The electric industry has been and will continue to change rapidly. Our team at Mountain Parks Electric monitors the news and latest developments to be sure MPE is in the know and on the forefront of important developments. To stay current, we must maintain industry contacts and attend meetings and regional and national conferences.
Personally, I am grateful to call Grand County my home. I enjoy family vacations, but I generally prefer to be in the MPE offices working closely with my colleagues during the week. On weekends, my time is best spent exploring all that Grand and Jackson counties have to offer. That said, I have been fortunate to be invited to meetings and to participate in industry groups that help our co-op stay at the forefront of industry happenings.
I was honored to be asked to participate in a meeting of the Western Power Players for the first time in 2024. That group includes industry experts from large cooperatives, investor-owned utilities, municipalities, and the renewable sector, as well as elected officials, regulators, and labor groups. The group is met again at the end of January. I enjoyed representing our co-op and our members while also learning from the leadership of much larger organizations, as well as policy and law makers.
Earlier in January, I attended the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s CEO Close Up. While there, I was a part of a small group meeting with one of MPE’s financial partners, CoBank. Overall, it was an excellent opportunity to meet many of our key partners and benefit from the conference sessions. They ranged from 2025 national energy policy preview to creative rate design to new labor laws impacting our industry and best practices for member
engagement and change management. My favorite sessions, however, focused on the role of technology in our industry and the potential uses for AI, both today and into the future, in areas such as grid optimization, data processing, employee optimization, and asset management. My other favorite topic was on cooperative governance and the working relationship between general managers and their boards.
Just as the industry has seen rapid changes, so too has MPE. Our employees prioritize industry awareness while ensuring we effectively communicate with you, our coop members. We want to share the direction of the industry, challenges and opportunities, and how we are involved in those efforts here at MPE.
Much of our recent communication pieces have detailed the transition to Guzman Energy, effective February 1, 2025 (see www.MPEI.com/Power-Transition for more info). This move began before I came to MPE, but I am incredibly proud to have been a part of the team that completed all the work to see it through to fruition. As I said at the January Board Meeting, “This is a small team at our co-op, and they have done an outstanding job.”
I am thankful for the direction and feedback from our Board. At last month’s meeting, Board President Liz McIntyre recognized a long list of achievements by our co-op over the past year (see the January edition of the Board Bulletin at www.MPEI.com/Bulletin), which included the power supply agreement with Guzman. It also highlighted all the work that went into being awarded $100 million from New ERA and the other state and federal grants to support our local communities. These funds will not only supplement our power supply purchase over the next 20 years, they will also continue to make our electric system more reliable and resilient.
As a cooperative, we are member-owned, not-for-profit, and serve our members’ best interests in our day-to-day activities as well as in long-term strategic initiatives. Affordable electricity is top of mind for our members, as it is for our Board and employees. The cost of service studies we had completed by industry experts, leading into 2024 and into 2025, were vital so that members would only be charged what it costs to serve their homes and businesses with electricity. Both cost of service studies showed we had to raise rates to ensure they are fair, equitable, and financially adequate. However, MPE’s rates for 2025 still fall below the average rates in our state and from across the U.S. from 2024.
One of the key reasons for transitioning to Guzman Energy as our wholesale power provider was to achieve long-term rate stabilization. With our fixed-rate, 20-year power supply agreement, we will avoid fluctuating or unexpected energy rate increases, which will help provide more stable rates for the cooperative as a whole. Additionally, the New ERA funding, secured through the dedicated efforts of our team, will further support our goals of delivering affordable power while enhancing community support. It’s important to note that MPE’s eligibility for this transformative grant funding was made possible by our departure from Tri-State and our partnership with Guzman Energy. The team at Guzman Energy played a pivotal role throughout the complex grant process and shares in our excitement about what this milestone will mean for our members’ future.