REA manager wraps up 25 years in Colorado

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

When Ron Carey arrived in Colorado 25 years ago to take the top job at Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association, the utility was in a heated court battle over service territory and the right to provide electricity to homes in areas being annexed.

For four decades, customer-owned electric cooperatives had existed to get electricity to the less populated, less lucrative areas of the country. In the '80s, they realized they needed to protect their investments in power substations and transmission lines as investor-owned and municipal-owned utilities moved into their territory through annexations.

Carey's first legal battle concluded with the District Court of Weld County ruling in Poudre Valley's favor over Home Light and Power Co., which had a franchise to serve Greeley. The decision was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which determined that PVREA could keep its service area, but it also needed a franchise with Greeley.

In the service battle with municipal-owned utilities, the statewide practice back then was to negotiate with each city, with cities usually extracting the better deal, Carey said. He and Poudre Valley REA wanted a state law to set a fair formula for negotiations.

Toward that effort, the state's rural cooperatives banded together to get legislation passed, only to have Gov. Richard Lamm veto it. The REAs didn't give up, however, and managed to get just enough votes to override the veto, Carey said. Cities then challenged the law, claiming they had absolute right to take over annexed service areas. The high court upheld the REA-backed legislation, and it remains in effect today.

As Carey retires, the PVREA he leaves behind will be using that formula to negotiate with Fort Collins over the value of the utilities serving the Southwest Enclave Annexation.

Carey has always watched with interest any move afoot that will affect electric cooperatives. In 1998-99, he served on the state's Electric Advisory Study Panel when Colorado legislators were considering whether to deregulate all electric utilities. Carey said the cooperatives and municipalities opposed that kind of deregulation, also known as "retail wheeling." That opinion prevailed, and Carey said it has protected residential customers from market manipulation.

"Utility deregulation just shuffles the cards," he said. "It doesn't drive down the cost."

This year, the state REAs lobbied the Colorado Legislature to rewrite a bill on net-metering for large renewable energy installations. PVREA already provides net-metering for residential generation of renewable energy, but it opposed being forced to buy on a larger scale. The result is a bill that is "more flexible to cooperatives," Carey said.

"Cooperatives can evaluate for themselves what works for their systems," he said.

Integrating renewable energy sources into the electrical grid will be the challenge for future REA managers, he said.

Natural gas offers some benefits because it's cleaner than coal, Carey said, but the country then risks becoming dependent on imported liquefied natural gas.

Energy conservation has merits, Carey said, but at this point "it's symbolic."

"People aren't serious yet about energy conservation," he said. "They're interested in somebody else doing it. As far as taking a real hard serious look, I don't think most people do."

There are a number of easy steps consumers could take to conserve energy, Carey suggested, and they would "have much greater impact than installing solar panels on people's homes."

Here are a few suggestions: drive smaller cars or battery-powered vehicles, install storm doors (which are missing from most new homes), install high-efficiency natural gas furnaces with a rating of 90 percent or more, use compact fluorescent lighting and build new homes to take advantage of passive solar benefits.

It has been 25 years of rapid change under Carey's watch. PVREA became more than a company that builds transmission lines to rural properties. It also has some large commercial and industrial customers, and many of its rural residential customers need 100 percent reliable electrical service as they run computerized businesses from home.

In May, Carey is part of a small group traveling to India to help that country develop a cooperative rural electric system. He may stay involved with that effort, but in June the Maryland native is officially retired and off to a home along a Sheepscot River in Maine, where he will happily spend some time catching lobster.