A Good Enough Way To Proceed (President’s Report)

Shoring up access to renewable generation, including Hydro-Québec, as Vermont demand for renewable power grows

President’s Report

By Stephen Knowlton

Washington Electric Cooperative is now in its 85^th year, and it is a good time to reflect on how we got started as a cooperative. As we are already close to being a quarter of the way through the 21^st century, we can also review several of the past year’s events to see where we are headed, and how WEC is adapting to change.

When WEC began operating in 1939, it was, like many cooperatives, founded on egalitarian principles to provide power equitably to all its members at a time when electricity was generally not yet considered a public service to be made available to all, as it is today. While the world has changed since then, today’s Board of Directors and staff of WEC still strive to act in the interests of the entire membership. To the extent possible, the cooperative prefers that investments made by the members for forward-looking programs are structured to benefit the full membership. The community, whether members know it or not, remains a key part of the cooperative ethic and shapes most of the actions taken by the Board on behalf of the members who jointly own the cooperative and invest in it when they pay their utility bills. 

General Manager Louis Porter describes in this issue of Co-op Currents an area in which adaptation is taking place in response to a challenge brought by the 21^st century. This refers to WEC’s improving performance over the last year to communicate local and timely notification to members during outages and plans to extend its effectiveness. This involved more effort throughout the organization than just upgrading our website, and has been in preparation since 2022. Importantly, these new efforts were spurred by member input. In talking with some members who’ve been on WEC’s lines for decades, I’ve been happy to hear that they use the system that Louis describes in more detail in his report, and that they appreciate the growing amount of information available to them. While no one likes an extended outage, most members feel more at ease when they can find out how the restoration is progressing after a storm. Just as important is the need to strategically strengthen WEC’s system to what appears to be a new normal in storm behavior. Numbers tell the story: around Vermont, more members are losing power for longer in recent years. Adapting our system to a changing environment and assisting our members to do the same is an increasingly important theme for WEC in the coming years. 

This past year we had to make a decision to assure that we remain a 100% renewable electricity provider. In 2022, the gas output from the Coventry landfill that supplies our gas-to-electric facility decreased by 10-20% and remained low for longer than anticipated, leaving us with a shortfall. Wind energy obtained from the Sheffield turbines is also somewhat reduced from previous years. In June 2023 WEC began buying approximately 1,000 megawatt hours per month of energy from Hydro-Québec (HQ). While we have had a contract for hydroelectricity with HQ since 2016, we have not needed to use it until now because we had enough renewable power to satisfy our members’ needs as well as to qualify as a 100% renewably-powered utility without it.  Our existing contract provided us with a safety net for our power deficit. WEC chose to make up the shortfall last year by taking HQ power for the rest of the decade.

Why did we think this was a good choice? WEC needed to resolve its recent shortfall, and we also anticipate that the growing numbers of electric vehicles and heat pumps will slowly but steadily increase the overall demand for power. In this transition WEC is committed to remaining the 100% renewable utility it has been since 2014. Increasing renewability is enshrined in state policy, and 100% renewability is likely to eventually be required by state law for all Vermont electric utilities. We believe most WEC members support the use of clean power whenever possible. WEC members, like most Vermonters, place an even higher value on their electric service being reliable and affordable. Hydropower from HQ is particularly valuable because it is dependable, like other so-called baseload generators. And it is relatively inexpensive as renewable power goes.

Some may critique our choice of taking HQ power. Solar and wind are frequently touted as the mainstays of an ideal power grid based on renewables, even though they are intermittent sources of power that are not highly dependable resources on their own. This is by no means a fatal flaw for such resources. Engineers are capable of finding and implementing a variety of solutions that could mitigate the major weaknesses of large-scale wind and solar. Judging from what I’ve read in the newspapers, the estimated cost of the latter is a lively topic of discussion among stakeholders and is sizeable enough that it needs to be penciled out more thoroughly than has been done to date. The Vermont electric grid is actually far cleaner than the country’s as a whole, and only 2% of Vermont’s estimated greenhouse gas emission comes from its use of electricity. WEC and other Vermont utilities are expecting to continue procuring more renewable power in the immediate future. WEC cannot afford to wait, and perhaps even afford, a perfect solution espoused by some politicians and policy makers if the goal is to continue cutting the emission of greenhouse gases. A portfolio of mixed technologies, some imperfect, that provides reliable power when needed, is a good enough way to proceed and allow for the adoption of even better solutions as they become affordable. Not letting the perfect being the enemy of the good should be the appropriate path for WEC’s future.