This year’s annual meeting of members was held on Thursday, May 12, at Beaufort County Community College. In recent years, the primary topic of discussion has centered around the vast number of capital construction projects undertaken as part of our construction work plans. Examples of completed or nearly completed projects include the Five Points to Washington substation subtransmission line, Merritt circuit improvements, and the rebuild of the Lake Phelps circuit.

With the largest projects now complete, this year’s meeting allowed us time to go into greater depth about the goal of North Carolina’s electric cooperatives to provide the low-cost, low-carbon energy solutions envisioned in House Bill 951 passed by the NC General Assembly last summer.

Each electric co-op, including Tideland, is contributing to that objective with our generation and transmission cooperative, the North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation (NCEMC) in Raleigh, serving as the overall faciliator and project coordinator. To that end, NCEMC is developing and coordinating resources at the edge of the grid, including renewables, storage and microgrids. Coordination ensures that dispatchable resources work together to deliver the greatest possible value to all co-op members.

Locally, Tideland hosts two NCEMC solar-plus-battery storage microgrid projects: one at the diesel-generating plant on Ocracoke Island and the other at Rose Acre Farms in Ponzer. The Rose Acre Farms microgrid is scheduled to become fully operational later this month.

Thanks to our investments in construction of the new Fairfield Harbour substation, we will soon be able to actively participate in NCEMC’s load control requests during those hours when power purchases are most expensive. We also have hundreds of members already participating in our Ecobee smart thermostat program, which responds to control events initiated by NCEMC during those hours of highest energy demand. So Tidelanders are on the frontlines when it comes to contributing to a low-cost, low-carbon future.

NCEMC’s 2030 target is to realize a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. While it may sound like a daunting goal, a look at the change in our generation resource mix from 2005 to 2021 shows great promise. In 2005, 40% of our generating resources were from coal-fired power plants. Today coal respresents just 4% of our generating resources. Yes, our use of renewables has more than doubled, but our greatest emission reductions have been made with heavy reliance on nuclear and natural gas generation.