Nelle Hotchkiss, VP for Corporate Relations at North Carolina EMC.
Photo by Luis Gomez.

With renewable resources and energy efficiency increasingly important, a majority of co-ops in North Carolina have taken a unique step forward.

“The members decided that in order to effectively and efficiently provide these types of services to consumers, and develop a renewable market in North Carolina, we needed to do that as a cooperative,” said Nelle Hotchkiss, spokesperson for GreenCo Solutions, the non-profit company formed and owned by 23 of the state’s co-ops.

“We felt it was important to do it that way because, especially in the development stages of these markets, it’s going to be expensive to implement a lot of these programs,” Hotchkiss said. “If we don’t do it well, we might spend consumers’ money in ineffective ways.” However, she added, by working together, development costs can be shared while providing the best efficiencies to the consumer.

Co-ops worked with the state legislature on a renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolio standard that was enacted last year. It requires generation or purchase of specific amounts of renewable energy, or enactment of efficiency measures to cut electricity usage.

“But we would have done this anyway,” Hotchkiss said. “We are in a state that is very environmentally conscious. We have beautiful coasts. We have beautiful mountains. And our consumers in many cases were asking us for these types of services. And being cooperatives, we respond to our members.”

Hotchkiss said the immediate focus of GreenCo Solutions is developing energy efficiency programs and renewable demonstration projects, though she noted that the company was not conceived to actually develop renewables. “We want to help devise the market and assist third parties to develop it, because that’s what they do.”

Another benefit of GreenCo Solutions is having what Hotchkiss called “a consistent message across the state to our consumers. There’s a lot of information flying at consumers today on these issues. So we felt it was important to be cohesive as a unit.”

This article by Michael W. Kahn is reprinted with permission from Electric Co-op Today.