Dear Members,

It’s been two years since we have been able to meet face-to-face. We have missed not seeing our cooperative family at our Annual Meetings. In 2020 and 2021, we hosted virtual meetings online, and we greatly appreciate your participation at these events.

We are looking forward to Friday, June 17, at Southwestern Randolph High School, where we will host our in-person Annual Meeting. We will celebrate our 84th year of existence with a focus on how we are stronger together, a theme that underscores the very meaning of the word “cooperative.”

Community leaders in the fall of 1938 exhibited the cooperative spirit when they met at Mr. Zell Brown’s service station to discuss the need for power in rural areas. From that time until now, Randolph EMC has sought to fulfill our mission of providing safe, reliable and affordable energy for rural member-owners.

An EV charger outside the Robbins Randolph EMC office.

As an organization, two of our chief values are accountability and integrity. These values lead us to prepare annual reports, to let you know about the state of your cooperative and so you can gauge our effectiveness as your power provider. In the pages of this 2021 Annual Report, we provide specific financials, industry trends and examples of our commitment to the community and our members.

As a cooperative, we are stronger together because of the partnerships we pursue. For instance, your Board of Directors and your executive team make a point to maintain strong relationships with legislators. We do this because it benefits our members when our federal, state and local elected officials understand the changes occurring in our industry. With these legislators we discuss cybersecurity concerns, infrastructure investments and the need for access to market-driven financing options. Randolph EMC’s goal is to avoid unintended costs or negative impacts for our member-owners.

On these pages you will read how Randolph Electric has made significant, consistent and long-term investments to demonstrate our core value of community involvement. Just one way that we do this is through our 27 years of participation in the Bright Ideas grant program. By creating strong partnerships with educators in our service territory, we have invested over $300,000 in innovative learning projects that have benefited students in our five-county area.

Randolph EMC has also partnered with key organizations to build a brighter, more sustainable future for our members. Through the State of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, REMC procured Volkswagen Mitigation Settlement funds to place the first ENERGY STAR^® Level 2 electric vehicle (EV) charging station in the Robbins area. The public charger, located at our Robbins office in northern Moore County, joined an expanding statewide cooperative charging network. Providing this technology is one way that Randolph EMC supports revitalization efforts.

Our organizational core value of innovation drives our cooperative to build a stronger grid. This modern grid not only distributes energy to our members, but in specific areas can also redistribute power when a fault occurs, reducing outage durations. As your trusted energy partner, Randolph EMC continues to invest in a smart grid that can accommodate newer technologies such as solar while maintaining the strength and reliability of our grid.

Finally, our core value of integrity spurs us to seek a stronger partnership with you, our member-owner. One way we demonstrate this is through our retirement of $2.5 million in capital credits. Nearly 97 percent of Randolph EMC members receive a check or bill credit for their share of the annual general capital credit retirement. As a nonprofit that operates at cost, Randolph Electric returns excess revenues to members in the form of capital credits. Since our inception, we have returned over $52 million to our members.

We are honor-bound to manage this electric cooperative with one question foremost in our minds: What is best for the member-owner? You are our priority, and we greatly value the trust you have placed in Randolph EMC. We hope that you will look through this Annual Report for 2021 and see a cooperative that places you, the member-owner, at the heart of all that we do. We look forward to a future in which Randolph EMC is better and stronger, together with you.

Cooperatively yours,

Jerry Bowman, Board President
Dale F. Lambert, Chief Executive Officer