Co-ops like SCI-REMC provide power across enormous areas of land with relatively few people.
(Sara Wittmeyer - WFIU/WTIU)
Tonia Schrier and her family live in the middle of the Owen-Putnam State Forest in a modest 1,400 square foot home. They’re surrounded by trees.
Getting and maintaining power to their home is an expensive challenge. Tonia said she typically spends $600 a month on electricity. In the winters, her bill can get as high as $900 a month.
The Schriers belong to the Southern-Central Indiana Rural Electric Membership Cooperative, or SCI-REMC utility provider. The utility covers 1,000 square miles and seven counties.
When the derecho hit the area a few weeks ago, the Schriers lost power almost immediately.
“We load up the gas cans and head into town to get some gasoline, then we took the chainsaw with us because we were experienced there,” she said. “And we had to cut five trees out of the road just to get into town.”
These are the generators and cans that kept a portion of the Schrier's home powered for nearly seven days. (Clayton Baumgarth / WTIU)
They went without power for nearly a full week. Luckily, they had generators to keep their kitchen fridge and some fans running, but it wasn’t enough to power the whole house. Each generator would run for seven and a half hours and cost $60 a day in fuel.
One thing the generators couldn’t power was the meat freezers holding hundreds of pounds of deer and hog meat.
“We had bought a whole pig so that was like, $700 right there,” she said. “We do have some inside but not much. We had three deer from last year in there. And we stock up, you know, any kind of meat sales we always bought. I want to say if I had to guess probably $4,000 in meat went bad.”
Electric co-ops such as SCI-REMC were created to provide power to hard-to-reach and low population places such as the Owen-Putnam State Forest.
James Tanneberger is the CEO of the utility. He said the storms took just over half of the co-op’s meters offline.
“After this derecho, we had approximately 18,500 members out, and that was our worst outage ever,” he said. “And then our second worst outage was the one that happened at the end of March where we had 14,500 members out.”
In a typical outage, it would be a challenge to get a home like the Schriers back online due to the sheer amount of vegetation surrounding their power lines. But in an event such as the recent one, it was downright impossible to mobilize enough lineman to fix all the outages quickly.
The drive to the Schrier's home looks like this the whole way; covered in trees on all sides. (Devan Ridgway / WTIU)
One reason is that Indiana infrastructure is largely above-ground, and another is that every other energy provider was going through the same issue concurrently, causing a shortage of lineman to go around.
“Unfortunately, this time, AES and Duke and everyone was getting every contractor that they could,” he said. “They were not only using their regular contractors, they were having to compete with us for the other contractors across the country.”
Sixty-five percent of SCI’s service territory is covered in forests, making it unique even among other co-ops in the state.
So, when it comes to putting lines underground to prevent falling limbs from causing damages like this, the cost to do so is prohibitively expensive.
“We estimate that it would take about $400 million to put our existing overhead facilities underground,” he said. “So, with 3,700 miles of facilities, that is a daunting task, especially whenever you're also trying to keep rates stable.”
Tanneberger said his utility is a top two spender for Indiana co-ops on vegetation management, and even with nearly $5 million a year going towards trimming trees, it often isn’t enough.
“We can’t account for the perfectly healthy live trees that during a major wind event fall from outside our right of way onto our lines,” he said. “Our easements are about 50 feet wide; we trim to the edge of our easement and as you know, a 60, 70 or 100 foot tall tree can easily reach our line.”
In a high wind event, even healthy trees can fall onto power lines. (Devan Rdigway / WTIU)
What can customers like the Schriers do? According to Kerwin Olson of the Citizens Action Coalition, engaging with electric co-ops is often a challenge.
“None of those entities are regulated by the state,” he said. “So, there's no single body, if you will, that you can go to participate in the processes.”
In 2012, co-ops began pulling out of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, thanks to legislation allowing co-ops to set their own rates and obtain financing.
In other words, investor-owned utilities such as Duke and AES are subject to transparent documentation through the commission, while co-ops aren’t, causing consumers trouble when there are complaints to be made.
“When an REMC customer filed a complaint at the Attorney General's Office, the Attorney General Office, referred them to the IURC,” he said. “And then the IURC says, ‘Well, we have no jurisdiction.’”
Tonia and her family were fortunate to have generators to keep portions of their home on during the outage. Other households weren’t so lucky and had life-saving appliances like C-PAP machines to worry about as well.
“I can't imagine if something more serious happened,” Tonia said. “We’d be without power for a long time because you know, not only is SCI-REMC trying to get out here, but the roads sometimes are impassable. We kind of got all kinds of strikes against us. I guess that's the perks of living in the country.”
Citizens Action Coalition and the Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor have filed a petition to investigate AES Indiana’s practices for restoring power after storm outages. They said that as energy companies continue to increase rates, it’s important they reliably provide energy.
