Managing rising costs

President and CEOSteve Hamlin (President & CEO)

A message from the CEO

With the start of fall just around the corner, thoughts at your local cooperative turn to a couple of different things: preparing for fall weather, college football rivalries and our annual budgeting process.

And whether you track your budget on your favorite phone app, your laptop or the checkbook, you may be surprised to find that the items in your budget aren’t all that different from ours.

While we don’t think anyone has 40-foot utility poles in their budget you will see familiar things like supplies and materials, insurance, maintenance, property taxes and more. And just like in your home you may notice the price of these things is creeping up each year.

Here at Piedmont Electric, we strive to provide exceptional service while still managing the rising costs in our industry. As your local electric cooperative, we are owned by the members we serve and ultimately any costs we pay are passed on to our members.

So, when it comes to saving money for you, we keep an eye on every part of our business while continuing the quality service you’ve come to expect. From preventive equipment maintenance and right-of-way clearing to prevent and reduce the impact of outages to refinancing loans at lower interest rates to reducing our bill printing costs, we look at it all.

Our efforts have allowed us to keep our residential rate the same for going on half a decade. We’ve worked hard to keep electric rates stable even in the face of increasing costs and as a result, electricity continues to remain a good value.

For example, think about how much television you could watch for $100. According to the Nielson report, the average American watches 5 hours of television a day which means we spend about $0.06 in electricity costs powering our television each day. *

So, for $100 you could power your TV habit for more than 1,500 days. In comparison, your Netflix subscription for those 1,500 days would cost you about $700.*

We can all agree, electricity powers so much more in our lives than our television.

As we put together our budget this fall, we will be taking a look at the rates we charge in addition to what we spend in an effort to balance quality service with cost. If any changes to our rates are necessary, we will be sure to inform you and provide ways to offset any changes.

While we know the cost of everything eventually goes up, we promise you that we will do what we can to continue to manage our costs while providing our trademark exceptional service.

*Calculations based on a 100-watt 48-inch LED TV, rate of $0.1275 per kWh and Netflix service at $12.99 per month.

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