POWERING AHEAD

South Central Power Company 2022 Annual report

After a few challenging years due to the pandemic — with supply chain issues, inflation, and more — South Central Power Company rose above that and is powering ahead into the future.

Just like we have since we were founded in 1936, we continue to invest in you, our members, to improve reliability, keep costs as low as possible, and add value to your lives.

Electricity powers your life — it’s not a luxury item, it’s a basic need. We always look for ways to improve the delivery and maintenance of our service. Here’s a snapshot of some of these investments:

Fiber

We’re connecting our substations with fiber to improve reliability and enhance cybersecurity and benefit our company and our members.

Safety

Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees and our members. We continue to train our employees on safe work practices to promote a safety-first culture and put in place practices to ensure member safety as well.

Keeping the lights on

Our teams work tirelessly to restore power when we have outages, but they also work to ensure reliability on days when we don’t have outages. We continue to upgrade our poles, lines, and equipment to ensure the safe, reliable delivery of service.

Operations

We’re looking at ways to improve how we operate, so we can deliver a better member experience for you, whether you have an outage, you have a service order, or are calling us with a question.

Message From The President And Ceo

When you look around these days, it’s hard not to feel like the pace of change is accelerating. And in fact, it is. One commonly cited example is the computer. In the 1960s, computers were the size of a house and extremely slow and inefficient by modern standards. Since then, the power and capabilities of computing continue to grow, and today, many of you carry in your pocket a smartphone that has more computing speed and power than NASA needed to send a man to the moon.

During the course of my career, when compared to other industries, electric utilities have historically lagged behind when it comes to the pace of change. Costs remained relatively stable, power plants were built to last for decades, and many utilities were still relying on some of the same power poles and lines they’d installed in the first half of the 20th century to deliver power.

Over the last few years, though, we’ve seen the pace of change in our industry rapidly accelerating. Environmental guidelines and economic pressures have led to the closure of many traditional baseload power plants, fueled by coal and natural gas, while intermittent sources like solar and wind have risen in popularity. Costs for many utilities have risen sharply, leading to higher and higher bills for consumers, and the transition to greener sources of power coupled with an increase in severe weather in many parts of the country have put a dent into reliability.

At South Central Power Company, we have felt this acceleration in our work as well. We have taken advantage of new technology, upgrading all our electric meters to help with outage restoration and provide our members and engineers with usage data that can help control costs. New enterprise software helps us serve you better, and other technology such as automated equipment in the field and the computer systems behind them helps us restore outages faster, deliver quality power, and keep bill increases in check. Our new fiber network we are building will help us accelerate that pace of change, and deliver new benefits to you as well. Better connectivity will give us better data, as well as the ability to offer new programs, services and even future rate structures that will be designed to give you more choices about how you use power at home, as well as options to save money and electricity.

Rick Lemonds PRESIDENT AND CEO

As we work to implement these changes, which will be a long-term process over a period of years, we like to say we are “powering ahead,” because the business of delivering power to you is no longer anything like the slow- and-steady utility culture of the past. We want to get ahead of the rapidly changing landscape in our industry and our world so we can continue to be who we’ve always been — your trusted energy partner, delivering dependable and affordable power to our Ohio communities. Thank you for being a South Central Power member, and for taking time to read and learn more about your cooperative.

Sincerely,

Rick Lemonds President and CEO