Cooperative Leaders: Mike Couick

PUF: What's unique about the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina?

Mike Couick: South Carolina has twenty co-ops. They serve over a million and a half of South Carolinians with electricity, all forty-six counties. They are larger than any single utility standalone in the state, but they're twenty different co-ops that are all unique and autonomous.

They're unique in that they don't have a G&T, they have a T&A. We have a transmission aggregator, Central Electric Cooperative. Central is the single largest customer of Duke Energy Carolinas. That relationship extends to 2030.

Central is the single largest customer of Santee Cooper. That relationship goes back to the 1950s and ends now in 2058. That relationship is now a matter of controversy. Because we don't own generation and because we pay not a rate, but a charge based upon cost causation, each month our local co-ops are looking at their contribution to peak as being an opportunity to reduce their cost.

So, our cooperatives come up with programs that do that, and they're varied. Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative has a three-part residential and commercial rate applied to one hundred percent of the members in the classes. By rate design, it's totally aligning its members' interests with the co-op's interests. It's one of the most radical things you've ever heard, but it's one of the most wonderful things you've ever heard.