For the last few years, I have spent a great deal of time during my annual reports talking about our broadband internet deployment, and rightfully so. This project might be the most significant infrastructure investment in rural northeast Indiana since your electric cooperative began building our current electric system in the late 1930s. 

The $32 million capital investment and its impact on the quality of life for our current and future members are similar, particularly when you consider how many of our members have already subscribed. Today, over 55% of members are enrolled, with six to 10 new subscribers every week. This level of response and participation by our members indicates how important and needed this service is to our rural community. This response even surprised us by outperforming even our most aggressive forecasts. 

In response to this overwhelming support and in keeping with our cooperative’s not-for-profit business model, we reduced our fiber to the home monthly subscription fees across the board in May. As your cooperative, we are not here to play games with introductory prices. We simply want to offer the best service to all our members regardless of the density of their neighborhoods. 

This is why, in addition to a rate deduction, we added a new 2 GB package for members who need even more bandwidth to run their business or enjoy the latest high-definition technologies. If you would like to join your neighbors and sign up, or if you would like to learn more about how this existing service can change your life, give us a call. Our experts are ready to help. 

On the electric energy side of our business, we continue to face challenges with Wholesale Power Supply. As we have mentioned on numerous occasions, renewable generation resources like wind and solar continue to take the place of gas and coal base load units and, in the process, fail to deliver energy and, more importantly, capacity to our national grid on a one-to-one basis. The primary reason for this imbalance is that renewables can’t generate power every hour of the day, and the technology needed to store the energy simply has not caught up. When we consider this meaningful change in our wholesale power make-up and look at our nation’s load growth, which is partly linked to the development in artificial intelligence (AI) and internet use, we are on a collision course with a disaster if something does not change. 

The first thing we need is more generation to keep pace with an unprecedented change in demand. For example, in the AI area alone, we are seeing requests for service ranging from a few megawatts to 2,000 megawatts in size. To put that in perspective, Steuben County REMC’s total load on the hottest day in the summer runs near 45 megawatts, and dozens of these types of load requests are coming in from all over the country. 

The second thing our industry needs is transmission facilities to get the new generation to where the load is needed. Unfortunately, both industry needs will take time and hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

As grim as this may sound, we are seeing a slight glimpse of relief from changes in our current administration’s viewpoints of traditional generation facilities, specifically here in the Midwest.
We, along with Wabash Valley Power, our wholesale generation and transmission provider, continue to work tirelessly and think creatively about our approach to continue to provide the same level of reliability and affordability into the future.

Back at home, your cooperative finished 2024 with a solid $1,614,842 operating margin, up from 2023’s margins of $255,766. The primary reason for the increase is partly due to a $488,937 assist from our broadband division and increased electric revenues. Moving forward, these improvements in margins will go a long way to help us keep pace with our growing debt service responsibilities, aid us in replenishing our cash, and bring our equity back up to more normal levels, all while continuing to enjoy one of the most competitive retail electric rates in northeast Indiana.

Based on our forecast for 2025, this trend looks like it will continue. With a firm financial footing and your continued support, Steuben County REMC will continue to be northeast Indiana’s advocate for economic development and improvements in our region’s quality of life.