National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

And then also, I'm, you know, we see headlines every day, you know, Colorado is kind of, I guess, retracted a ward to over $100 million to one recipient that they thought was disqualified themselves.

We see NRECA saying that only one in three electric co-ops is going to take their BEAT award.

Can you kind of just give an overall assessment of how this is going to shake out and of the money that's been allocated? Are we going to find people that are going to want to serve that? And then get into, then how do we go back and see what's left over and go after that?

Well, I think one of the questions I have is, you know, NTI previously had issued guidance explaining the process for what states should do when one of their, you know, tentative awardee defaults and, you know, sort of process to select replacements.

Sat down with our good friend, Don Bowman.

We were at the NRECA regional in Columbus, Ohio.

And I met Don originally at an event for North Carolina Electric Cooperatives.

And he told me this story and we

right.

We give away a guitar at every show.

And we are now at the NRECA regional meeting here.

But yeah, you have had a lot of experience.

One of the places where we see a tremendous number of jobs unfolding is in electrical contracting, in line workers and people in those functions who are cross-trained in solar.

And this is a vision that my dear friend and mentor Curtis Winn, who's the CEO of Seco Energy down in Orlando, Florida, and who's a past elected president at NRECA, has articulated.

Because in states and counties where large scale solar or smaller scale solar is providing a lot of power to the grid, you need people who can maintain the grid and who can maintain those solar projects.

So to be cross-trained as a line worker or as an electrical contractor and also in solar operations and maintenance in particular and solar installation is a ticket to a great job.

So we're going to talk about that briefly.

We're going to talk about how NRECA, which I like to call NRECA because I think it sounds awesome, but they insist on calling it the National... a rural electric cooperative association, NRECA.

They're noting that one out of three of the electric co-ops that have gotten these fiber awards in bead are turning them down.

This is terrible.

the big companies say that they are doing better, and so we are doing better.

So, okay.

With that, NRECA.

Sean, good thing or bad thing that out of the 63 rural electric cooperatives that are building rural fiber networks, that 20 of them have now pulled out of the BEAD program and more are about to?

But the story of...

Rural electric cooperatives is about, to me, much more than just electricity.

It's one of the great American success stories.

There was a time when much of rural America was quite literally in the dark.

Neighbors helping neighbors.

It's deeply American and it's deeply Kentuckian.

And I think that same spirit of service and community continues to define rural electric cooperatives today.

You go where others may not go because you believe every community, no matter how rural, deserves the opportunity to thrive.

These risks are coming into sharper focus after recent reported cyberattacks against utilities in the U.S. and Europe.

NRECA has been working with Sandia National Laboratories on Department of Energy-funded research to understand where co-ops stand in this area and what they can do about it.

On this episode of Along Those Lines, we'll look at how co-ops can cost-effectively manage these emerging challenges, gathering perspectives from NRECA's Senior Director of Cybersecurity, Carter Manussi, and Cooper Cash, Vice President of IT Operations for North Carolina's Electric Cooperatives.

Carter and Cooper, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having us.

You're listening to Along Those Lines.

Welcome back.

Next we'll talk about NRECA resources and research around cybersecurity for DERs and EV infrastructure.

More data centers are bringing new challenges for utilities across rural America.

Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which represents more than 900 not-for-profit consumer-owned electric co-ops, says these co-ops are seeing unprecedented demand from large-scale data center projects and they're weighing how to meet the demand while protecting existing customers.

Electric demand growth historically has had a certain amount of predictability to it where it's incremental.

But you go to a rural electric cooperative that has a certain load of existing consumers and you bring in a new 800 megawatt data center and that can be triple what all the other consumers in the electric cooperative consume.

We don't like one size fits all mandates.

on data centers or any other policy quite frankly that's out there we like because different geographic locations have different characteristics different capacities different needs and different challenges and the extent that you can maintain that autonomy and local control in making decisions from an electric cooperator standpoint that drives through all of our policy advocacy that we do

Once again, that's comments from Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Think about this, though, with data centers.

We recorded this with Rachel Johnson.

She is at Cherryland, and we sat down in Columbus, Ohio, for the NRECA Regional, and she has an incredible story.

Yeah.

I, I can relate to Rachel's feelings about her board and about co-ops in general.