 Well good afternoon everyone and thank you Fran for those nice comments I have known Fran for a long time and I think his commitment to the cooperative industry is is fantastic and we need people like that to continue the movement going forward. Today I'm going to talk about electricity so one of the things that we focus on every day is powering our members lives and I'm going to just take you into a little exercise here if you don't mind starting off with so bear with me the screen is black so everyone please close your eyes and think for a moment imagine imagine using your senses to appreciate a day in a life with electricity in the morning you're awakened by the sound of music or maybe an annoying alarm you then see the light in your bathroom and proceed to take a warm relaxing shower dry off and blow dry your hair once ready you proceed into the kitchen to start a coffee maker so you can smell the aroma of a fresh cup of coffee a piece of cinnamon toast some fresh bacon and eggs as you prepare your breakfast you turn on the TV to hear the morning news after finishing your morning rituals you're on your way out the door grab your cell phone which was charged overnight to take on the day of course the garage door opened by electricity to get you out the door all your morning activities were powered by electricity sometimes taken for granted but essential in today's world I believe it is important for everyone to be reminded of the value of electricity plays in our lives every second of the day my lecture today will focus on the value of electricity why cooperatives are best suited to supply it so thank you for participating in that exercise this morning so I'm going to go through a few things today in my presentation I'm going to talk a little bit about my journey not too much but a little bit a little bit about the history of cooperatives look at our industry structure what it really takes to provide electricity to our membership the role of Cass County Electric more specifically careers in electric cooperatives for those students in the room I'll share some opportunities there for you and then I'll just close with a little little update on our recent ice storm that we've had back around the Christmas time so that's the that's the agenda for today and I hope you hope you enjoy it and if you don't well it is what it is so starting off so I I have I've had the fortune of living in this in this area in my entire career so I actually grew up south of Castleton in a really small town called Lynchburg it's basically an elevator in five houses I went to college at NDSCS in Waperton and I have a two-year associate's degree and that's that's my formal education I started my career at Cass County Electric in 1986 and as what frame mentioned earlier I started as a load management technician and that position was designed I was it was a new position to do maintenance on our ripple control systems for off-peak heating you guys are looking me what is that anyway I always just out to maintain our our systems as a technician and I did that for about four years and then as as we continued to grow the electric heating market kind of in our rural areas of our cooperative we felt we needed to market that more so I actually became a marketing representative and was in that role for about ten years and we really explain the value of electric heating and water heating to our members builders contractors whatever I spent a lot of time doing that then moved into a role as as a marketing manager to oversee that area and expand my role into helping with key accounts eventually became a key accounts executive where there we worked with our top 100 accounts really to make sure that they were taken care of they were this was at a time when there was customer choice being talked about in the utility industry and we wanted to make sure that our key accounts liked us and I think we did a good job making sure they did after that it was promoted to a vice president of member and energy services to oversee our marketing communications team our energy management team economic development at the time and our billing billing and accounts area and from there I was named a CEO in 2016 after our past CEO Scott Handy who is here today by the way Scott Andy raise your hand Scott and he's our past CEO of Cass County Electrics I learned everything from him so I'm grateful for his his past leadership so that's a little bit about me and I'm gonna talk a little more about you know kind of what what drove me in my career to do the things that that I've done and I guess I'll go way back you know I grew up in a family of contractors my dad and my grandfather were building contractors they they service the rural community of Cass County at the time and really learn the values of hard work being efficient and enjoy life and perform good work and those basic values of life is really what has driven me in every stage of my career to the best I can be in every position I've had I also played sports and I bring that up today because I think playing sports is important for me it kind of brought me the value of leadership you know if you play sports in a team if you're a captain of a basketball team or a football team your teammates are relying on you and I think that type of a background is really important in life and playing sports taught me a lot about doing the right things and being a leader in this in our world as was mentioned I look at continuous process improvement I think that's really important something we've really focused on at our cooperative to make sure that we don't don't just settle for status quo we're always looking for ways to improve communicate effectively I mean that's as about as important as you can get it communication is everything in this world we had to make sure those that were dealing with know what's going on and why positive attitude you know we always have the opportunity when we walk in the door or come to a meeting or do whatever we do it's up to us to come with the attitude we want to bring to that event or that situation to have the positive attitude makes everything just that much better and constant learning I'll talk about that next so these are just a few of the certifications I've probably have some more but just some more noted ones that I've obtained over the over the years that has helped me in the position I was at to perform at the highest level I could at the time so one of the things that we pushed a lot back in the 90s was electric heating more specifically ground-source heat pumps you know so that was kind of just coming into fruition as a new technology so I became a certified installer to put in ground-source heat pumps only put into my whole life but I was actually a certified installer energy auditing so we want to make sure as a we want to be the energy experts so we we did took a lot of training to make sure we could be energy experts in our field be it if a someone new house or a commercial building so I became a commercial energy auditor and eventually through the association of energy engineers yet some training for that and another area in that was a certified energy manager that's a designation that a lot of mechanical engineers get in their profession so again more to gain knowledge and get credibility as is someone that actually knows what I'm talking about and towards the end of my career was more focused on leadership you know so we had some training programs through our national organization called the management internship program that's a six-week program that we send managers through to get training on cooperatives we went through a strategy execution masterclass and a lot of our key staff did as well to basically allow us to get training on setting a strategic plan and roadmap for the cooperative future and my recent training was probably about five years ago was more the Gettysburg leadership experience again a leadership training about the Civil War and all that unveiled but anyway that's a little background on what what's important I think for lifelong learning to help those in your careers to do the best you can be or be the best you can be so the keys to success is continuous learning be ready for the opportunities because you never know when a door opens in my my career I've had a lot of door opening opportunities and I happen to be the right person at the time to go through that door doesn't always happen so I was very lucky from that perspective commitment I'm someone that it says if I'm gonna do it I do it I don't I rarely back down to something I don't commit to think that's really important and having connections and that's I've spent my entire career making connections with people and I think that's probably put me in the seat I was in for the last eight years so why were electric cooperatives formed you know if we look back in the in the 1930s you know what did people want well the people in the rural area wanted what the people in the cities had and that's electricity you look at what was done before electricity was in the rural areas and when nine out of ten homes didn't have electricity farmers would milk cows by hand and dim light or no light at all you know we washed clothes not with machines you know you just don't think about that stuff until we're reminded of those things and as far as cooperatives go we're I mean our main focus is we're focused on people and not profits you know I think that's the value of a cooperative in our in our world especially in our industry so you've a lot of you have seen this you know I'm not going to go through these in detail but the seven cooperative principles are really what drive us to do what we do every day and there's probably a few here that'll probably focus on more than others today you know democratic control is really important cooperation among cooperatives concerned for community there's others on here I'm not going to go through all of them but they're all just really important and and drive again what we do every day so looking back in time you know cooperatives been around for a really long time back in the to the 1800s and really for electric cooperatives in in the United States if you look back about 1935 is when President Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Act and that really was the start of electric cooperatives across the nation so Cass County Electric was formed in 1937 by a group of local farmers in the Kindred area that decided we want to have power just like those in the in the big cities do so that was the start of Cass County Electric as you can see there's many other milestones in there that like electricity kept expanding across the country and today we serve a lot of them I'll get to show you that in a little bit how much we serve today I want to make a point so my cooperative roots run deep so back in the 1940s my my grandfather actually wired homes that brought electricity to our rural membership down in the Enderland Fort Ransom area so I I kind of have a little bit of co-op blood in me you might say because of what he did and just that value he brought to to to my mind I remember the day that I came came home and announced that I got hired at Cass County Electric I was really excited and my grandpa said to me that's a great place to work I think he was right rural electrification you know that that is really what we're known for the RREA I mean the old-timers in our industry refer to us as the RREA anyway that's when I used to go to places all the RREAs here that was me so electric co-ops across the country so right now you can see the landmass of cooperatives across the country there's we cover a lot of landmass but not near as many people our country has over 300 million people co-ops supply about 42 million of those there are about 832 ish electric cooperatives across the country that supply electricity and we power over 21 million homes and businesses so that this model is took off since the 30s and is doing a great job providing electric electrification across the country and one thing we we return more than 1.4 billion dollars in capital credits and 9 in 2021 I'll talk about capital credits a little later so really what what makes up the power industries so we have to look at you know power plant generation we look at transforming that power transmitting it over power lines to another substation to actually bring it to the home so there's a multi-step process that's that's involved in bringing electricity to homes and businesses across the region and there's many different corporate structures so the original cooperatives were more investor-owned utilities and I'll just give examples there that would be more like autarkill power or Excel energy municipals like more public service you know they've been around for a long time longer than we have but cooperatives like I said it started in the 30s and you know from our our power delivery it's Cass County Electric in Minn Kota really in partnership so we look at Minn Kota and Cass and we're we are owned and controlled by our members you know so whatever we do whatever money we invest our members have to come up with that money and they're built back in rates so be it Minn Kota investing something with power supply or Cass County Electric investing in whatever our members have to pay for it there's no subsidies for that at all no grants to support it it's all member supported and again our focus is on people not profits so looking at the cooperative structure from a generation perspective Minn Kota power cooperative and Mack McClendon there's their CEOs here so Mack raise your hand. Mack provides us power so they produce power through self-generation with coal they have purchased power agreements for wind and hydro and market purchases through MISO which is a mid-con and independent system operator which is an RTO and we get most of our power probably from the top to generate self-generation and purchase power agreements probably I'll show you that 97% so Minn Kota has been around for since what date Mack was it 84 years okay we got you beat we've been here longer so one thing that I don't know I'm Mack probably knows this but our first power supply didn't come from Minn Kota power it came from Vala city municipal so we actually had a line transmission line from Vala city to a area called Warren right southwest to West Fargo is where we had our first power brought in then eventually Minn Kota took over and has been doing a great job since so Minn Kota wholesale power so they serve parts of 11 cooperatives in northwest Minnesota northeast North Dakota serve about 35,000 square miles and 33 counties and 400 ish ploys I think a little above 400 but and those are employees that not only work at their service center and Grand Forks but at the power plant out in the center of North Dakota this is their generation resources we have three coal plants that we get power from three major wind farms in Ashtabula Langdon and out by center and then we have two smaller wind turbines which were the first utility scale wind turbines in North Dakota and in Petersburg and Valley City this makes up the power capacity that Minn Kota sends to this region totals up to be about 1400 megawatts of power and this is a capacity rating and not so much not energy it's I'll show you what that means in a little bit but coal has been our driving force for base low power and power supply for this region over the past while it's probably in 15 years now that wind has been as added to that as well and I'll show you what makeup that is right now so currently from a capacity perspective Minn Kota gets about 8% of their capacity from hydro which is the garrison dam about 55% from coal today and about 34% from wind and that's capacity or the nameplate rating from the power supply one thing we do know is that we think the wind blows all the time but it doesn't you know so we only get about 19% of the energy from wind about 67 68% from coal and about 11% from hydro so that's the general makeup when one of our members uses electricity that's approximately where their resources come from today so next is transmitting so I talked about the three legs of the stool basically in transmission you know Minn Kota delivers power from 252 substations around the region you know from international falls to Oaks North Dakota or not quite Oaks but down in that pretty pretty broad area and they supply about 3,300 miles of line and they have supply voltages at different levels based on you know what their areas they're supplying so their main main high voltage system is 345 and 220 kilovolts and their other transmission is 115 and 69 kV this 69 is really what goes around our the rural parts of our service territories to supply our substations generally and then this Casconi electric so we're the distribution part of this so what when Minn Kota sends power to a substation our role as a distribution cooperatives to take that power from the substation and deliver it delivered to the homes and businesses there are 44 distribution cooperatives in Minnesota and 16 in North Dakota that do the same thing that we do this shows a map here where they're located in North Dakota you know again Casconi electric so we serve about 40 miles north far far go about 40 miles south and about 80 miles west and then it kind of meanders around the Shine River Valley to the south of us is kind of our general service territory I'll show this show you that next this is a little more detail of that and some of the communities that we do serve within within our service territory their auto tail serves parts of cities and as P does and a mean about like Valle City Municipal serves some of the inner parts there too but that's generally our service area in those colored color different colored areas you see in that map so like I said earlier we've been around since 1937 we have service centers in Valle City Arthur Kindred Lisbon and Farrell and we do that to make sure that we can respond outages quick by having service centers scattered throughout our service territory we have linemen that can go out and respond outages as quick as they can and as safe as they can we serve today over 58,000 accounts back in 1986 when I started at Cas we served about 11,000 accounts we've grown significantly over the years because of the service territories more specifically around Farrell West Farrell and now Horace if you've driven down to Horace lately is growing like crazy we're get our power from Encota and we're also a member of the North Dakota Electric Cooperative Association so who's Cas County Electric you know we're distribution cooperative like I said you know we're governed and regulated by our nine member board directors and we have several directors here so board of directors from Cas County Electric please raise your hand and thank them for their service they do a phenomenal job representing the membership and giving me the right direction not too much or maybe not so just to break down kind of the role of the board and some of you students may have seen some of this you know one thing I'll just remind everyone here this today this is really about the students we want to share with with all of you what what co-ops are all about and hopefully you'll gain some information today that's useful in your careers so our goal as electric cooperatives we have our members our members are everything like I talked earlier then comes the board of directors representing the member and then they hire a person like me the CEO to make sure that I fulfill the mission that the board has set out and of course we have the phenomenal employees that we have that do the work for us every day and we do have a few employees here today too so the employees of Cas County Electric please raise your hand again I have great support for from our employee group and can't be more happy with what they do every day so the role of the board is you know governments governance versus management so the governance is really a stop establishing broad goals establish policy we have a lot of policies at at Cas County Electric that are reviewed periodically to make sure they're the right policy for the time we set limits budgets and rules and hires the CEO so I I'm retiring next week if you didn't know this and we have a gentleman in the room who's took over for me and his name is Paul Mathis so Paul Mathis raise your hand he will be the new CEO of Cas County Electric next week in the management we act as within policy limits to achieve the goals set out by the board and report back results at the end of the year so the role of the board looks a lot at financials very important role at the board we spent a lot of time talking about financials in the boardroom from budgets to rate services to loans compensation plans construction work plans that to know we spent a lot of money in construction work plans I'll talk about that a little bit we borrow a lot of money from the federal government to put that plant we call it in the ground or overhead we do financial and IT audits to make sure we're doing the right thing from both financial and information technology perspectives we have a lot of memberships and other organizations to support our industry and of course capital credits we set capital credit policies and fulfill those policies so what are capital credits you know in our industry I don't know if everyone here uses capital credits but the electric cooperative world does so you know when you look at our excess revenues or margins from the previous year are allocated to our members based on their portion of the revenue our margins at the end of the year so for example if we had a million dollars in margin and a member had a thousand dollars bill for the year their percent of that would be a million divided into a thousand would be their percent of that margin in the future when it's paid out so we're about 20 years out and paying out capital credits right now you know that's pretty typical for electric cooperatives some are higher but 20 25 years is pretty typical in 2023 we we paid out a record amount of capital credits to our membership four million dollars and 2023 and 2024 to 3.5 million so we kind of base it based on the amount of money we have left over maybe at the end of the year is the right way to phrase that versus how much we pay out and but it is a high priority our board has looked at this and I have to as this is a really important part of being a cooperative member to make sure we pay capital credits and we do we've done a great job increasing that amount over the years and of course getting that capital credit check as a benefit as a member owner so when I looked at my bill last month it was negative fifty five dollars meaning back in 2001 or two I had a pretty high electric bill evidently for that year so I didn't have to pay much I didn't pay anything this last month so the role of the word again is is the CEO is the sole responsibility so really if there's an issue with any employee or any issue at the cast the board goes to the CEO not so much with the employees and I think that's the way it should be they do need clear directions though so when I get a direction from board I need to know exactly what they want I don't you know and they've done that our board is fantastic about about making sure that I understand exactly what they're after so my role as the CEO then looking at the business plan for the cooperative is to make sure we fulfill that and so we look at a mission vision and values really for the cooperative our mission statement if you if you say it would be our members energy needs to serve our members energy needs with affordable and reliable reliable electricity that is something we do every day and I think we do a fantastic job with that in our world we also want to be a leader so when we look at what we want to be a leader in we want to be a leader in safety we want to be a leader in service reliability data security financial management employee engagement that's what drives our cooperative and we I think and that's what I think about every day when when I go to work to make sure we're doing just those things we have core values of safety accountability integrity commitment to community and innovation and though these two also drive us as a concern for community as a cooperative so affordability for objectives you know we as talked about earlier we want to make sure we are being prudent fair and responsible with our members money it's really really number one for us embrace and continue can use for continuous process improvement utilize technology we have a lot of technology at our cooperative that has really improved the efficiency if you look at our cooperative 20 years ago we had about 20,000 accounts and we had about I don't 98 employees something like that today we have 58,000 accounts and we have 94ish employees somewhere in there so we actually have less employees and we did 20 years ago but we have implemented numerous technologies that have allowed us allowed us to be more efficient we always want to sell more kilowatt hours too so we're trying to look at new ways to do that we've invested a lot in the economic development I've served on the greater far more more economic development board for the last 10 years to make sure that the city of Fargo and the rest of our communities continue to grow and we have done that we grow on average about 1600 accounts a year which is really high compared to the average crop cooperative cross a nation and promoting electric electrification so we're seeing things like electric vehicles we're seeing more data centers going in there's lots of electric loads and even probably more heating in the future I mean heating was quite prevalent for us historically but our rates have gone up a little bit so there are we're probably not as competitive but it's kind of a national movement to use more electricity for various things like that we also try to control our costs to make sure we're operating efficiency if control or our operating costs or controllable expenses might be better termed to use and I'll show you what we talk about our distribution at her and how we compare with our peers and this is something that's got Andy put together a long time ago and we continue to monitor this all the time to make sure we're doing the right things and operating efficiencies efficiently I'll show you what I mean by that here next night my next slide so this is what we call our distribution at her so if you look at you know our our distribution at her which is really our fixed costs and operating costs divided by our kilowatt hour sales and that comes up to be about two point two one cents per kilowatt hour for 2023 and if you look at the past 20 years it's been flat and you wonder how can a company you know just with inflation not have their costs go up you know the reason we can do that is because we're growing most co-ops don't grow the way we do and we saw therefore we've been able to keep that flat along with numerous investments in technology and to be as efficient as we can but what's interesting with this graph is the line on the red line on the graph are cooperatives our size across the country so either they're doing something wrong or we're really doing something right their average distribution at her was three point eight cents or 38 mills and ours ours was 23 what does that mean annually for our member owners a savings of over 21 million dollars annually just by operating the cooperative is efficient as we can that's a really cool slide next is reliability so we want to make sure not only our members can afford to pay their bill we want to make sure that it's on as much as can be we have a goal to be on 99.99% of the time that's a pretty aggressive goal but we we have done that historically in fact we for the last five years I think we've been the top number one in the nation twice and second a couple times and of course this year I'll talk about that but December 24th we were on track to have the best reliability year on record of Cass County Electric and then mother nature threw us an ice bomb and caused a lot of problems and I'll talk a little bit more more about that towards the end of my presentation here today but what what factors really influence reliability you know and that goes down to our distribution design so we have our own in-house engineering and one of the gentlemen actually is an NDSU graduate Troy Troy Knudson and Jody Bullinger are in charge of our engineering they just do a fantastic job designing our system to make sure that it's resilient we invest in technology when we invest a lot in maintenance from tree trimming to plant or underground lines replacement to whatever is needed to make sure that our system is as resilient as it can be and we have a lot of committed employees so when we do have an outage they work as hard as they can and do a great job restoring restoring power so those those factors really influence reliability finance you know that that's we borrow a lot of money every year so securing financing for building maintaining and replacing our system is really important we have ongoing financial monitors and accounting functions in place and whatever money we do have or we draw from our finite financial sources we reinvest until we need to use it and that's that's been a model we've worked on for four years so where do we get our money from you know so we're not the average borrower we actually borrow through the federal government so we get the majority of our financing through our us which is through the USDA and they provide us a very fair rate for financing our cooperative business model we also have borrowed through the national role utilities cooperative finance corporation and co-bank for farm credit leasing you know so there's several financial partners we use to make sure we can operate as low-cost as we possibly can from an operations perspective I said earlier we added about 1600 accounts per year that takes a lot of investment in new utility plant we added about 16 to 20 million dollars depending on on the year of new infrastructure to feed some of these growth areas and Fargo West Fargo Horus and replacing infrastructure in our rural areas a very important part of our operations team is our linemen are our linemen you know they they're the folks that have to go out when the weather is bad they're the other folks that make sure that when there is an outage that it's put on as put back as quick as we can but to assist them we also have a 24-7 power control center where one of the few cooperators is in this region that actually has someone there 24-7 making sure that our system is operating as good as it can be from an engineering perspective again you know we've designed a monitor system for reliability we use what's called a SCADA system that's super supervisory control and data acquisition this is a way for us to monitor each substation to make sure all of our feeders have power what the voltage levels are what the current levels are we have a it's kind of a heartbeat or a pulse beat of our entire infrastructure by having a SCADA system out there we're in the process of adding to that which it's a system called flizzor and that will allow us to incorporate a somewhat self-healing network you might say so if there is an outage in the metro this flizzor system can actually isolate that outage and backfeed power to customers without alignment even going out there to touch it so it can reduce the outage we still have the outage that we have to go fix but instead of maybe 2,000 people out of power maybe there's only 200 so it's really a neat technology we're just starting to invest in and that's going to only improve our reliability numbers going forward in the future we also do the normal things that other businesses do as we market you know so we have selling core services you know like I said earlier where electric heating was big but water heating is also a big load for us and we continue to promote the use of electric water heaters we assist members with energy efficiency and conservation advice communication I'll talk about that in a little bit when I talk about the ice storm but we still have to portray a positive image to the public and we do a great job with our social media Jocelyn is here from our communications team that manages that it's really important to make sure that we're using all the channels we can to get our message out to our membership in the general public legislative communications you know part of my role over the past eight years is involved with public outreach and that means legislative visits with both national and local legislators to make sure that they support issues that important to electric cooperatives so that's one of the big things that I've done over the past eight years as well information security you know that is something that is more prevalent today than it's ever been and we take this extremely serious at Cass County Electric we have our vice president of information security Tim and Tim is here right yes yes we we we just it's just so important the last thing you ever want to do is get compromised and I know you all know this but this it's it's top of mind and we're doing a lot of the right things there human resources that as all businesses are struggling with right now they're struggling to find people and talent and train them develop them and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit but Teresa's here from our human resources team as well so I'm gonna talk a little bit about more directed at the students so when you look at it at the cooperative industry you know we're just not linemen we're every facet of a business and when you think about cooperatives it's a pretty good place to work you know it not just electric but all cooperatives in general and you look at our business we have accounting and finance we have engineering we have business administration marketing communications human resources information security they're all up there you know we we we have all those people we have a lot of specialty electric electrical technology employees that are at our cooperative that probably don't have four-year degrees but very specialized electrical technology degrees so quite a variety you know customer service when somebody calls up they need a warm body to talk to and they get that so anyway there's just a lot a lot of opportunities in the cooperative world for students to take advantage of because it's a it's a great place to work why because it's we have business stability we are not a so much in competition we're kind of a monopoly we we don't work that way but we are so that what that provides business stability and you know we not that we don't look at performance but it is something that's really important excellent paying benefits we're member focus men member centric maybe is another term we have a culture to serve you know I think that's in a lot of people like that I would say we're family oriented I think I've been here for 38 years and I I think I'm getting divorced for my family next week is kind of what it is for because it is you know you're when you work at a place for that long it's just part of your family and I think the training and development opportunities are incredible you know that our industry has to offer for for employees is just fantastic and we think it's an excellent work environment too so anyway that's my sales pitch friends that I could do that so shifting gears a little bit so in our industry we have there's some challenges out there and if you look at you know what what's what's coming up for both probably more men coat a little bit but cast to his public policy plays a huge role it has forever in our industry but what's it going to mean in the future you know what happens to these carbon rules that are out there where we're still burning coal what do we do you know to replace that with something different there's rules coming out potentially on co2 or regional haze you know things like that you you probably don't even know about or ever to worry about but but we do because it's a very very expensive change to do something like that I'm not going to get into a lot of power supply stuff today but there are some things on in the future that we are working on and concerned about grid security you know is there's a lot more threats to the grid today than there ever has been and to harden that and prevent that is is really difficult but it's something we do definitely to keep in mind the other thing with power supply is that as power supply continues to change meaning going away from our base load resources to more intermittent sources is there concerns that we may not have have enough power availability during peak conditions so for example if it's extremely cold out across the central part of the United States you might remember a Texas event back in 2001 when there was really no wind and it was colder than you know you know what cold the weather we get North Dakota all the way to Texas it was really really really close that day to having a blackout a major USA blackout it was with within seconds of that happening and that was because of the power supply that we have today isn't as resilient maybe as we need it to be and we're concerned about the future if as we continue to close more base load power plants specifically coal and natural gas and even nuclear the intermittent sources just aren't always there and those are things that leaders like Mac and others are going to have to figure out to make sure that we can keep our lights on but anyway I just want to make sure this is a this is a concern for our industry and of course physical and cybersecurity that that's a that's a that's continued concern talked about this a little bit but even competing remaining competitive so if we're gonna have to switch sources say we go away from our legacy resource of coal go to something else what does that mean for rates so if we have to reinvest in a power system to replace coal even if it's natural gas it's very expensive you know so it rates could potentially I don't think double but it they could go up significantly by having to go away or reinvest in something else it's not millions it's probably over a billion dollars to get to a new system for the the supply that's needed to supply mancoat a system in the future so huge challenges there and we don't know how long we can continue to use resources so we're looking at one option to add to the Milton our young station would be to look at putting in carbon capture that would potentially allow that system to run maybe another 20 years that would and that would capture and sequester CO2 that would be stored in the ground that's one option that's being looked at to in the future and I think we will see probably more wind and more solar and really what is what if batteries where they gonna go they're not they're not ready yet they're right they're expensive their short-term storage someday if we have battery technology that can store energy for a long periods of time I'm talking days and if it's affordable to build it and it's reliable to last for decades it could be a game changer we're just not even close to being there yet so we need some time for that to evolve some of the other concerns maybe we have our growth related issues you know some of these massive data centers take up huge amounts of power you may have heard of some stories out in Western North Dakota where they're having to add transmission or generation just to feed some of these new data centers so that's kind of a concern to Bitcoin mining is not so much a data center but that that we have one pretty large or a couple large Bitcoin mining loads up in Grand Forks right now but who knows where they'll go and electric vehicles are kind of the unknown too I think they're gonna probably deploy deploy slower in our region compared to other parts of the country and I will see evolution on battery technology that will even improve electric vehicles as well and just electric electrification of the economy is something we're keeping keeping keeping an eye on so some of the positives most people in the United States have electricity around the world that is not the case there's billions of people in the world that still do not have electricity so we're very fortunate in the US we're very competitive you know I think that that will hopefully stay that way for quite a while we feel we do a great job as as providing great service to our members and really look at them as a customer member in a friendly manner and we've not are making huge strides we have made huge strides in technology we are way ahead of the game when it comes to comparing our technology level today compared to the investor own utilities in this region we've had automated meter reading for the past eight years and a lot of these local investor own utilities are just putting that in so we're probably eight years ahead of the game in some cases January 24th was you know Christmas Eve in 20 the 25th the ice storm began and I looked out the window and it's in raining and I looked at our how did viewers like you know this just isn't good if it's raining and it's 28 degrees outside and the ice kept building and building and building and building and building and pretty soon we noticed more outages more outages and as you can see in this picture this is what the ice ended up doing it was probably two three inches thick on the power lines that's not a good day when something like that happens the timing could have been worse on Christmas day when it started you know a lot of employees were home on vacation but that doesn't mean they didn't come in that day that day we had 28 of our 29 linemen available to come in and start helping the problem with this outages it didn't last it wasn't a day when everything went down it lasted about three days before the lines kept falling down and that was really a huge challenge they put some up drive away and more would fall down in the same area it was really a huge challenge we lost power to many of our rural substations because Minn Kota powers main transmission lines actually went down that feeds a lot of our rural substation so they had to get those back up and running before we could re-energize our substations in the end we had about 1200 poles that went down which was the second worst storm in the history of our cooperative in 1997 we had 2200 poles go down during the blizzard ice storm and flood that we had in 1997 this is what our outage map looked like that day which this was actually I think the 25th but not good when you see something like this this doesn't mean like in those red red circles there that's hundreds of people out of power this particular graph is probably close to 6,000 people out of power and that's more when Minn Kota had their major transmission line outages as well we probably without Minn Kota's outages we probably had over 2,000 out of power so how do we deal with something like this you know this goes back to being prepared you know this isn't necessarily something you want to be good at because that means that happens a lot but I think in general we handled it quite well you know I think obviously those that have to go out and fix this understand that that's their job that's what they go to work for that's where the hero and then comes out to put these lines back up but it takes a lot more than that it takes we actually have a planning session set up where we establish an incident command center you know to make sure we have somebody in charge and that was Jody Bollinger did a phenomenal job we need public information officers so we needed to make sure that we got information out to the public and I'll talk a little bit more about that we had operations chief to coordinate the restoration efforts we had scout teams that had to go out we'd go scout or drive these lines we have 2,800 miles a line we have to drive every 2,800 but yet we drove them one day and three poles are on market send it into our control center well two days later 10 more poles went down you'd drive it again some of these times we did drive these poles are matter these roads three times to assess the damage that took a lot of time to do that and then you have to have to obtain inventory we don't have 1200 poles in our in our pole yard you know or do we have the cross arms or do we have the splices or the wire whatever takes to put the power line back up we had to obtain all that material and that that just doesn't happen overnight and then if you bring in help where you gonna put them and feed them you know so the coordination coordination efforts were amazing and then if you know in a situation like this you we can actually get reimbursement through FEMA so we got to make sure we track everything correctly to make sure in the end we can apply for FEMA funds to get some reimbursement so there's a lot of that goes on behind the scenes versus just putting up the power lines we actually brought in mutual aid from 15 cooperatives in North Dakota Minnesota and South Dakota we had 103 linemen in addition to our own helping to restore power we did over 20 radio and TV interviews and that was both both Paul Mathis and myself were out there trying to get the word out of hey this is not your normal event you're gonna be out for days in a lot of cases somewhere out the longest duration was 10.6 days imagine being out of power for 10.6 days in the rural area they understand that more but in town if that would have happened in Fargo I think we would have it would not have been good in the and I just want to say again the employees just really really shine through this whole process and we're extremely grateful to the help of our neighboring electric cooperatives I talk about cooperation among cooperatives as a core value or of cooperatives these are the cooperatives that helped us out just did a phenomenal job from Sioux Falls South Dakota to Crow Wing to cooperatives in our neighboring area the challenge is is we weren't the only one that had problems so Dakota Valley South of us West of us was Northern Plains and Nodak Electric had some problems so there was a lot of regional problems with outages in addition to our area so in conclusion you know electric cooperatives have a long and successful history of developing rural America and I think that's something we'll never forget cooperative business model is working and has many advantages in utility environment and really I think the only model it should be used for delivering electricity I think it works great future power supply like I talked earlier is is a concern and for you students again we have a lot of career opportunities for you to consider in the cooperative world and that is the end of my presentation are there any questions that anybody in the audience has that I could try to answer for you questions from our great this question probably comes in my perspective is more on the ag side so I think I like the food versus people debate with corn usage going to ethanol so I mean going in renewable diesel what do you guys see in on the electric side you mentioned Bitcoin you mentioned these data centers especially with AI you know kind of that question of these these things of the future one can make an argument of do you need Bitcoin but we need electricity for our homes right so I'm just kind of curious what you guys are seeing on the electricity side around that kind of debate well like I said earlier the power needs for even Bitcoin mining you know it's really Minn Kota's job to make sure that they if we have a customer come to us that says I want to put a plant here to do X that we can supply it we've denied plants because they just are too big so we do take that all into consideration that the thing about our transmission network in this region is it's nearing capacity so if we have a huge load that would come on we'd have to add more transmission and there's a transmission study is the right word but through my so the midcontinent independent system operator they're looking at the needs for transmission in the future to supply to this region to make sure that we can not only bring power here but really we need to get power out of here North Dakota is long on producing electricity and we need to make sure there's transmission available not only add power to new loads but if we produce electricity through wind or solar or whatever it is that we can ship it to other parts of the country but it's a great question when it comes to we can't prioritize you know we don't we can't say no we're just going to serve the residential business and not serve the data center we would make the decision not to serve the data center because it's it would be too large for us to serve with our current resources as if that helps with that can you give us an idea of what the power power draw you're talking about yeah that's a that's a good question so our current system load for 58,000 accounts is about 250 megawatts roughly we have one Bitcoin mining load that's over a hundred megawatts we don't mean Kota does one so yeah I mean if we had five of those we couldn't probably serve it we I know we couldn't serve so that's absolutely something where we look at and the draw from AI the AI computers are very similar the amount of power draw coming off these are just astronomical and one of the reasons that this region is attractive to some of those folks is because we are cold they generate a tremendous amount of heat we got a built-in de-free at least for most of you open up the door to run the fans then you can cool your computers right versus if you're in Atlanta or if you're in Texas it's a completely different perspective and try how do you keep those things cold I was at a conference recently and I don't quote me on this but I believe the gentleman said for AI data centers in the future I think we're currently at about 15 gigawatts of required capacity and that is expected to go to 45 in 10 years so to frames gigawatts to frames point a huge amount of electricity but yet we're reducing them on a base load that we have in the future that's that's the concern we get a sense of perspective so we have a really large data farm at 500 megawatts so Marshall talked about we have 35,000 square miles international falls to double wake from the Canadian border to roughly the South Dakota border right so that imagine that footprint our people load on a cold day is 1,100 megawatts a data center is five so building about you know 50 feet by 500 feet uses half of the energy we use in that entire region I'll give you a sense of perspective yeah right so it's a gigantic amount and they're continuing to grow and as we all take our phones and take pictures and every piece of data gets captured somewhere in the world and people continue to use that a phenomenal amount of energy that gets utilized so it'll be interesting as we your question about how do we serve all of this as it continues to continue to grow you know because with with some of the labor challenges we're currently facing as well we continue to face we're going to lean really hard on technology and in particular AI and help us out with that and so this I mean we know it's coming it's a matter of pace it's a matter of scales how do we prepare for these are huge huge challenges glad to carry I know other questions from Marshall I'm sorry other questions from Marshall so I got I got one so what would you consider to be the highlighted career what is it that you're most proud of of the time that you spent within California and California Electric and the electrical industry well I I think there's probably a few but I think there's I'll say probably two you know I think if you look historically back in the 90s specifically and probably early 2000s is at the time our our goal in life was to sell electricity and that was my job and we did because we had a tremendous program to sell electric heat and in that amount of time in about 15 years we put about 2,700 heating systems in apartments and homes in the Fargo West Fargo area the second thing I think is being able to lead an incredible organization like Cass County Electric as as the CEO you know and to to work with a team of employees and and staff that is just incredible and to watch the employees just do phenomenal work you know what else can you ask for right in the end I think you know we look at our we our mission as a cooperative and what we set out to do and what we accomplished it's exactly what we wanted to do so that's I'm very proud of that anything any other questions thank you very much Marshall we appreciate you