ADAMS RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE LOCAL PAGES

Message From The General Manager

If you’ve been to the grocery store, bought gas, or enjoyed a meal at your favorite restaurant lately, I’m sure you have noticed a spike in prices. Many factors are driving this unwelcome trend, including rising resource costs, supply chain issues, and worker shortages.

At Adams Rural Electric Cooperative, we also face rising costs. Increased expenses, supply chain challenges, and price volatility touch every part of our business.

The cooperative has 22 vehicles in our fleet, plus various types of equipment that require fuel. In 2022, our vehicles drove 165,764 miles and the co-op spent $102,156 in fuel. In 2021, the cooperative spent $77,692 on fuel for vehicles driven 203,762 miles. As you can see, we drove fewer miles in 2022 but still spent 31% more on fuel.

The cost of materials the cooperative uses to build and maintain our electric lines also has soared. (These increases are illustrated on the pole to the right of this article.) The lowest increase is the price of a utility pole, at 13%. The highest is the price of a u-guard at 200%. It’s especially challenging to manage costs when prices tend to change from order to order.

Additional increases come not only in dollars, but also in time. Many of our common, everyday materials have longer delivery cycles due to supply chain problems. The last shipment of transformers we received in 2022 were ordered in January and arrived in November. It took 11 months to receive these transformers, which are a key component in delivering electricity. Meters, similarly, are expected to arrive eight months after an order is placed. We’re experiencing similar scenarios in the day-to-day operations of the cooperative’s office. One box of copy paper has gone up 36% in price since 2021. The accounting department needed a new printer in June 2022, and it finally arrived in December.

These conditions are ever-changing and prices continue to increase, but rest assured that the cooperative is doing everything we can to meet our community’s needs and continuously plan for the future.