Message From Your President & CEO

A Letter to Members

“Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer” was a Nat King Cole hit song in 1963, describing relaxed, carefree summer days. It evokes leisure, long, unstructured days of youth, and time in the sun.

There are no “lazy days” for your electric cooperative. In fact, summer means watching the weather, planning for hot peak days, and working diligently to ensure we have sufficient generating resources to keep the lights on and air conditioners running. There is a complex network of power sources, transmission lines, and local resources that allow United Power to respond to the changing conditions of hot, sultry days, often capped with clouds and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Storms may bring cooling relief (and lower system demand), but they also impact the grid in a number of ways, from lightning strikes on aboveground equipment to flooding of underground vaults.

Managing the distribution system is a well-choreographed dance between power sources, energy storage, and transmission that matches the flow of power with demand. 

Modern storage, pioneered here at United Power, has been a major change in system operations in the last two years. It allows us to take advantage of lower-cost power and use it when demand is high. As a percentage of our overall generation portfolio, we have one of the largest utilization rates in the country with 119 MW of capacity. Next year, we will add another 200 MW of storage. This is against a peak of nearly 700 MW that continues to grow.

The cooperative also has significant solar resources. Nearly 14,000 of our members have invested in rooftop solar systems on their homes, which complement our utility-scale systems. United Power will add 500 MW of additional solar generation by 2030. 

Because our members need the cooperative to provide a continuous supply of energy day or night, we manage 30 power purchase agreements, including hydropower and local gas generation, and participate in the Southwest Power Pool’s power market.

During the summer, particularly on hotter than average days, demand rises sharply and United Power must pay more as the regional system is impacted. There is often a misperception that the “peak” time for utilities is midday when solar is at its highest production. It is not. Peak hours generally fall between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when businesses and industries are still operating and our members are also coming home from work or school, cooking dinner, and cranking the air conditioning.

Your cooperative anticipates the needs for the summer — and the rest of the year — through a sophisticated modeling process that produces an integrated resource plan (IRP), also called an energy resource plan. In fact, we are in the process of developing United Power’s IRP right now. This looks at the potential for continued growth over the next 20 years and the availability of generation and storage. It also reviews new resources that align with our hyper-localization strategy. The cooperative’s IRP — which will ultimately be approved by your Board of Directors — helps to guide decisions in terms of generating resources, the investments that will need to be made, and the timing of those decisions. Later this summer, we will release the details of our IRP and share the final report on our website. 

I am proud of the team at United Power that is helping us make the best decisions for our members. They work diligently every day to manage this complex power supply web and ensure our lights stay on reliably. 
As Nat King Cole sang, “Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer.”

Enjoy your summer, and please feel free to reach out to me with any questions or comments.