At its annual meeting in Nashville a month ago, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) honored Wadesboro-based Pee Dee EMC with the association’s Community Service Award for Energy Efficiency. Only one co-op is cited each year for this award.

Consistent with electric cooperative’s longstanding commitment to saving their members money through greater efficiency, Pee Dee Electric developed a program to install more efficient lighting at local poultry and livestock facilities, offering rebates to members who purchase the new bulbs.

“This program exemplifies the cooperative difference: Pee Dee Electric is looking out for their members, finding innovative technologies to help them save electricity and money,” said NRECA CEO Jo Ann Emerson.

Pee Dee Electric makes high-efficiency agricultural lighting available to farmers to replace existing high-wattage incandescent bulbs in poultry houses and livestock barns. The LED bulbs pay for themselves in energy savings in six months. To date, Pee Dee Electric has sold 102,000 of these energy-efficient bulbs to more than 542 farmers. The calculated daily savings for the average poultry house that replaces 60-watt incandescent bulbs with 8-watt LED bulbs is 82.4 kilowatt-hours per day.