our

costs.

And so having a good mix of some market based power purchase agreements and also some power supply that we own is how we keep our power cost as affordable as possible for our members.

Alpine has historically worked as a power cost reduction component inside our bill.

And you see that.

Cherrylands rates are 15% to 20% lower than the neighboring investor-owned utility.

That's in part the work we do here, just be as efficient as possible with that substation and beyond aspect.

now just goes to reducing costs for cherryland's power bill which then in turn reduce costs for our members cherryland bills and i think that is a piece that can easily kind of feel disjointed from our membership who might be listening and so we like to do our job in a way that they don't have to think about it so i will

Tell me a little bit more about some of those challenges and what's happened and, and at what point did something happen where you're like, "I have no idea what I'm gonna do," and what did you do?

Yeah.

It's a great question.

The biggest challenge I have faced in my life and career happened six months to the day after I took over as CEO at Cherryland.

So I became the CEO at Cherryland June 15th of 2023, and on December 15th I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was an awful moment, right? And I was just...

This thing that I'd been working for 10, 12 years to get to that seat, barely in the seat, and all of a sudden this, right? And it was a, it was a terribly hard time, and I was, I was afraid I was gonna lose something that gives me so much purpose and that I love so much, which is my career at Cherryland, before I even had the chance to, to get going.

And so that was an, an incredibly profound, difficult moment in m- my life and in my career.

Okay.

And then some other things, not to psychoanalyze the global population, but you've got everybody's seen the terminator so it's ai and people are concerned about you know is this skynet and people are rightfully concerned about what does this mean for my job long term if ai comes along all we've seen over time in michigan is really a case study in how this goes bad is as technology comes along good paying manufacturing jobs go away that doesn't look like that'll be the impact here where hands-on work will still be needed but if you're doing white-collar work middle management type work people are afraid for their jobs so you have both that boogeyman from the movies but also the practical reality is people want to work people need to work and when you take Rising prices, really large tech companies, and threats towards jobs that kind of creates this perfect and uncomfortable storm that gets everybody talking about data centers.

yeah and i think to zach's point the other thing i've noticed is in the in the midst of all that then we've lost the ability to have calm rational rational and reasonable conversations about how we manage through this and it is turned into to deeply entrenched kind of people on the edges of it so they're either we should just all data center development unregulated or we shouldn't do any of it ever.

And at the end of the day, we have to figure out how to do it in a way that is reasonable.

I mean, I think that data computing is quickly becoming like a bedrock of a modern economy.

So we have to be able to do it.

And in some ways, it's no different than 80, 90 years ago when people said, hey, energy is a bedrock of a modern economy.

In the absence of electricity, we can't compete globally in manufacturing and all these different things.

And then what would happen if a hyperscaler was like, what's up,