NRECA
Jim Matheson is CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative.
The National Rural Electric Cooperative's PowerXchange is the largest gathering in the nation of cooperative leaders. Public Utilities Fortnightly brings you excerpts of an online CEO talk with NRECA's Jim Matheson, Middle Tennessee Electric's Chris Jones, Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas' Buddy Hasten, and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative's Suzanne Lane.
NRECA CEO Jim Matheson: We are at Nashville at our PowerXchange meeting. We have over ten thousand people here. This is exciting to see the interest in what's going on with electric cooperatives and it reflects the opportunities we face today. The opportunities and challenges are rapid change in technology, rapid change of circumstances, and it's a great time to get folks together across the co-op network and compare ideas and share solutions.
We have over nine hundred electric cooperatives across forty-eight states, forty-two million total consumers. We're different because we're not like for-profit entities. We serve usually the hardest to the most expensive places in America based on lack of population density.
We are owned and governed by the members we serve, and it gives us a particular consumer centric view of how we do our jobs. We are not responsible to shareholders. We are only responsible to our own stakeholders.