmission will be critical,” Matheson said. “Electric co-ops are working together to reliably meet these increased energy needs.”

In addition to Georgia Transmission Corp., other rural utilities getting the new START project awards are:

• Arizona Electric Power Cooperative Inc. (Benson, Arizona)
• Carteret Craven Electric Membership Corp. (Newport, North Carolina)
• Dairyland Power Cooperative (La Crosse, Wisconsin)
• East Kentucky Power Cooperative (Winchester, Kentucky)
• East River Electric Power Cooperative Inc. (Madison, South Dakota)
• Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative Inc. (Calais, Maine)
• Elkhorn Rural Public Power District (Battle Creek, Nebraska)
• Great River Energy (Maple Grove, Minnesota)
• Northern Rio Arriba Electric Cooperative (Chama, New Mexico)
• Ozarks Electric Cooperative Corp. (Fayetteville, Arkansas)
• Polk County Rural Public Power District (Stromsburg, Nebraska)

The new round of GRIP funding also included a variety of other co-op projects:

• Tennessee Valley Authority (Nashville, Tennessee): $250 million to support TVA and project partners, including some co-ops, on grid resilience projects across eight states.
• Hoosier Energy Rural Electric Cooperative (Bloomington, Indiana) and Southern Illinois Power Cooperative (Marion, Illinois): $116.8 million to build new transmission feeds to loop transmission to 10 substations in seven counties.
• Jones-Onslow Electric Membership Corp. (Jacksonville, North Carolina): $42.3 million for enhancements including a new step-down station, new transmission lines to provide feeds from multiple sources, and structure hardening of existing facilities.
• Rita Blanca Electric Cooperative Inc. (Dalhart, Texas): $40.7 million to construct a new 55-mile transmission line between Dalhart, Texas and the Three-Corners Substation at the Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico border.
• Delaware County Electric Cooperative (Delhi, New York): $27.7 million for grid resilience projects to avoid outages caused by weather events and tree damage due to invasive species.
• Black Hills Electric Cooperative Inc. (Custer, South Dakota): $20.54 million for grid technology, a wildfire alert system and system operations tools to mitigate risk from high winds, extreme temperatures and wildfires in South Dakota and Nebraska.
• Randolph Electric Membership Corp. (Asheboro, North Carolina): $11.5 million to replace 24 aging circuit ties over 50 miles and install advanced predictive maintenance and fault location devices.
• Tombigbee Electric Cooperative (Hamilton, Alabama): $11.2 million to modernize its electric distribution system, including with energy storage, reconductoring and deploying a distributed energy resources management system.
• Kotzebue Electric Association (Kotzebue, Alaska): $7.5 million to improve its power plant to protect against blizzards and extreme weather.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Rapid electric load growth, the loss of baseload generating assets and more extreme weather make a diverse power portfolio more crucial than ever, a generation and transmission cooperative leader told federal energy regulators.

“An ‘all of the above’ policy on resources has never been more critical to maintain reliability, predicated in large part on unprecedented challenges,” Hoosier Energy President and CEO Donna Walker said in remarks submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as part of FERC’s annual reliability technical conference in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 16.

Walker represented NRECA on a conference panel about resource adequacy and expected load growth. She discussed the confluence of variables that utilities must navigate in the current environment, including potentially rapid load growth, plant retirements, and a shift toward variable and energy-limited resources.

The commission “would benefit from considering the cumulative impact of all of these factors when evaluating the reliability risks of today and how it can avoid exacerbating those risks,” Walker’s written testimony stated.

She said the U.S. electric grid is already struggling to keep up with existing demand while preparing for increased demand from manufacturing, data centers and vehicle electrification. At the same time, new regulations, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule, could accelerate the retirement of always-available fossil-fuel-based generation and add more pressure on the grid.

“NRECA has been clear about the need for smart energy policy to prioritize electric reliability,” Walker said. “Resource adequacy is a critical component of maintaining reliability, and policymaking is impacting our members’ ability to reliably and affordably provide power to the 42 million Americans they serve.”

She explained that Bloomington, Indiana-based Hoosier Energy is transitioning from a mainly coal-fired baseload utility to a balanced portfolio that includes more renewable resources. The co-op is also partnering with Wolverine Power Cooperative in Cadillac, Michigan, on power purchase agreements with Holtec International that will support the restart of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, a project that will deliver reliable, affordable, carbon-free power to members, Walker said.

Those resource additions will meet normal expected load growth over the next 10-20 years, but “these efforts become much more complicated when considering the vast number of moving parts within our industry,” Walker’s remarks noted.

Growth in consumer demand, she said, has typically been linear and incremental, but that dynamic has changed as large new commercial loads come online.

“Changes in customer load, especially large customer loads, have the potential to turn resource adequacy on its head,” she said. “Hoosier Energy is by no means alone among the co-ops in receiving interest from data centers, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency companies.”

Walker outlined several steps that FERC could take to help co-ops and other generation and transmission providers address these challenges.

Those include a revamp of the way FERC measures and forecasts resource adequacy and giving priority to load-serving entities seeking to interconnect new generation to the grid.

Walker also encouraged FERC and states to work together on easing transmission constraints and allow states, self-regulating entities such as co-ops, and other relevant authorities to prioritize regional flexibility, transparency and fair cost-allocation methodologies for new projects.

“FERC should focus transmission planning and expansion on meeting the needs of [load-serving entities] and the consumers they serve,” she said.

Throughout her testimony, Walker repeatedly stressed that any solution to meet the growing demand for energy and transmission must consider the costs to consumers.

“The consumers of electric co-ops, who serve more than 90% of the persistent poverty counties in the United States, have to be able to afford that electricity,” she said during the Oct. 16 panel. “Cooperatives share an obligation to serve their members by providing safe, reliable and affordable electric service. The objective must be to strike a balance between cost and reliability.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request from NRECA and other parties to pause the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule regulating power plant greenhouse gas emissions while a lawsuit against the rule proceeds.

The Oct. 16 decision is disappointing for many electric cooperatives that face severe harm from the rule. NRECA and other industry challengers argue the rule violates the Clean Air Act because it relies on the use of inadequately demonstrated carbon capture and storage technology along with unrealistic compliance timelines. Legal challenges to the rule are currently on an expedited schedule before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

“Given today’s ruling, it is essential that the D.C. Circuit expedites their evaluation of the legality of the EPA rule, which we believe is unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “Failure to do so will further jeopardize the reliability of the nation’s electric grid, which is already under threat from skyrocketing electricity demand.”

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch issued a statement saying that legal opponents of the regulation “have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule.”

They also urged the D.C. Circuit to move quickly on issuing a decision and emphasized that a stay may be more appropriate following the D.C. Circuit’s decision.

The rule requires increasingly stringent emissions controls at many power plants in the coming years.

Existing coal plants and new baseload gas units that intend to operate past 2038 must capture 90% of carbon emissions by 2032. Coal units retiring before 2039 must co-fire with natural gas at a 40% rate starting in 2030 under the rule and could only avoid adding new emissions controls if they retire before 2032.

Emissions controls will also be required for new intermediate-capacity gas plants.

The rule will force many co-ops to install costly carbon capture technology that has not been adequately demonstrated at the scale required by EPA. If they forgo that option, co-ops may be forced to build lower-capacity gas units to avoid more stringent emissions requirements as larger coal plants retire, or to add weather-dependent energy resources that may not be as reliable as traditional generation.

Those challenges will coincide with a rapid increase in power demand as transportation and other sectors of the economy electrify and load rises from data centers and artificial intelligence, straining the grid’s ability to reliably provide power.

“The EPA Power Plant Rule poses severe harm to American consumers, the U.S. economy and the nation’s electric grid,” Matheson said.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—NRECA is fighting the Biden administration’s latest action to move toward breaching the Lower Snake River dams that provide clean, carbon-free hydropower to 55 electric cooperatives in eight Western states. 

On Sept. 20, the Department of Energy announced that it would launch a study to explore how to “replace the power and services provided by the four Lower Snake River Dams” in southeast Washington. 

“It’s difficult to imagine why anyone would want to breach the four dams on the Lower Snake River—3,000 megawatts of always-available, carbon-free capacity,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson told co-op CEOs and directors this week at NRECA’s Regions 7&9 Meeting, where the dams were a big topic of discussion. 

Matheson vowed that “NRECA will be very aggressive in advocating for the dams.” 

Louis Finkel, NRECA’s senior vice president of Government Relations, said the association has already been meeting with the transition teams of Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.  

NRECA wants to ensure that the next president—regardless of who wins—will come to office understanding how important the dams are to reliable, affordable power in the West, Finkel said. 

“Our passion is a reflection of your passion about this issue,” Finkel told co-op leaders at the regional meeting. 

The DOE study comes in the wake of a settlement agreement reached in late 2023 among the Biden administration, environmental groups, and tribal and state governments over the federal government’s operation of the dams, which plaintiffs said are threatening the survival of endangered salmon. The settlement supports breaching the dams and replacing them with other types of renewable energy. 

In January of this year, Matheson testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, Climate and Grid Security, warning that efforts to breach the dams threaten the region’s power supply and would hurt farmers and economically disadvantaged rural communities.  

Although it would take an act of Congress to actually breach the dams, the settlement agreement and DOE study show that the administration’s actions are “all geared to putting forward a trajectory toward breaching the dams,” Finkel said. 

The DOE’s action comes as the Bonneville Power Administration, which provides power to co-ops from the dams, warned in its latest Pacific Northwest Loads and Resources Study that the region will experience rapidly escalating energy deficits in just three years as demand for electricity grows. 

In addition to advocacy efforts by NRECA and co-op leaders, NRECA has activated its grassroots network—Voices for Cooperative Power—to oppose breaching the dams, said Kelly Cushman, NRECA’s vice president of political programs.  

Last December, about 20,000 co-op consumer-members and employees who belong to VCP signed a petition calling on President Joe Biden to abandon any plans to breach the dams. The signatures were collected over a seven-day period and delivered to the White House. 

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

Four large electric grid operators are backing NRECA’s legal argument that the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant greenhouse gas rule will drive the early closure of crucial generation sources and threaten grid reliability.

The operators voiced their concerns in a “friend of the court” brief supporting a federal lawsuit that NRECA, many states and other parties have filed against the rule. Among other things, the brief claimed that EPA did not adequately consider the grid’s overall “energy requirements” when deciding the best system of emission reduction under the rule.

The grid operators spoke out on the issue after more than a year of sustained outreach from NRECA and co-op leaders.

“The final rule unreasonably discounts that existing fossil power generators will need to decide whether to commit to installing untested technology or retire the generating unit years before the compliance deadline, given the economic cost and risk of compliance,” the Sept. 13 amicus brief states.

Premature retirements of generating units that provide critical reliability attributes “can have significant, negative consequences on reliability,” the grid operators noted.

 They asked the court to remand the final rule back to EPA, “with instructions for it to adequately consider the grid adequacy and reliability issues [we] previously raised.”

The brief was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, PJM Interconnection, Southwest Power Pool and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Together, they maintain and enhance bulk power grid reliability in all or part of 30 states and the District of Columbia.

Their filing echoes NRECA’s concerns with the power plant rule, which EPA finalized in April. The regulation established greenhouse gas emissions standards for existing coal plants and new natural gas facilities, including requiring a 90% carbon capture rate for coal plants that operate past the start of 2039 and for new and modified baseload gas units.

The 90%  carbon capture and storage system that the rule mandates has not been adequately demonstrated and the emissions limits based on it are not achievable, according to NRECA. Furthermore, the rule’s timelines are too tight, and electric co-ops and their members will be saddled with the high cost of either deploying CCS or building extensive new renewable generation to replace lost coal and gas capacity, NRECA has said.

The rule is “based on overly ambitious and inadequately supported assumptions,” the grid operators said. “These assumptions then drive both the rate and timing of compliance, which in turn will drive the premature retirements of generation sources that will threaten the reliability of the electric grid.”

In comments before the rule was finalized, the grid operators had offered several “safety valve” options to mitigate their reliability concerns. But in its final rule, the EPA “did not address these specific recommendations, let alone explain why it did not adopt them,” the brief states.

Failing to address the rule’s consequences, along with those of other EPA power plant regulatory mandates, violates the Clean Air Act’s directive that EPA adequately consider the grid’s energy requirements, they stated.

“The grid operators have confirmed that the negative impacts of the power plant rule on the grid’s reliability that NRECA has warned EPA of are real and could have significant, harmful consequences for our nation,” NRECA Regulatory Affairs Director Dan Bosch said. “We are hopeful that the court will carefully consider the views of these operators that are responsible for ensuring the reliability of the bulk power grid in all or parts of 30 states and Washington, D.C.”

NRECA filed its lawsuit against the EPA power plant rule in May. The association has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the rule until the case is resolved, saying the regulation poses immediate harm to co-ops and the nation’s electric grid.

In addition, several lawmakers in Congress have sponsored a resolution to overturn the EPA rule.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

The power sector and government are best at solving industry challenges—including how to ensure a stable, reliable grid—when they work together, a top Department of Energy official told electric cooperative leaders at an NRECA gathering in Arlington, Virginia. 

Gene Rodrigues, assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Electricity, spoke Aug. 21 at an inaugural meeting between NRECA’s Strategic Technology & Advisory Council and Member Advisory Groups (MAGs).  

The council and MAGs are made up of co-op representatives and have leads within NRECA’s Business & Technology Strategies division. The MAGs focus on areas of innovation, including distributed energy resources, cybersecurity, generation and data analytics. Representatives of the Transmission and Distribution Engineering Council also attended the meeting. 

As the power sector rapidly transforms due to emerging technologies and new demand sources, Rodrigues said four principles should anchor what DOE and co-ops do: reliability, resilience, security and affordability. 

“The thing that makes NRECA effective … is that we work together around those four things,” he said. “Those principles are what I think are really important.” 

But ensuring those attributes is increasingly difficult, according to Rodrigues. 

“Reliability and resilience are no longer things that we can forecast accurately,” he said. “And that means we have to get better in this industry about being not just adaptable, but actually being a little more able to … allow judgment to replace a regulator’s economic model for what to do and how to approve it.” 

Addressing those challenges also means collaborating across policy divides. 

“As we think about all those things that are important to fight against, let’s find a way for this industry to come back to an area of … agreement,” said Rodrigues. 

As an example, he pointed to a successful collaboration among DOE, NRECA and other stakeholders to craft final new energy efficiency standards for electric distribution transformers to provide stability to industry after DOE’s problematic initial proposal amid the ongoing supply chain crisis. 

“In a perfect world, we would address every issue that way, instead of litigating and regulating, et cetera,” the DOE official said. “We don’t live in a perfect world. So, what we have to do is try to push the balance to as much upfront collaboration around those four principles as we can and just recognize that there are always going to be things that we argue about.” 

That cross-sector cooperation will be key as the U.S. prepares for elections in November that could have a big impact on national energy policy. 

“There is so much common ground,” Rodrigues concluded. 

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA is taking its fight to halt the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury and air rule for power plants to the U.S. Supreme Court, maintaining that the rule will create substantial costs and reliability impacts for electric cooperatives but provide no appreciable health benefits. 

On Aug. 22, the association led a coalition of co-ops and industry groups in filing an application to stay the rule with the Supreme Court after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declined a similar request earlier this month. A group of 23 states led by North Dakota separately asked the high court to halt the regulation until legal challenges against it are resolved. 

“This EPA rule is unlawful, unworkable and poses a serious threat to electric reliability,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “Absent a stay, it will force plant operators to install expensive, excessive and unjustified equipment that provides marginal benefit at their power plants or shut down. In many cases, this will push essential always-available generation off the grid, just as Americans are increasing their reliance on electricity.” 

As it did with the D.C. Circuit, NRECA told the Supreme Court that the rule will cause “substantial, irreparable, and immediate harm” to electric co-ops while having “no appreciable public health benefits.” 

The rule, released in April, ratcheted down filterable particulate matter emissions limits by 67% for all coal-fired plants and will require plants burning lignite coal to slash mercury emissions by 70% compared to EPA’s 2012 standard. EPA did so even though the agency found no residual health risks and did not identify any new cost-effective technologies that warranted tighter standards, which is unlawful under the Clean Air Act, NRECA argues. 

Plant operators must comply with the new standards by July 2027.  

In its stay request, NRECA said power plants are spending up to $1 million on testing just to assess whether they can meet the final rule’s emissions requirements while remaining commercially viable. It also noted the long lead time for upgrading emissions controls, with the electrostatic precipitator alterations needed to meet the rule’s filterable particulate matter limits taking three full years. 

“The final rule imposes an unduly short timeframe to commence lengthy and expensive control projects, or units will be forced to shut down,” NRECA told the Supreme Court. “The associated costs are unrecoverable.” 

NRECA filed its new stay request along with four generation and transmission co-ops—Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. in Missouri, Basin Electric Power Cooperative and Minnkota Power Cooperative in North Dakota, and East Kentucky Power Cooperative—as well as the Lignite Energy Council, the National Mining Association and Rainbow Energy Center. 

Minnkota estimated it could spend over $260 million to bring its Milton R. Young lignite coal-fired power plant into compliance with the EPA’s new standards, according to the new stay request.  

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA is asking a federal appeals court to review the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule for coal ash impoundments at inactive power plants and other sites, a regulation the association says will impose undue costs on electric cooperatives and exacerbate grid reliability challenges.

NRECA joined the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group and the American Public Power Association (APPA) in challenging the rule. The lawsuit was filed Aug. 2 in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“EPA has exceeded its statutory authority and finalized a one-size-fits-all coal ash rule that will impose unnecessary and duplicative costs on cooperatives,” said Viktoria Seale, NRECA regulatory affairs director. “Cooperatives will be forced to reclose coal ash units that have been properly closed under state requirements, including sites where all coal ash has been removed.”

The legacy coal combustion residuals (CCR) rule creates two new categories of federally regulated CCR facilities: inactive coal ash impoundments at inactive power plants and CCR “management units,” areas of land where coal ash was received, placed or otherwise managed that had not previously been regulated by EPA as a CCR unit.

The rule came after the EPA in 2015 established federal requirements for managing coal ash at CCR ponds and landfills and required some units to close. The agency at the time reaffirmed that CCRs are not hazardous wastes and encouraged their continued beneficial use, including as an ingredient in concrete.

But the new legacy coal ash rule will apply existing regulatory requirements to already closed sites, some of which are located under active CCR landfills and existing power plant infrastructure, NRECA said in a fact sheet on the rule.

Instead of standing up a risk-based federal CCR permitting program and approving state plans, the legacy coal ash rule takes a monolithic approach that relies on broad and unclear definitions of regulated sites, NRECA said.

The regulation could also expose currently exempt beneficial uses of CCR to the rule’s stringent requirements. The EPA has “significantly underestimated” the number of CCR management units that would qualify under its vague definition, meaning compliance timeframes and costs will be greater than the agency anticipates, NRECA said.

“EPA should reconsider this flawed rule, which would cause serious disruptions at active power plants and exacerbate grid reliability challenges for co-ops and other utilities,” the NRECA document stated.

The legacy coal ash rule was one of four power plant regulations that the EPA finalized in April. NRECA is suing to overturn the EPA’s power plant greenhouse gas rule and has requested that the Supreme Court stay the regulation. NRECA also has joined several of its member cooperatives in challenging and requesting a stay of the mercury and air rule.

In addition, the Utility Water Act Group, which NRECA is a member of, joined the Southwestern Electric Power Co. in suing the EPA over the power plant wastewater rule, also known as effluent limitation guidelines (ELG) rule, and requested a stay of the regulation.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Oglethorpe Power said it will invest more than $2.3 billion in two new natural gas projects to supply its 38 member cooperatives with an additional 1,400 megawatts to meet escalating demand across residential, commercial and industrial sectors.

The Tucker, Georgia-based generation cooperative plans to build a $2 billion, 1,200-MW two-unit combined cycle gas plant in Forsyth near the existing Smarr Energy Facility, a natural gas power plant the co-op operates. It’s expected to be operational in 2029.

The co-op also plans to add a 240-MW gas unit at its existing Talbot Energy Facility in Box Springs and aims to bring it online in 2028. The $360 million unit will be equipped with dual-fuel capability, allowing it to burn natural gas or a substitute fuel, enhancing Oglethorpe Power’s year-round resiliency.

Pending successful permitting, Oglethorpe Power plans to break ground on both projects in 2027.

“The electric cooperatives we serve need more energy capacity to meet their increasing demand,” Oglethorpe Power President & CEO Mike Smith said July 11 after the generation cooperative’s board approved the investment.

“These two new natural gas projects demonstrate growth in Oglethorpe Power’s generation portfolio and our focus on reliable, affordable and sustainable energy for our members.”

The new projects will create permanent, high-quality jobs, hundreds of temporary construction jobs plus boost local revenue that will support schools and the counties involved, he said.

The announcement comes on the heels of Oglethorpe Power’s purchase of a 465-MW, three-unit combustion turbine generation facility in Monroe from Mackinaw Power Holdings, an affiliate of the global investment firm The Carlyle Group Inc. The purchase represents the cooperative’s eighth acquisition of natural gas-fired generation in Georgia over the last 15 years, totaling more than 3,600 MW.

Oglethorpe Power also owns 30% of Plant Vogtle, a nuclear facility in Georgia. The final unit began generating electricity in April, and the project represents the first ground-up expansion of a U.S. advanced commercial nuclear energy station in more than 30 years.

Over the years, Oglethorpe Power has made strategic shifts in its generation portfolio and projects that its carbon emissions intensity rate will decline by 47% in 2025 compared to 2005 while at the same time anticipating a 61% increase in the energy it generates for its member cooperatives.

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson today issued the following statement on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s denial of NRECA’s motion to stay the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule:

“EPA’s power plant rule is unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” Matheson said. “It undermines electric reliability and poses immediate and grave consequences for an already stressed electric grid. We are disappointed by today’s court ruling and will imminently file an appeal with the Supreme Court.”

NRECA filed suit over the power plant rule in the D.C. Circuit on May 9 and filed its motion to stay on May 13. The rule would force the premature closure of power plants that are critical to maintaining reliability, even as electricity demand surges.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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NRECA filed suit in Wyoming federal court on July 12 against the Department of the Interior, challenging a rule the association says will jeopardize electric cooperatives’ ability to operate on federally managed public lands across the West.

The lawsuit asks the court to vacate the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, which was finalized in April. A broad coalition of 11 other stakeholder industries, including agriculture groups and energy and mineral developers, joined NRECA in the legal challenge.

“This unlawful conservation rule creates further regulatory and operational hurdles for cooperatives and jeopardizes their ability to continue to affordably and reliably serve some areas,” NRECA Senior Vice President of Government Relations Louis Finkel said.

“It compounds the complex, slow, and inconsistent BLM bureaucratic processes that co-ops must navigate to operate on public lands. It curtails grid expansion and hardening projects; and delays vegetation management and maintenance activities that ensure reliability of the grid and reduce risks for adverse events like wildfire.”

NRECA members operate tens of thousands of miles of electric transmission and distribution lines across BLM-managed public lands, much of which are in rural parts of the West. To access and use those lands, co-ops must obtain rights of way from BLM. Prior to the BLM rule, these co-op activities were prioritized as a principal use of public lands.

BLM’s new rule, however, will make obtaining, operating and accessing those rights of way even more difficult as it elevates conservation as a priority use of public lands and requires all agency actions to be compatible with conservation moving forward.

That will create challenges for co-ops operating on BLM lands. The rule creates a conservation lease program that could enable nongovernmental groups and other parties to block energy projects and other development. The regulation also unlawfully expands BLM’s authority to designate large “areas of critical environmental concern,” in which cooperative operations may be prohibited or severely curtailed across vast swaths of land, the lawsuit says.

“Under the existing regulatory framework, BLM is already incapable of making timely and effective approvals for cooperative wildfire mitigation activities, regular operation and maintenance activities and more,” Finkel said. “This further jeopardizes safety and the reliability of the electric grid by severely reducing the amount of public lands available for utility use, and by restricting cooperatives’ ability to access and operate on those limited lands that are remaining.”

The other groups challenging the BLM rule alongside NRECA are the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, the Natrona County Farm and Ranch Bureau, the American Exploration and Mining Association, the American Forest Resource Council, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Sheep Industry Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Mining Association, the Public Lands Council and the Western Energy Alliance.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

NRECA has joined with four of its member cooperatives to urge a federal appeals court to halt implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury and air rule before it can cause “substantial, irreparable, and immediate harm” to electric co-ops.

If the rule is not paused, co-ops will suffer “exorbitant” costs to bring their power plants into compliance with standards that may later be deemed unlawful, according to a motion for a stay of the final rule that NRECA and others filed June 21 with the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Co-ops would never be able to get that money back, even if the rule is later thrown out by a court amid legal challenges to the EPA’s authority, the motion says. If the court grants NRECA’s request for a stay, the rule would be put on hold until the courts can evaluate its legality.

It’s also questionable whether the new standards are even achievable, according to NRECA and other petitioners. NRECA has urged the EPA to rescind the new mercury rule—which has “no appreciable public health benefits”—and keep the previous standards in place.

The new rule requires plants burning lignite coal to slash their mercury emissions by 70% compared to EPA’s 2012 standard. The chemical differences in lignite prevent emissions controls from achieving the same level of reductions as in other types of coal, NRECA says.

The rule—which plant operators must comply with by July 2027—also requires a 67% cut in filterable particulate matter for all coal-fired plants but does not identify any new cost-effective technologies to meet that goal.

If the standards can’t be met, power plants would be forced to shut down, which NRECA warns would threaten reliability at a time when demand for electricity is growing.

“The premature shutdown of plants will cause electricity costs to skyrocket,” the stay request warns. “Without generation, utilities must purchase power at unsustainable prices to meet demand.”

For example, Mac McLennan, president and CEO of Minnkota Power Cooperative in Grand Forks, North Dakota, estimated in court documents that if its Milton R. Young power plant was forced to prematurely retire, it could cost his generation and transmission co-op $236 million for just four days of replacement power.

In addition to Minnkota, the G&Ts that joined with NRECA in requesting the stay were East Kentucky Power Cooperative in Winchester, Associated Electric Cooperative in Springfield, Missouri, and Basin Electric Power Cooperative in Bismarck, North Dakota.

In a declaration attached to NRECA’s request for a stay, Jerry Purvis, EKPC’s vice president of environmental affairs, said that even if the co-op spent millions of dollars on plant upgrades, it still might not be able to meet the rule’s mandates.

The mercury and air rule was released in April alongside EPA’s final power plant rule for existing coal-fired power plants and new natural gas-fired plants. NRECA believes the two rules, along with other recent EPA final rules, would exacerbate reliability threats to the electric grid as U.S. power demand surges in the coming years.

Erin Kelly and Molly Christian are staff writers for NRECA.

An expected surge in U.S. power demand from AI, data centers and other sources will be an “engine of growth” for electricity providers but also pose major reliability risks, two electric cooperative leaders warned at a recent event on supply threats to the grid.

Northern Virginia is home to many data centers that are having a “huge impact” on power consumption, Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative President and CEO David Schleicher said during a June 5 virtual briefing on “The Deepening Electricity Supply Crisis” hosted by the U.S. Energy Association.

About six years ago, Manassas-based NOVEC was a 1,000-megawatt distribution co-op, but its capacity has since doubled and is on the way to reaching around 8,000 MW.

“It’s our engine of growth,” Schleicher explained.

But that expansion comes with big challenges. Schleicher noted that data centers can be built in 18 months—well ahead of the four-year or longer lead times for some new substation equipment.

NOVEC gets its power from the PJM Interconnection, which relies heavily on the region’s natural gas and coal plants. But state and federal policies are pushing a shift toward carbon-free resources.

“[We’re] seeing an awful lot of renewable [energy] coming in with solar and offshore wind, which is going to be an integration challenge without new baseload generation,” Schleicher warned.

Rayburn Electric Cooperative faces similar challenges.

The Rockwall, Texas-based generation and transmission co-op is experiencing organic annual demand growth of 10%, and an influx of data centers is forcing them to plan for “doubling or even tripling our size,” Rayburn President and CEO David A. Naylor said at the briefing.

For Rayburn, all options are on the table for increasing supply, but when “you look at what’s available to meet those needs … you’re driven by the current technology,” Naylor said.

The co-op went so far as to purchase a natural gas-fired plant last year, but “we need more resources to meet our current needs, let alone… these additional data centers and [other demand sources],” he said.

In 2023, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. projected “material growth” in electricity demand in its long-term reliability assessment—a change from prior forecasts for flat to modest increases, NERC President and CEO Jim Robb said at the USEA event.

At the same time, the loss of many coal plants could rob the grid not only of power but other services such as spinning reserves, frequency response and voltage support, Robb said.

“As we pull any of these individual plants out, we’ve got to be mindful that we’ve got to replace not just the energy … but also the reliability benefits that they provide to the grid,” he said. “And that’s why we get concerned about the loss of traditional generation.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced a resolution Wednesday to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized power plant rule. 

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rep. Troy Balderson, R-Ohio, introduced resolutions of disapproval against the rule in their respective chambers using the Congressional Review Act, which gives lawmakers the ability to legislatively undo a federal agency’s final rule. 

 The EPA rule seeks to aggressively limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and new natural gas power plants. It mandates inadequately demonstrated technology and unachievable emissions limits, NRECA and co-op leaders say, jeopardizing affordable, reliable electricity by forcing premature plant closures while making it harder to permit, site and build critical new power plants. 

“EPA’s power plant rule is unlawful, unreasonable and unachievable,” said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. “Under the rule, EPA illegally attempts to transform the U.S. energy economy by forcing a shift in electricity generation to the agency’s favored sources.  

“EPA exceeded its authority and Congress must overturn its action. We urge Congress to pass this resolution and are grateful for Sen. Capito and Rep. Balderson’s leadership to reverse this harmful rule.” 

To derail the rule, both the House and Senate would have to pass the resolution of disapproval. If that happens, it would then go to President Joe Biden, who would likely veto it. Two-thirds of the lawmakers in each chamber would have to vote to override a veto. The first vote on the resolution is expected in the next few weeks. 

“With this Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval, every member of Congress will have the opportunity to protect America’s energy future, heed the warnings of our nation’s electric grid operators, and adhere to the precedent set by the Supreme Court,” said Capito, the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, in a June 5 statement. 

Balderson said the rule will have “a catastrophic impact” on power generation. 

“Slashing our baseload energy production while power demand continues to climb at historic levels is shortsighted and will have a catastrophic impact for Ohioans,” Balderson said. “This Congressional Review Act resolution allows Congress to step in and reverse the Biden administration’s efforts to practically eliminate all fossil fuel power generation by 2032.”  

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

As Congress considers a sweeping water infrastructure bill, NRECA CEO Jim Matheson is urging lawmakers to protect the Lower Snake River dams that provide clean hydropower to 55 electric cooperatives in eight Western states.

Matheson, in a letter to the chairman and ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, asked them to stop implementation of the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative as they prepare to take up the biennial Water Resources Development Act.

The initiative grew out of a controversial legal settlement reached by the Biden administration, environmental groups, and tribal and state governments over the federal government’s operation of the Lower Snake River dams in southeast Washington. Those four dams supply hydropower to utilities served by the federal Bonneville Power Administration.

The settlement “poses a grave threat to the operations of the Lower Snake River Dams, will ultimately result in the breaching of the dams, and threatens electric reliability for the entire region,” Matheson wrote.

In a lawsuit filed in 2021, plaintiffs charged that the dams are threatening the survival of endangered salmon. The settlement supports breaching the dams and replacing them with other types of renewable energy.

Although it would take an act of Congress to physically breach the dams, the settlement agreement undermines their operation by mandating spill and flow requirements that weaken their economic viability, Matheson said in testimony before Congress in January.

Nationally, more than 600 electric co-ops in 34 states purchase over 10 gigawatts of hydropower at cost from the federal Power Marketing Administrations’ hydropower facilities, Matheson wrote in his May 20 letter.

“Because the [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] is the largest generator of hydropower in the United States, NRECA members have a strong interest in ensuring that the provisions included in WRDA bolster the value of the power resource that the Corps makes available to the PMAs,” he wrote.

Matheson also asked House leaders to consider other co-op priorities, including preserving rate-making authority for the PMAs to ensure that federal power customers don’t get stuck paying a disproportionate sum for Corps infrastructure projects that are miscategorized as hydropower improvements.

“Electric cooperatives enjoy a productive partnership with the federal government and the communities we serve,” Matheson told Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo., and Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, the panel’s senior Democrat. “We appreciate your consideration of these priorities and look forward to working with you on policies that support rural America.”

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a major new rule late last month that aims to aggressively cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. 

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson immediately responded, calling the rule “unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” and critics across the industry have decried the sweeping, 1,000-page regulation as a misguided threat to electric reliability at a time when the grid is already stressed and facing soaring demand amid a rise in new manufacturing, electric vehicles and data centers.

Hear from Ashley Slater, NRECA’s vice president for regulatory affairs, and Mac McLennan, CEO of Minnkota Power Cooperative in North Dakota, about the rule, its impacts and how co-ops are working to reverse it.

Listen to the episode below:

You can also listen and subscribe to Along Those Lines on your preferred podcast service:
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Find out more about NRECA’s podcast. Questions or suggestions? Email us at AlongThoseLines@nreca.coop.

Extreme heat could threaten the nation’s energy supply this summer, driving up demand for electricity and potentially causing shortfalls and power outages throughout large swaths of the United States, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned in a new report.

The states and regions most at risk are Texas, California, the Southwest, New England and much of the Midwest, according to NERC’s 2024 Summer Reliability Assessment released Wednesday.

The warnings underscore the danger of the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized power plant rule, which threatens reliability by forcing the premature closure of power plants at a time when demand for electricity is rising, said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson.

“This latest report highlights the importance of always-available energy as our nation works to keep the lights on,” Matheson said. “That’s particularly true as we look towards a future that depends on electricity to power more of the economy. Importantly, this report does not consider the impact of EPA’s power plant rule, which will significantly undermine reliable electricity across the nation.”

Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of reliability assessments, also emphasized that the increased electrification of key sectors of the economy is quickly boosting demand and taxing the grid.

“Demand is growing in many areas at a rapid pace with the adoption of electric vehicles and construction of new data centers, straining some parts of the system,” Olson said.

The NERC report says that “weather services are expecting above-average summer temperatures across much of North America, potentially creating challenging summer grid conditions.”

Most areas are forecasting higher peak demand for electricity than last summer, the report says.

“Above-average seasonal temperatures can contribute to high peak demand as well as an increase in forced outages for generation and some bulk power system equipment.”

NERC found that the delayed retirements of fossil fuel-powered plants coupled with limited new supply “have improved the outlook for 2024” compared to some earlier reports. However, NERC also found that “a growing number of areas in North America face adequacy risks as early as 2025.”

In addition to forecasts for extreme heat this summer, other risk factors cited in the report include continued supply chain delays for utilities seeking to acquire essential equipment and the potential for wildfires in late summer as conditions grow hotter and drier.

NERC’s assessment also warns that the areas most at risk have these additional challenges:

• New England: The retirement of two natural-gas-fired generators at Mystic Generating Station in Massachusetts this month means that the region will have 1,400 megawatts less capacity this summer, increasing the risk of energy emergencies.
• The Midwest: While there is some new solar and natural-gas-fired generation in the region, it is being offset in part by generator retirements and mandates to reserve more fuel. If demand rises higher than the normal peak, wind and solar resources may not be enough to meet it.
• The Southwest: The ongoing severe drought raises the risk that extreme conditions could affect the bulk power system.
• Texas: There is a risk of emergency conditions in the summer evening hours when solar generation begins to ramp down but demand remains high.
• California/Mexico: The biggest risk is in the Baja area, which could suffer energy shortfalls if demand is above normal due to widespread extreme heat and solar power output is below normal because of transmission limitations.

Erin Kelly is a staff writer for NRECA.

A new rule guiding the federal environmental review process for major infrastructure buildouts will impede critical projects needed to ensure reliable and affordable power, NRECA says.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality released its final Phase 2 rule under the National Environmental Policy Act on April 30. Despite Congress’ efforts to make the NEPA process more timely and efficient through the recently enacted Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2023, the administration layers on new requirements that undermine those improvements.

The administration’s rule, which applies to projects needing federal permits or that receive federal loans or grants, includes provisions that will make the NEPA process less efficient and more burdensome.

“CEQ’s final rule takes our nation in the wrong direction and further undermines reliable electricity,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “It will delay key infrastructure projects by prolonging and complicating environmental reviews while increasing litigation risk.”

The rule elevates certain environmental considerations, including a project’s climate impacts, above others. That is inconsistent with NEPA’s historical approach of using an objective project-specific method to assess proposed actions and would favor certain types of infrastructure over others, according to NRECA.

Furthermore, the final rule will require environmental mitigation measures and monitoring and compliance plans that CEQ lacks the authority to mandate under NEPA. The rule also adds new requirements for agencies that want to establish and apply categorical exclusions that allow low-impact activities to avoid more extensive NEPA reviews.

The Phase 2 rule will apply to projects starting environmental reviews on or after July 1.

“Our broken permitting system already makes it exceedingly difficult to add new energy resources to the grid,” Matheson said. “This rule makes that problem worse.”

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

Georgia’s Plant Vogtle Unit 4 began operation on Monday, completing the first from-scratch expansion of advanced commercial nuclear energy in the U.S. in more than three decades and bringing the region’s electric cooperatives a source of reliable, clean energy well into the future, said Oglethorpe Power, a part-owner of the facility.

“We celebrate not only the completion of this important emission-free resource, but also the historic achievement it represents,” said Mike Smith, president & CEO of the generation co-op based in Tucker, Georgia.

“Oglethorpe Power and our members are committed to navigating the transition to cleaner energy while ensuring electricity remains reliable and affordable for electric cooperative consumers. The emission-free energy generated by Unit 4 will play a crucial role in helping us deliver on that mission for generations to come.”

Oglethorpe, with more than $16 billion in assets, provides power to 38 electric co-ops serving 4.4 million consumer-members.

Vogtle Unit 4’s start-up follows that of Unit 3 in July 2023. Oglethorpe owns 30% of the twin 1,100-megawatt reactors, which are expected to operate for the next 60 to 80 years, as well as 30% of the plant’s legacy units, 1 and 2.

The completion of the units makes the 4.5-gigawatt Plant Vogtle, first commissioned in 1987, the country’s largest nuclear power station. With Unit 4 online, Plant Vogtle is also now the largest generator of clean energy in the U.S.

“As we strive to meet our members’ existing and expanding power supply needs, clean nuclear energy will remain an essential source of dependable baseload power and a vital part of our energy mix,” Smith said.

Federal tax credits had a positive impact on the project, Smith said. Following years of advocacy by NRECA and Georgia electric co-ops, with strong bipartisan support from the Georgia delegation, Congress amended a nuclear production tax credit in 2018 to allow co-ops and municipal partners of new nuclear projects to receive the tax credits. Federal guidance clarified how the tax credit could be monetized just months prior to Unit 3 going commercial.

“The tax credits are already significantly lowering the energy costs for millions of Georgia co-ops and will result in hundreds of millions in savings for rural ratepayers during the eight-year life of the tax credit,” said Smith.

He attributed the safe and successful build at Vogtle to “the tireless efforts of thousands of workers at the site.” The expansion created 800 permanent jobs to manage both new units and was the state’s largest construction job producer, peaking at about 10,000, Smith said.

Southern Nuclear operates Plant Vogtle and owns 45.7% of the facility through its subsidiary, Georgia Power. Dalton Utilities and MEAG Power own the remaining 24.3%.

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

The Environmental Protection Agency released four major new regulations for the electric industry Thursday, including a much-anticipated rule to cut emissions from power plants, a sweeping move that NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said will aggravate reliability concerns for electric cooperatives and other utilities nationwide.

“The path outlined by the EPA is unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” Matheson said Thursday. “It undermines electric reliability and poses grave consequences for an already stressed electric grid.”

The power plant rule constrains existing coal and new natural gas plants by requiring them to deploy carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that is not yet proven or commercially available. The other three new rules tighten standards for mercury and air toxics and wastewater and impose requirements on legacy coal ash sites.

“This barrage of new EPA rules ignores our nation’s ongoing electric reliability challenges and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future,” Matheson said.

He noted that the power plant rule would force the early retirement of always-available generation sources and limit construction of new natural gas plants just as the power sector is facing a surge in demand from factors like transportation electrification and the rapid expansion of data centers to support artificial intelligence, e-commerce and cryptocurrency.

Under the new rule, existing coal-fired units that plan to operate past the start of 2039 must reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 90% by 2032. Units retiring before 2039 must co-fire with natural gas at a 40% rate starting in 2030.

Existing coal units that commit to close by 2032 will be exempt from the new requirements.

The rule also requires new natural gas plants operating as baseload— above a 40% capacity factor—to capture or avoid 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. Operation of a natural gas unit without additional emissions controls is limited to 20% capacity factor.

The standards will inhibit cooperatives’ ability to economically and reliably replace lost coal generation. Cooperatives building new gas-fired facilities will either need to install CCS capturing nearly all emissions or run new gas units that can only operate a small portion of the time. The final rule did not include hydrogen co-firing as part of the EPA’s “best system of emission reduction,” but generators can use the technology to achieve compliance, EPA said.

The updated mercury and air toxics rule sets new limits on certain coal plant emissions. The effluent standards regulate wastewater discharges into water bodies near coal plants. And the legacy coal ash rule covers surface impoundments at inactive power plants and historical coal ash disposal sites.

Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.

ARLINGTON, Va. – National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson today issued the following statement after the Environmental Protection Agency finalized four new rules to regulate power plants.

“The path outlined by the EPA today is unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said. “It undermines electric reliability and poses grave consequences for an already stressed electric grid. The American economy can’t succeed without reliable electricity. Smart energy policy recognizes that fundamental truth and works to help keep the lights on. This barrage of new EPA rules ignores our nation’s ongoing electric reliability challenges and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future.”

NRECA’s assessment of EPA’s power plant rule, the most impactful of the four finalized by EPA today, remains unchanged from the agency’s original proposal:

• The rule is unlawful. It violates the law, exceeds EPA’s authority, and disregards Supreme Court rulings.
• The technology isn’t ready. The rule mandates the widespread adoption of technology that is promising, but not ready for prime time.
• The timelines are unrealistic. The rule gives neither existing coal units nor new gas units enough time to reach compliance.

EPA finalized its rule against a backdrop of daunting threats to reliability, as electricity demand surges at the same time supply is decreasing.

The Energy Information Administration projects that power demand will reach record highs in 2024 and 2025, increasing by 2.5% and 3.2% respectively. Grid planners forecast electricity demand to grow by 38 gigawatts through 2028, the equivalent of adding another California to the grid.

Meanwhile, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has warned that more than 110 gigawatts of always-available generation, enough to power about 35 million homes, will retire through 2033. And all or parts of 19 states are at high risk of rolling blackouts during normal peak conditions over the next five years.

Below is a 30-second audio clip of Matheson’s comments on the power plant rule: “What’s most concerning is that it puts electric reliability at risk.”

Download these comments in MP3 format.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is the national trade association representing nearly 900 local electric cooperatives. From growing suburbs to remote farming communities, electric co-ops serve as engines of economic development for 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the nation’s landscape. As local businesses built by the consumers they serve, electric cooperatives have meaningful ties to rural America and invest $15 billion annually in their communities.

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The Department of Energy has finalized new energy efficiency standards for distribution transformers, giving manufacturers more time to meet them and easing requirements that would have forced the use of less durable, hard-to-find amorphous steel in most transformers.

The final rule reflects NRECA’s advocacy priorities to maintain use of grain-oriented electrical steel and to allow manufacturers more time for compliance to help keep the focus on increased output to meet electric cooperatives’ demand for transformers. NRECA took this message to DOE, the White House and Congress, culminating in congressional requests to change the proposal, bipartisan legislation and the final rule issued on April 4.

The standard will take effect in 2029, providing an additional two years for compliance compared to DOE’s proposal.

NRECA leaders said the revised proposal is “much improved” from DOE’s initial plan, which would have made it difficult for co-ops to get the essential equipment they need to modernize their systems and help communities recover from disasters. Co-ops are already struggling to get enough transformers due to ongoing supply chain delays.

“As the nation depends on electricity to power more of the economy, a stable distribution transformer supply chain is essential to maintaining reliability and meeting growing demand,” said Louis Finkel, NRECA senior vice president for Government Relations.

“DOE’s final rule is much improved over its proposal, which would have upended the entire market for distribution transformers at a time when manufacturers could not keep up with demand for this critical equipment.”

The department’s updated efficiency standard will force some distribution transformer manufacturers to eventually switch from using grain-oriented electrical steel to amorphous steel, but it will require only about 25% of them to do so rather than nearly all as initially proposed. There is only one domestic supplier of amorphous steel in the U.S.

Most of the distribution transformers used by electric co-ops for residential or lower load settings will still be made with grain-oriented electrical steel, a more plentiful and durable resource for this key piece of equipment for keeping the lights on.

A large portion of distribution transformers used for some commercial loads, as well as certain new electric vehicle charging sites, will require amorphous steel.

NRECA had urged DOE to reconsider its proposal to shift nearly the entire market to amorphous core transformers in comments last year, outlining concerns about the material’s core durability, its limited availability and the utility sector’s operational and equipment burdens to make the change.

“It was also a serious risk that the lone domestic supplier of grain-oriented electrical steel would leave the market, harming the potential outlook for more domestic large power transformer manufacturing,” said Stephanie Crawford, NRECA regulatory affairs director. “DOE’s final rule now walks back that potential risk, hopefully leading to more domestic investment in grain-oriented electrical steel supply.”

“The final rule provides stability for most of the market, while affording a more gradual shift toward tighter efficiency standards for transformers used to meet larger commercial and certain electrification loads,” said Finkel. “We will work closely with our members, manufacturers and suppliers to ensure implementation does not further disrupt an already strained supply chain.”

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.

A long-simmering dispute in the Pacific Northwest over the management of the Lower Snake River dams burst onto the headlines late last year with the news of a backroom deal between the Biden administration and the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Bonneville Power Administration and other government agencies that manage the dams.

The deal, which has now become a formal memorandum of understanding between the parties, was done without the input of key interests, including the irrigation, shipping and power industries, and has raised fears about the possibility of breaching the dams and compromising the availability of reliable, carbon-free electricity at a time when demand in the region is set to skyrocket.

To discuss the history and on-the-ground impact of this major development, we’ll talk with Louis Finkel, NRECA’s senior vice president for Government Relations, and Bryan Case, CEO of Fall River Rural Electric Cooperative in Idaho.

Listen to the episode below:

You can also listen and subscribe to Along Those Lines on your preferred podcast service:
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Related Content:

• Matheson to Congress: Snake River Dams Are Vital to Power Supply in Northwest
• Nearly 20,000 Co-op Members Urge Biden to Preserve Snake River Dams
• NRECA Blasts Secret Deal That Would Jeopardize the Lower Snake River Dams

Find out more about NRECA’s podcast. Questions or suggestions? Email us at AlongThoseLines@nreca.coop.

Seven electric cooperatives will join a nearly $58 million cost-share program with the Department of Energy to build a range of microgrids to improve grid resiliency and reliability for remote and economically challenged communities across the country.

DOE announced Feb. 27 that it will negotiate $45.2 million in funding for the co-ops under the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations’ Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas (ERA) Program, part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. The co-ops will provide an additional $12.6 million. The final budget for the five-year program will be determined after award negotiations are completed this year.

NRECA led the seven-co-op consortium in applying for funding for the Microgrids for Community Affordability, Resilience, and Energy Decarbonization (CARED) project. Project technologies will include solar PV and battery energy storage systems with distribution upgrades.

“These electric co-ops will build microgrids so vulnerable communities can mitigate extreme weather risk and end-of-the-line connectivity issues and support essential and emergency services,” said Tolu Omotoso, director of energy solutions at NRECA and principal investigator/program manager for the project.

“Without this investment by DOE, these critical projects would not happen.”

The seven microgrid consortium co-ops are:

• Anza Electric Cooperative in Anza, California.
• Blue Ridge Energy in Lenoir, North Carolina.
• Flathead Electric Cooperative Inc. in Kalispell, Montana.
• Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative in Jordan, Minnesota.
• Missoula Electric Cooperative in Missoula, Montana.
• Trico Electric Cooperative in Marana, Arizona.
• Volunteer Electric Cooperative in Decatur, Tennessee.

In addition to improving grid resiliency and reliability in needy areas, CARED objectives include establishing a forum for sharing information and creating new jobs that support the local economies served by the participating co-ops.

The project team estimates, for example, that the Volunteer Electric’s microgrid may provide an annual electricity savings of $400,000 for the town of Decatur, while Flathead Electric’s microgrid in Cooke City may slash power outages by 70%.

DOE also selected Brighton, Colorado-based United Power for $6 million in funding from the ERA program to build a microgrid with PV and battery storage to replace an aging diesel generator at a water treatment plant for the city of Fort Lupton. The microgrid will ensure reliable clean water for the community, and a 20-year agreement will keep the project affordable with United Power owning the microgrid and the city paying for its upgrades.

“This funding is an important step as electric co-ops work to improve access to affordable and reliable energy in rural America,” said NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. “By deploying microgrids in communities across the country, co-ops are exploring new ways to keep the lights on and meet tomorrow’s energy needs.”

Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.