Buzzing About Beekeeping and Electric Co-ops with Buddy Hasten

Absolutely.

In America, there are...

Basically three types of electric power companies.

So you have your investor owned utilities like Intergy, right? Shareholders invest money to provide the capital to run the business to, you know, the focus is to generate a return to make a profit.

Right.

You have municipals, right? So like, you know, Conway Corp, Jonesboro Water and Light.

Where in a municipal, in a city, you have such a density of people.

In their business model, it's more efficient to just do local power for that city.

Okay.

Right? Because they don't have to go long transmission lines or anything else.

Sure.

And then you have the electric co-ops.

And how the electric co-ops formed was, you know, 80 years ago, the cities in America all had electricity.

But rural people did not.

And so people out on the farm are still pumping water and burning wood to cook with.

And so there was a real, you know, kind of right after the Great Depression, there was this whole, you know, the Great New Deal.

And Roosevelt, sort of the rural electric administration, their whole focus was bringing electricity to rural America.

And as part of that, cooperatives were formed.

And what is a cooperative in general? A cooperative is where the people get together.

form their own entity and they cooperate together to bring a needed resource to their community there's food co-ops there's you know there's electric co-ops there's a lot of different co-ops across the globe but the electric co-ops are different in that we we don't have shareholders we are not for profit but we actually work for all of the members of our community who essentially have put their money in and they support the resources needed to bring power to their homes.

So it's a win-win.

It is win-win.

And when I say we're not for profit, because this is a world of finance and banking and investment, we do have to every year show the bankers and the federal government that we actually do make a profit just because that's the health of a business.

But what's different about us is in an investor-owned utility, they take that profit and they give it to the shareholders.

We take the profit that we make, we put it on our books, and then we write checks back to those members.