News

No question about it, 2018 was a big year for Lake Region Electric Cooperative. It’s been exciting and productive, as well as setting up our cooperative for the year ahead. Responsiveness. Reliability. Resiliency. Renewables. Rates. Much of our work during 2018 focused on these five critical goals. I’m proud to say that Lake Region made very good progress on each of these fronts.

“It went fast,” Ken Hendrickx says, reflecting on his experience on Lake Region Electric Cooperative’s Board of Directors. “It has been a great experience for me. I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of people with different perspectives. It’s even helped me learn more about myself.” Due to term limits, Hendrickx will retire from the board this summer after serving the cooperative for the past 15 years. For 14 of the last 15 years, he’s either served as board chair for Lake Region or as the co-op’s Great River Energy (GRE) representative.

We’ve had a flurry of activity since experiencing some major power outages this past summer. Lake Region Electric Cooperative has been working methodically and meticulously with both Great River Energy and Otter Tail Power to address these outage situations and modernize our electric grid. Great River Energy and Otter Tail Power operate the electric transmission facilities while Lake Region is your member-owned electric distribution cooperative. We’re taking an approach of close collaboration and analyzing all aspects of the electric grid serving the Lake Region territory.

Candidates for the LREC Board of Directors will be nominated in districts 3, 6, and 9. There will be a meeting held in each of the three nominating districts. You are invited to attend any meeting, although only members of nominating districts will be allowed to vote.

Juhl Energy will break ground in October on an innovative community-based renewable energy facility. The project is one of the first commercially integrated wind-solar hybrid power generation facilities in the nation. All of the electricity produced will be purchased by Lake Region Electric Cooperative and delivered through interconnection with the cooperative’s distribution system at a single rural distribution substation. As you may remember from discussion at previous membership meetings and newsletter articles, Lake Region has been pursuing a development of this nature for quite some time. We are pleased that these efforts are now coming to fruition.