Electric Co-op Today

When Oklahoma’s Tri-County Electric Cooperative acquired some of Xcel Energy’s service territory, Zac Perkins said it “really changed the way that we had to do business.” The inherited equipment had been—to put it mildly—neglected. Having a pair of ice storms rip through just four months later didn’t help matters.

This pole, resembling the Leaning Tower of Pisa, was among the assets that Tri-County EC acquired from an IOU. (Photo By: Tri-County EC)

But the Hooker-based co-op rallied to win over its new, and skeptical, commercial and industrial members.

“C&I is extremely important to Tri-County Electric,” accounting for 73 percent of revenue, said Perkins, vice president, corporate services. “The only thing we had to offer after the acquisition was our service. We were new to a lot of folks.”

During the Touchstone Energy® National Best in Class Virtual Conference, Perkins said the co-op had rebuilding plans for its new territory before the December 2006 storms damaged 1,000 poles. “The ice storms just turned a 15-year plan into a 15-month plan.”

The August 2006 acquisition already concerned some new members. “In a lot of people’s minds the perception of us was that we were a small cooperative” that “bit off more than we could chew,” Perkins said. So Tri-County decided “to change everybody’s perception of us through the way that we offer our service.”

“Any opportunity we had to meet with the ownerships and the managements of C&I groups we took advantage of, and tried to offer an experience that they had never had before, and showed them the way co-ops do things,” Perkins said.

By 2009 that effort paid off. In its Cooperative Difference Survey, Tri-County’s business members gave the co-op higher numbers than residential members in all but one category. “I think that has to do with us flat out going door-to-door, almost literally, and meeting people and asking them, ‘What can we do to help your business be successful?’”

One answer was to keep them informed about planned outages and maintenance, something on which Perkins said Tri-County now places an emphasis. “We get thank yous instead of complaints.”

Related content: Touchstone Energy National Best in Class Virtual Conference

Tags: Business and Finance, Consumer-Members, Investor-Owned Utility