Message from CEO Julius Hackett
A Note from our CEO and Board President - 2024 Annual Report
The past twelve months have presented significant challenges. In addition to maintaining Tri-County Electric Co-op’s core business functions, we have been heavily involved in recovering from Hurricane Idalia and bringing the fiber project to a close by the end of 2024. Each of these projects alone would have been demanding, but managing both simultaneously stretched our organization and highlighted areas needing reinforcement ahead of this year’s peak hurricane season.
Hurricane Idalia tested our emergency response capabilities. Over the past twelve months we have strengthened our response in key areas. We increased our storm material inventory, added additional internet access points and replaced office, shop and warehouse generators.
We reworked our workforce base camp strategies to use multiple smaller locations to avoid traffic jams and minimize drive times. We adjusted the ratio of line workers to right-of-way personnel, recognizing that stronger storms generate more tree issues.
On August 5th, Hurricane Debby followed a nearly identical path of Hurricane Idalia. Although Debby was a Cat 1 Hurricane, it’s slow move across our counties provided plenty of opportunity for flooding, tree damage and damages to the electric system.
We now know that the improvements we made since Idalia has helped this process to be less stressful, better organized, and we were better prepared for the major FEMA documentation requirements post-storm.
The fiber project remains within the original financial projections and home installation rates are higher than projected. The build is winding down and we’ve added additional splicing teams to bring the last few feeders on by late summer. We challenged ourselves to take a more aggressive build approach so we could offer access to fiber broadband to our members as quickly as possible. Make-ready engineering and construction crews wrapped up their work by June 1 and fiber contractors are expected to wrap up in September.
We continue to meet RUS reliability indices that measure the average duration of power outages. By enhancing our ability to backfeed circuits and implement automated switching of power sources, we will improve reliability over the long term. This year, we focused on building stronger alternate feed capabilities between Cherry Lake substation and increasing power transfer between Perry and Steinhatchee substations. We are laying the groundwork to deploy smart grid strategies, connecting downtime reclosures to the fiber network as part of our smart grid project. We will connect our substations and offices to the Connect by Tri-County Electric fiber network.
Our work & focus remains on our members and providing the quality, affordable, reliable electricity needed to power their lives. We look forward to seeing you all at the TCEC Annual Meeting on Saturday, September 21st.