POWER LINES
HARNESSING
THE SUN
Co-ops respond to member demand with an expansion of their community solar program. BY JEFF MCCALLISTER
B
uckeye Power, the generation and transmission cooperative that provides electricity to Ohio’s 24 electric cooperatives, produces safe, affordable, and reliable power using an all-of-the-above generation strategy.
Since electricity can be generated in many ways, it makes sense to make use of any or all of them to produce the power that turns the lights on for the 400,000 Ohio co-op consumermember households, farms, and businesses. Each potential generating resource — coal plants, solar panels, hydropower facilities, etc. — produces power at a different level of reliability, environmental impact, and cost, so the trick is to balance each factor in the generation mix to produce electricity in the safest, cleanest, most economical, and most reliable way possible. That’s already a complicated task, because some of those factors tend to be at odds with one another. In recent times, another factor has added another twist to those generation decisions: consumer attitudes. “I think it’s important to know that I’m doing as much as I can to support green energy,” says Tom Kagy, a member of North Baltimore-based Hancock-Wood Electric Cooperative. Kagy, a retired insurance agent who also serves on Hancock-Wood’s board of trustees, was one of the first members to put in his subscription application for the cooperative’s community solar program, OurSolar.
4 OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING • OCTOBER 2021
