The start of the new year always seems to bring about the inevitable lists of resolutions to improve one’s life: Lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more, spend more time with the family.  We all set goals for our new year with the hope that we will make improvements to our lives and possibly for others.

Your cooperative is no different.  Each year we set goals for your cooperative – both long- and short-term goals that we, the management and board of directors, feel will best benefit our members.  Many of these goals are part of on-going projects that have been carefully planned and executed to improve your service and your cooperative experience, but they all result in improving your electric service.

Your cooperative has a work plan that allows us to move forward on construction and upgrade projects efficiently and in a manner that will benefit as many members as possible.  These projects include conversions from single phase to three phase line and upgrading devices along our lines.  Upgrades like these boost the reliability of our system – helping us reach our main goal of keeping the lights on.

As I mentioned last month, HCEC has an on-going right-of-way program.  An in-house crew and contract crews will continue to work across the co-op’s service area through the year to deal with dead or dying trees could hinder reliability and safety.

Another of your cooperative’s goals is to improve our communication and education efforts.  We hope to provide our members with useful energy efficiency and conservation information and improve our overall communications with you.

Your cooperative will also be implementing and exploring new technologies that could help us lower the cost of power and improve efficiency in outage restoration.  A SCADA system has been put in place to help us monitor and control energy consumption during critical peak usage times.  We are researching the benefits of pre-paid metering and other technologies to see if they will be beneficial to our membership.

Our goal is to serve you, our members, to the best of our abilities in 2013 and years to come.  Rest assured that your co-op is working to continually make improvements that benefit our members.  We wish you all success in sticking to your resolutions and hope for a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year for each of you.