Believe in You

Have you ever had someone fully believe in you?

Most of us can answer that question with mom or dad. Maybe a grandparent. I’m asking about outside of your family — a teacher, a coach, or someone you work with. I have been blessed to have several people outside my family believe in me.

Do you know how I know Douglas Green believed in me? He told me.

He also told me he loved me. I think it’s rare for men to express their feelings and to encourage others. That did not stop Mr. Green.

On June 10, 2025, I lost my true believer, and cooperative members lost a true advocate. Mr. Green served South Alabama Electric Cooperative for 41 years, never losing focus on who he was there to serve — the members.

At the beginning of the 32 years I knew Mr. Green, I wasn’t sure how to take him because he was always picking on me. Even after I became the general manager, he would tell wild stories about me at employee functions for all to hear. By then, I knew if Mr. Green picked on you, he liked you. Every time he saw my wife, Nelda, he joked about what a good job she did writing my monthly articles. She would respond and say, “No, he writes them.” He would reply, “You don’t have to cover for him.”

Mr. Green was a special person. He was a special leader with a talent to apply common sense to leading young people and a large corporation like South Alabama.

Mr. Green, an educator and principal at Zion Chapel School, had a wonderful approach to giving young people a second chance. If a student got in trouble, he would write the child’s offenses on a piece of paper. He told these students if they never returned to his office for a disciplinary matter, he would not tell their parents and would destroy their files after they’d finished school.

If the student kept their promise, Mr. Green kept his promise.

Mr. Green applied that common-sense approach in the boardroom. I saw him take complex issues and bring management and other trustees to a simple solution that was always fair to the cooperative and its members.

As much as I admired Mr. Green’s problem-solving and leadership abilities, what I regarded in him most was his faith. The trials Mr. Green faced could only be supported by a strong faith in God. Mr. Green was married 3 times. Each one of his wives preceded him in death. He was blessed with 2 children, Larry and Karen. Mr. Green buried his only daughter and watched his son battle cancer. These challenges are not easy to navigate even with strong faith, but Mr. Green leaned on his faith in Jesus Christ hard and was able to show how Jesus Christ carries you during your worst trials. When Mr. Green prayed, it was like he was having a conversation with Jesus.

Today, I know he is having a face-to-face conversation with his Lord. I say that not to comfort his family, friends, or myself. I make that statement because his presence with the Lord is a fact.

It’s difficult to move forward without a man who truly believed in me. But, as I learned from him, I will lean on my faith to get me through losing Norman Douglas Green.

As I looked down at Mr. Green at his funeral, he cracked me up one last time. In our South Alabama Electric headquarters building, you need a security badge to enter the office. Mr. Green often lost or forgot his security badge. But as I looked down at him, he was wearing his South Alabama Electric Cooperative security badge, and I just smiled. He no longer needs that security badge because he already had his heavenly security badge laminated years ago.

I will see you later, Mr. Green. Thank you for being a true believer in me.

Who Is Guiding Your Plan?

At my church, we recently completed a long study of the Book of Genesis. For the unfamiliar, the summary is that God had a plan when he formed the universe and Earth from nothing. The sin of man did not shock God because he knows everything, so he had a plan to save us.

That is why he formed the Israelite people with his promise to Abraham. God took the evil from Joseph’s brothers and used it for good, helping him save millions of people from starvation, including the Israelites. You could say that God used Joseph to save the world. But he certainly used him to save his people, so the Messiah could later save the world from man’s sin.

The Israelites would go on to spend centuries in Egypt as slaves, but God had a plan for them, too. That is not until the book of Exodus, though, which could be our next study.

This July, the United States will celebrate 249 years as a country. Like in Genesis, God had a plan at the beginning of this governing experiment. When you study a detailed history of our country, there are many times events could have gone another direction in the blink of an eye, and the experiment would have died.

For example, early in the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington moved most of the Continental Army to Long Island to defend Brooklyn. The British attacked on 3 fronts, catching Washington’s army off guard and outnumbering. Only a series of fortunate events saved the Americans.

Their only hope was to retreat across the river to Manhattan. British ships set sail to cut off that retreat, but there was not enough wind for them to make it. That gave Washington the night to secretly get 9,000 men to safety.

But as the sun rose, much of the Continental Army, including Washington, remained in Brooklyn. That is when God smiled on the Americans a second time. A heavy fog settled over the area, giving Washington and the remaining army the cover they needed to cross safely. Without a lack of wind and some heavy fog, there may never have been a United States of America.

If you believe, like I do, that God has a plan for everyone and everything, that plan was also evident when President Franklin D. Roosevelt formed the Rural Electrification Administration with an executive order in 1935. The next year, God had a plan to fund the REA and change rural communities in the U.S. forever.

At your cooperative, it is our responsibility to seek God’s plan to provide reliable and affordable electricity to our members. This responsibility includes creating an annual projection of the co-op’s load over the next 10 years that is updated and approved by the board of trustees.

This load forecast is then delivered to PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, our generation and transmission co-op, so it can plan to supply each of its member cooperatives with the energy they need. This ensures that when you flip a light switch or turn on the AC, your electricity is working.

We also develop a 4-year construction work plan to address forecast needs and use engineering data to upgrade possible problem areas on our system. By doing so, we can build the proper electric infrastructure to provide for members without overbuilding.

Why is this important? Because an electric utility has only 1 way to generate cash — through electric rates. If we do not plan and build properly, rates may have to increase to pay for this over-build. That is why we take our planning process very seriously.

1 thing we cannot plan for is criminals stealing copper wire from distribution lines. This thievery has cost our membership hundreds of thousands of dollars and can also lead to rates going up.

The management and board at South Alabama Electric Cooperative take this very seriously. We have developed a process with our local county sheriff’s department to apprehend these criminals and address the companies purchasing stolen property. If you see something, please report it to your local sheriff’s department. You could say this is part of our planning, too, but it is not how I would like our resources to be used.

Finally, ask yourself who is guiding your plan? As we celebrate our great country’s birthday, my hope is that our country and each person in it is following God’s plan. Have a happy July Fourth because many men and women have given their lives for our freedom.

Planning for the Roadblocks

Those who have read my columns know I like to look back at history and apply those lessons to our current events. On June 6, 1944, the greatest invasion in military history was the Allied land, air, and sea operation against the German forces on the Normandy coast of France.

The United States was, by far, the largest equipment supplier for this invasion. The force consisted of some 6,000 ships, 50,000 land vehicles, and 11,000 planes. The planning to prepare for it was far-reaching, and what I wish to focus on. The U.S. officially entered the war in December 1941. In just 2 years and 5 months, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fundamentally changed our economy. But I think luck might have played into those history-changing events.

President Roosevelt founded the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935 with an executive order. Later funded by Congress in 1936, the REA’s main source of electrical power was hydro, with dams making up 94% of the power supply. In creating the REA, I believe Roosevelt knew the U.S. had to expand its electrical generation sources, hence the completion of the Hoover Dam in 1936 and the Grand Coulee Dam in 1942.

The first roadblock to these plans for electrical growth in a “normal” economy was the Great Depression in 1929, which cost President Herbert Hoover his job. But as incoming president, Roosevelt had the foresight to carry on the existing hydro projects and add more.

The second major roadblock was the start of World War II. The excess electrical demand capacity built in the worst economic times was plain luck. The U.S. economy flipped from below normal standards to a full-scale war effort. Increasing the manufacturing capacity to supply the massive amounts of war equipment required excess electrical power, which the U.S. fortunately had. And do not forget the women and men who worked in plants to construct that equipment. This process shows the character and can-do spirit that made America great.

Hydro lost its position as the top power source for this country in 1956. Natural gas won out over coal in 2001 and is still the top today. So, what is going to be the next top power source? If you think my answer is wind and solar, I would have to be standing downwind of a concert. I will go on record to say it will not be those because the challenges we face are real and not normal.

The roadblocks we are facing today are data centers, new manufacturing in the U.S., electric vehicles, and the political climate. In March, I discussed the possible electric demand shortage and our electric demand portfolio. Currently, our baseload and intermediate demand are adequate. But forecasting the need for peaking demand has led us to start planning and constructing a new 450-megawatt peaking generation facility at the Lowman Energy Center. We added 700 megawatts of baseload demand there to replace 480 megawatts of coal capacity.

As I have said before, we are not a big player in the electric industry. But we know that to you, the member-owner, we are huge because you rely on us for reliable and affordable electric power.

Historically, the average timeframe to add some type of demand generation plans has been 10 years. Today, that has dropped to about every 6 years. With that construction timeframe being shorter, we need more access to capital. We have that currently, and interest rates are reasonable for capital expansion compared to 1980, when they were in double digits. But long-term interest rates have increased from historic lows in the last 15 years.

While we still must apply the foresight of our country’s past leaders, we will have to navigate around these roadblocks to furnish you, the cooperative member, with quality and reliable service at reasonable rates.

In closing, I ask that we do not forget the greatest generation that made the ultimate sacrifice on June 6, 1944. If you have not seen it, I encourage you to look up the Normandy American Cemetery on YouTube. I have been blessed to see that site in person, where approximately 9,400 Americans rest. I also do not think the lucky events in this article were luck, but that God has always blessed the U.S. I pray that he always will.

The Leaning of 2 Trees

The older you get in life, the more you look back and reflect on the people who had a hand in shaping you as a person. I have always been blessed to have people like this at every stage of my life. But there is 1 in particular I want to discuss in this article — Mark Hill.

I met Mark about 35 years ago, when he was still a new data processing manager at South Alabama Electric Cooperative. I was working as a CPA at an accounting firm in Montgomery and was engaged to do a financial audit for the cooperative. That meant Mark and I had several meetings. To say he was energetic would be an understatement. If I had the pep of a koala bear, he was more like a cheetah.

1 day, our discussion ran on into midday, and we decided to get lunch. He offered to drive, and we hopped in his red Honda Prelude. By the time we got from the parking lot to Highway 231, we were already doing the speed limit. He drove through Troy traffic like a well-trained NASCAR driver. I thought, “Wow, this guy is very hungry.” But he drove the same way after lunch. As a new dad, I was just grateful to make it home safely to my wife and daughter

By 1999, I had been working for the co-op for 6 years, and Mark was promoted to office manager, a role that had us working closely together. So closely, in fact, that Mr. Max Davis, the general manager at the time, asked us to move to neighboring offices joined by a solid wood door.

Mr. Davis only had 1 condition. “Fellas,” he told us, “I don’t want to see this door open between these 2 offices. That’s what phones are for.” That was a problem since our jobs often required us to look at data on each other’s screens. So, we developed what we called “The Budweiser Hot Seat.”

If Mark needed to visit my office, he’d sit in the hot seat in front of the computer while I kept lookout through the cracked door. If I saw Mr. Davis coming, I would say his name, and Mark would spring out of the hot seat, back into his office, and ease the door shut.

We thought our plan was bulletproof, but looking back, I’m sure Mr. Davis knew. That door gave me another insight into Mark’s character, though. I would often hear members come into his office extremely upset about a high bill and leave so calm that they offered him a mess of peas as thanks. It was an offer Mark never took them up on since he doesn’t eat garden food like peas.

I can honestly say I’ve never seen Mark get angry on the job. It’s a characteristic I try to emulate but fail almost daily. About a year ago, he walked into my office and said, “Big Guy, I need to talk to you.” He shared his plan to retire, and I couldn’t help thinking about the friend and mentor I would be losing, rather than what was best for him.

Over the last 30 years, we have been like 2 trees in the forest starting to fall at the same time. Leaning against each other, holding each other up. To be honest, I think my tree leaned more on his than the other way around. I’m going to miss his mentorship and his support, but most of all I will miss his daily friendship.

So, “Big Guy,” enjoy your retirement with your family. When I need someone to lean on, I’ll just have to go to the golf course or chase you down at the beach to lean on you again. Happy retirement to my friend, Mark Hill.

Out in the Storm

What do you do when a major storm comes around? Most of us take cover at home. We make sure the doors and windows are shut tight, the refrigerator is full and we hunker down in a safe place with our loved ones.

But imagine if you couldn’t do that. Imagine your job was to respond to that storm — that every time the wind howls and the rain comes pouring down you had to leave your family and go out into the storm that everyone else is avoiding.

That’s what we ask of our linemen on a regular basis. It might be responding to a storm that strikes late at night or repairing a major outage early in the morning. Our linemen are called to help at all hours of the day, and you’d be hard-pressed to find one who’d ever complain about it.

That’s why, across the country, utilities recognize National Lineman Appreciation Day on April 18. It’s an opportunity to thank them for all the hard work they do, and not just on stormy nights. The truth is that our linemen work just as hard day in and day out to make repairs to aging power poles and damaged equipment, and build new power lines

While they may not face the cold and rain daily, the job still presents many dangers to anyone who isn’t properly trained and fully focused. That’s why South Alabama Electric Cooperative (SAEC) always puts the safety of our linemen first, making sure they have the equipment and training needed to do the job right. Safety is our top priority, and we want to ensure that every 1 of our linemen and employees goes home at the end of the day just as fit and healthy as when they came to work.

But our linemen don’t stop at serving their own neighbors. 1 of our core principles is helping other cooperatives in their times of need, knowing that 1 day we may be the ones who need a hand. As a result, even when a hurricane or major storm spares our system, it isn’t unusual for our crews to roll out to other cooperatives, ready to work long hours to restore power for those members.

Just last year, SAEC sent several crews to Georgia to help restore power after the devastating impact of Hurricane Helene. When they went into the field, some were greeted by local members lining the roads with signs and cheering them on, almost like fans cheering for their team before a big game.

Unfortunately, our linemen aren’t always welcomed so warmly. At times, members who have been waiting a long time for power to be restored can be unhappy when help arrives, and our linemen take the brunt of that displeasure, too.

If you’d like to learn more about what it’s like to be an SAEC lineman, you can also find some reflections from a few of our longest-serving linemen in this issue. Tony Greer, Blane Senn, and Darrell Foster have watched the job change and learned valuable lessons over the course of their careers, so don’t miss out on their decades of experience.

This month, as we put a spotlight on the people who work hard on every line in our system, I’d like to ask all of our members to take a moment to say thank you to any linemen they know. It is a rewarding and satisfying job, but it can also be a challenging and dangerous one. If you see 1 of our linemen out in the community, take a minute to let them know just how much you appreciate all the hard work they put in.

Marching Toward Change

March is only the end of the first quarter of the year, but what a year we have experienced already. In the first season of Alabama football without coach Nick Saban, the team didn’t even make the 12-team playoff. For the first time in 132 years, the United States has a nonconsecutive-term president. Can you name the only other 1?

Due to global warming, the state of Alabama also had over a foot of snow in some parts of South Alabama Electric Cooperative’s (SAEC) service area. Compound that with almost a week of hard freezing temperatures, and it all adds up to a third consecutive year when our co-op has set a demand peak record for our electrical system.

That kind of peak demand might be normal for places like Minnesota or Wisconsin, but this is Alabama. We relate more to the words of the great songwriter Hank Williams Jr. in his song, “Country State of Mind.” “That hot, old summer sun makes you beg for your next breath. So, you best be on the creek bank, laying in the shade, so the mosquitoes can eat you alive.” I added in that last part for old Bocephus.

Things are so off-kilter in Alabama that it appears our most successful sport is basketball. What the heck? I guess that’s due to global warming, too. On the topic of global warming, the January snowstorm answered a lot of prayers. No, I did not pray for snow. That prayer was from individuals not related to the electric industry. My answered prayer was our members experienced few outages, which meant your employees were not subject to hazardous road and work conditions. Another 1 of mine was that schools and large businesses were not open, so their demand was not fully reflected in our system peak. If schools and businesses had stayed open, that demand would have been even higher.

I’ve written about demand for the last several months now, which reminds me of my pastor, Lanny Shepard. Each Sunday he reviews what he has taught us over the past few weeks, drilling the word of God into our heads because so many of us forget the message by the time we get home and eat lunch.

I feel the same way when it comes to electrical demand shortages. So, to review, electric demand is the amount of electricity people on our system are using at any given moment. We have to build our generation plants to meet that demand requirement.

Our baseload generation is what meets those needs most of the time. Intermediate generation fills the void when our system exceeds its baseload but is usually more expensive to run. Then, there are generation plants for peak demand. These can be started up quickly and then shut down until the next demand event but are typically very costly to operate.

Currently, SAEC and its generation partner, PowerSouth, are in good shape to meet baseload demand. Our problem is that, according to demand forecasting models, we are short on resources for peak demand in the coming years. This demand problem isn’t limited to SAEC and PowerSouth but is 1 shared by the entire country. Maybe not in California. I’m not sure they care if people have power or not, but we do.

Across America, we are retiring baseload-generating plants 3 times faster than we are building and replacing them. The same goes for peaking plants. If you remember basic economics, you know that when demand outpaces supply, prices tend to increase.

On the utility side, the concern is that when electric demand outpaces generation, there could be rolling brownouts and blackouts as producers struggle to meet peak demand. That would be like the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and Troy University football teams all going 0-14 each year. It just can’t happen.

Our decision-making process for building generation plants has become riskier. But we don’t want our power plants to run out of generation capacity, the same way we don’t want our teams to stop winning games. Then all we can do is hope for global warming to keep us warm.

In closing, have you figured out the other president with nonconsecutive terms? It was Grover Cleveland in 1893. Until next month.

The Month of Love

Some months of the year carry their own identity. Just like November and December are often identified with Thanksgiving and Christmas, February is synonymous with Valentine’s Day and a time of love.

But here in Alabama, February is also the month that deer season ends, which reminded me of a story about 2 mature bucks locked in a fight. A farmer was walking over his land late 1 winter when he came across the bodies of 2 great bucks that had died with their huge antlers eternally locked. There was no way of knowing which buck had won the fight, but the farmer decided to mount the antlers and skulls in his home as a conversation piece.

He did this as an example to the youth in his community, whom he would often open his farm to as a way of helping them understand the importance of agriculture. When mature bucks with good antlers fight, he would explain, they run the risk of locking up with each other. Even if the winning buck kills his opponent, they could remain helplessly locked, spelling doom for the victor. Whether they win, lose, or draw, simply entering the fight increases the odds of death.

What’s the moral of this story? The way I look at it, if you choose to fight everything life throws at you, you spend all your time fighting and not living what God has planned for us. We don’t have to take on every fight that crosses our path because, like those 2 bucks, we often won’t even be able to tell who won.

We should all try to be wise in selecting our battles so that the outcomes do matter. In the electric cooperative world, many of the battles we are fighting are to maintain long-term reliability. Over the next 10 years, our country is at risk of energy shortfalls, with electric demand growing and baseload power plants being retired. This trend leads to a lot of reliability challenges.

But there’s a group of individuals who want to fight everything and are pushing for an electrification of our economy that is supplied only by renewable energy sources. Those sources will not meet our long-term reliability needs. And with more data centers being built that almost need their own power plants on-site, the demand problem is only getting worse.

Electric infrastructure is not being built fast enough to keep up with the projected demand. You may think it’s the American way to say, “Just build it,” but it isn’t that simple. In terms of electric utility, we are small. That goes for every electric cooperative in Alabama and our generation and transmission cooperative. The financial commitment to build the infrastructure we need is huge, so careful planning has to be done to provide our members with the long-term reliability you depend on.

Even once it’s built, what if the group I mentioned before starts attacking the new baseload power plants and demanding their closure? They have a proven track record. We have to educate our members about the truth of the electric industry. It must be taught at home, at work and at school. As a cooperative, we also must do a better job communicating with you.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association has brought this issue to the incoming administration and has highlighted the need for smart energy policies. The president appears to be open to supporting policies that promote energy generation and infrastructure that are critical to our rural communities, but also to the entire country. We have to get this reliability train on the tracks quickly because 10 years of planning and building in the electric industry is like the blink of an eye.

In this world, where there is so much fighting, we all have to wisely and prayerfully pick our battles, even if we love the issues we’re fighting for. Love is what called those 2 great bucks to fight and what led them to their demise. With both of those bucks out of the picture, I bet there was a wise little six-pointer that slipped in and found the love they were fighting for. Until next month.

Each day, my path to work takes me by the many new homes being constructed on our system. They’re built quickly, and they serve a basic need for our members. It also got me thinking about the old days when an elderly woman in the community would babysit me and my older brother.

Her house didn’t look anything like these new ones. It was an old wooden-sided house, unpainted inside and out. It had no running water and no plumbing. It did have electricity but no wall plugs just lights wired to the ceiling with pull strings to turn them on and off. If you think you have a hard time finding a light switch in the dark, imagine searching in an open, dark room for a string hanging from the ceiling.

The main room had a fireplace for heat and a wood stove for cooking. There was no TV, but she knew the art of making quilts, not so much for the craft but for the sorely needed added warmth. Her home’s exterior was upgraded with asphalt shingles that looked like bricks, which I’m sure helped greatly reduce the wind passing through the single panel of wood.

As I look at these new houses, I wonder if they are properly insulated. Over the past few years with the inflation crisis, the cost of electrical materials to build lines and run service to members’ homes has greatly increased. In many cases, material costs have increased 3 to 4 times compared to 5 years ago. In some instances, it can be as much as 5 times more expensive. That means the cost of electricity, much like other costs, is likely to continue rising slightly.

Taking care to properly insulate your new home can go a long way toward mitigating that cost for your household. For many couples, building a new home is a lifetime purchase. They want everything to match their dreams, but the budget doesn’t always allow for that. When it comes to making cuts, often the first items people choose are to less visible areas like insulation.

While everyone wants a beautiful home, quality insulation is the wrong thing to cut. It may be possible to redo it years later, but it will be a costly upgrade. Popular features like granite countertops or high-end cabinets, on the other hand, can easily be upgraded later when your income may be better suited to make those investments.

In this month’s magazine, we’re excited to include an article that touches on the various types of home insulation. By investing in effective insulation like spray foam, you can not only cut down on the noise in your house but also save on your heating and cooling costs for years to come.

A home is not unlike a person. What makes a person is not their outward appearance, it’s who they are inside. They are defined by what I like to call their character. Your home is the same way. The foundation of a home is key, just like the foundation of a person. If you’re fortunate enough to build a new home, establish that strong foundation by prioritizing energy-efficient insulation and HVAC systems. They will pay for themselves a lot quicker than granite countertops.

I hope all of our members enjoy the first month of this new year. For those of you building a home, enjoy the process. Sometimes, all you get is one shot to do it right. Start your year off right and stay warm. Until next month.

Let’s Go!

Let’s face it, December is mostly about kids and Christmas. For Christians, it’s a time to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on Dec. 25. But it is also a great month to reflect on everything that has happened over the last year, both good and bad. So as the great quarterback Tom Brady would yell at the beginning of every football game, “Let’s go!”

Back in 2014, South Alabama Electric Cooperative (SAEC) set what was then an all-time peak demand of 94 megawatts. That all-time peak demand was shattered in 2023 and again this year by 17%, reaching 110 megawatts in back-to-back years. To put it in perspective, that level of demand was not forecasted for our system until 2043.

So, what does that mean for our members? Well, reliability will suffer if demand exceeds the capacity our system is designed to provide during abnormal weather. As your electric cooperative, we don’t want this to happen and will address the issue as part of our current four-year plan next year.

The board of trustees first started acting on that plan in February, approving work on your distribution system that will take place over the next 4 years. The predicted budget for those projects is $32,484,000. So, as you can see, that construction is a serious investment and should not be entered into lightly.

As I’ve said many times, the only place a member-owned cooperative gets the money to cover these expenses is from the electric rates paid by our members. The challenge for your management team is to keep those rates stable and competitive while ensuring your service is still reliable.

I think our management team has done a wonderful job of meeting those goals. If you look at the largest electric utility in the state, Alabama Power Company, their average customer pays about $18 more each month than the average SAEC member. I am very thankful to our management team for keeping your rates stable and we will continue to stay on top of this process.

Economic development has always been another priority at SAEC, and in 2024 we were able to help Luverne hold on to a long-standing business in Crenshaw County: Pepsi Cola Bottling Co of Luverne, Inc. By taking advantage of the Growing Alabama Credit established in 2021, companies can receive a matching tax credit of up to 50% of their total income tax liability for investing in projects approved by the Renewal of Alabama Commission.

That’s exactly what SAEC and others did to help Pepsi Cola Bottling Company move to an expanded location in Luverne, rather than relocating to another city or state. For their contributions, I would also like to thank our partners: Central Alabama Electric Cooperative, Prattville; Dixie Electric Cooperative, Montgomery and Union Springs; Covington Electric Cooperative, Opp; and Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative, Talladega. First Citizens Bank, Petrey Wholesale, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Our community is also blessed to have a world-class educational institution at Troy University. And, powering it at the intersection of U.S. Highway 231 and George Wallace Drive sits the SAEC-Troy Substation, which has been there for over 70 years.

While no one likes to look at poles, wires, transformers, and substations, it is impossible to bury them all and still maintain reasonable and competitive rates. So SAEC teamed up with PowerSouth Energy Cooperative to build a beautiful fence around that aging substation that cleverly matches the new Troy University sign pointing the way to our hometown university.

I haven’t even mentioned SAEC’s new website, which I hope all of you will take a moment to visit soon. In the meantime, don’t forget the true meaning of Christmas as you celebrate with friends and family this season. We are so fortunate to live in a country that provides us with the freedom and financial ability to celebrate however we wish. Merry Christmas!