News & Press
Message from Brenda P. Green, Tri-County EMC Board Chairman
Welcome to 2018. Although the date has just changed, we have been planning and preparing for the year for quite a while. It is our responsibility to look into the future, prepare for uncertainties, plan for growth and, most importantly, continue to provide members with reliable electricity. This past August, your board and senior staff held a strategic planning session to identify the major goals of Tri-County EMC in 2018. Keeping the cooperative financially stable always remains the number one goal. In 2018, we also set goals to continue to attract, retain and develop quality employees, prepare for the unexpected with an updated Disaster Recovery Plan, account for future power supply needs and develop new energy management strategies.
We continue to invest in new technologies to more efficiently serve you, our members. Over the past few years, we have focused on rebuilding/converting the power lines from 12 kV to 25 kV capacity to handle additional electric load. We’ve also installed automated switches and controls to automatically back-feed lines when possible in order to minimize outages. This year, we will begin the process of upgrading our metering system which will allow us to know about an outage before a member reports it.
Along with investments in technology, right-of-way maintenance remains a critical component in electric reliability. With recent warmer winters and rainy summers, meaning longer growing seasons, we have to be constantly vigilant in our vegetation management efforts. We have refocused our right-of-way programs to ensure trees and limbs do not encroach upon power lines and interrupt service.
We will continue our member survey program that lets you tell us to how we are doing. We survey a random sample of our members each quarter. During the first two quarters of our surveying, our satisfaction rating has been a 9.02 out of 10. We have also gained valuable feedback that we can use in our future planning.
We have a busy year ahead of us, but we are well-prepared to meet the challenges of 2018 and beyond. As always, we look forward to serving you. (59416002)