Mapping Strategic Organizing within Electric Cooperatives 

Electric cooperatives are unique among utilities since they are run by democratically elected boards. With sponsorship provided by the New Economy Coalition, I mapped electric cooperatives in four states to support grassroots organizing for clean, equitable energy provision. Collaborating with four partners –  Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Mississippi OneVoice & the Northern Plains Resource Council – I developed customized analyses by exploring geographies of interest and adapting context-specific indicators. After an iterative process of feedback and revisions, the results were then communicated back through a series of webinars.

Two slides from a presentation to Mississippi OneVoice highlight how electricity provision intersects with systemic racism in the form of higher energy burden among majority-Black communities in the Mississippi Delta. 

Located in Montana, the Northern Plains Resource Council needed to understand how electric cooperative service territories overlap with reservation lands and indigenous communities. Despite considerable overlap between indigenous lands and cooperative territories, leadership of the utilities does not tend to include indigenous people. 

Honing in on three electric cooperatives located in Southern Montana, mapping the percent of energy burdened households by census tract provided useful context to understand the conditions within electric cooperatives. Energy burden ranges considerably by geography, revealing areas most in need of interventions such as weatherization programs.

Hog farming is an important issue for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. A thorough review of the location and concentration of hog farms within rural electric cooperatives revealed that hog farming within certain cooperatives drives up consumption. As a result, electricity burden may appear worse within these regions, yet the true driver of the association is not poverty or poor housing conditions. Rather, energy consumption from power-needy farms lifts the average consumption across all households. 

For Kentucky, mapping the location of organizational contacts revealed opportunities for strategic engagement within certain electric cooperatives. Importantly, the analysis also provided a benchmark, revealing the success of previous engagement within Blue Grass Electric Cooperative.