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  • Monarchs Still Need Help

    You can create monarch butterfly habitat in your 
    own garden this spring. 

  • Build future leadership, co-ops told at NRECA gathering

  • Safe | Reliable | Affordable

    WECA’s members provide power to nearly 600,000 member-owners in Wisconsin.
  • Wisconsin electric cooperative leaders lobbied their elected officials in Washington, D.C. about rural and energy issues facing cooperatives across the nation. Visit WECA on facebook for photos.
     

Finance Committee: Island Cable Repair Stays in Budget

May 16, 2019—The Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee voted Thursday to retain funding in the state budget bill that offers disaster assistance for the repair and replacement of the underwater cable that failed last June, cutting off electricity to the residents of Washington Island.

The power failure—caused by recurring winter ice damage over multiple years—forced Washington Island Electric Cooperative to switch to more expensive backup generation until the cable could be spliced. With close cooperation from state and federal agencies on routing and permitting, a replacement cable was installed last fall and current costs are now approaching $4 million.
 

Teamwork Time

April 30, 2019—This year’s budget process will be out of the ordinary in multiple ways. Tony Evers is the first Democrat to win the governor’s office in eight years, and both legislative houses reviewing his budget proposal are controlled by Republican majorities. Former leaders of both parties in the State Senate and Assembly recently speculated that 2019 might see three different budget bills: Governor Evers’ plan, another one crafted by legislative Republicans, and finally a compromise adopted well after the customary June 30 deadline. (Unlike the federal government, Wisconsin doesn’t shut down anything when a budget is late; the prior one simply stays in effect.)
 

ROPE Deployment Underway

April 4, 2019—Wisconsin electric cooperatives and others served in neighboring states by the Dairyland Power Cooperative generation and transmission system participate in a mutual assistance program known as ROPE—for Restoration of Power in an Emergency. A large ROPE deployment was underway Friday after the call for help went out on Thursday from Freeborn-Mower Cooperative Services headquartered at Albert Lea, Minnesota. An estimated 400-500 poles were downed and approximately half the accounts on the Freeborn-Mower distribution system were without power in the wake of storms—snow, ice, mixed precipitation, and wind—that tore across the upper Midwest Wednesday and Thursday. Continue here...

Monarchs Still Need Help

March 28, 2019—Several times these past couple of years I’ve delivered updates on what’s been happening with the monarch butterfly and the decline of other pollinator species in North America. These are obvious concerns from the standpoint of environmental quality; less obvious but very real is our concern over the effect reduced butterfly numbers could have on rural utility operations The unfortunate fact is the monarch population east of the Rocky Mountains has declined by more than 80 percent over the past 20 years. Read the full story here.
 Click here to learn how to create your own monarch butterfly habitat.

 

Co-op Difference | What Month is This...

…or, what would June be without the dairy industry? Year after year, even a fleeting glance at this month’s edition of Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News confirms that June is Dairy Month, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. Through several decades of rural electrification in Wisconsin, a huge percentage of co-op members—and readers of the publication—were dairy farmers. That’s changed dramatically with a diversifying rural economy and more rural residents commuting to jobs in the cities. But there’s a reason why Wisconsin is known as the dairy state—as the song says, “nobody does it better”—and we’ll still be doing it for the foreseeable future.

Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News

The Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News serves as the voice of the state’s rural electric cooperatives. Founded in 1940, the publication focuses on statewide issues that affect electric cooperatives, promoting the general welfare of Wisconsin’s electric cooperatives, their member-owners, and the areas they serve.
 

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