In preparation for our mid-month leadership transition at Cherryland, I dug Tony’s first column as the co-op’s manager out of the Country Lines archives. It was May 2003, and he had been on the job for just 30 days at the time.
Avid readers of Tony’s columns may know that he has long considered the recipe section in Country Lines his main competition for audience popularity. He’s not wrong—the recipes are very, very popular.
That’s why I was so surprised to find that his very first column was titled “Your Co-op Has a ‘Sweet’ Recipe for Success.” Apparently, his love/hate relationship with recipes developed later in his tenure.
In the column, Tony compared running a cooperative to baking a pie. The recipe for that pie is “a solid membership, an open board, and hard-working employees.” He ended the column by saying that at the end of his first month, the cooperative pie was far from cooked, but the first taste was good.
It is still true today that the primary ingredients of a well-run cooperative are the engagement of our members, the strength of our board, and the dedication and talent of our employees.
While the recipe remains the same, our method must change. Baking is an effort in precision. It is also highly predictable and replicable. But today’s energy landscape is far from precise or predictable.
Cooking is a more apt metaphor. For our Country Lines recipe followers, you already know that cooking is more about adaptability and agility. The best cooks can rarely tell you the recipe. Instead, it’s often an evolution of a dash of this, a pinch of that, and a little bit more to taste.
This will be especially true when it comes to grid management and power supply. Think of it as substituting ingredients in a familiar recipe. Often those new ingredients don’t work quite like the old ones and require more adjustments to get the dish right.
As traditional fossil fuel-based generation is increasingly replaced with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, we need to adjust the portions of each in order to address the challenges that more intermittent energy sources create for maintaining grid stability.
It also may require some new ingredients. At the distribution system level, incorporating these “new ingredients” will require significant investments in technology, including more advanced metering systems, distributed energy resource management systems, and other smart grid technologies.
To manage those systems, we must continue to beef up the technological capabilities of our staff. Luckily, we have a strong technical team to build on in both engineering and informational technology. A dash of hiring additional staff and a pinch of investing in new tech are the final steps in preparing our co-op dish for the future.
In a few weeks, we will celebrate Tony’s 20 years of dedicated service to our cooperative. During that time, he has baked us a truly first-in-class pie. I hope you’ll join me at the Annual Meeting in wishing him well. If you stop by, please be sure to introduce yourself to me. The foundational ingredients of our future haven’t changed; an informed and engaged membership has never been more important for the success of the cooperative.
I’m looking forward to seeing you on June 15.
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