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A number of years ago, I was on a kinda/sorta advisory board for our local rural electric cooperative. Simply put, it was kind of a farm team to prepare people for possible service on the actual Board of Directors.

One thing that has stuck with me is that every rural electric cooperative in the country uses exactly the same equipment=transformers/poles/whatever. That way when a hurricane or ice storm strikes and major outages occur-other rural electric coops can send their guys down to help and they all know exactly what they are doing.

The investor owned utilities such as PG&E are different animals and may have different stuff than other IOU's.

Spock wrote:A number of years ago, I was on a kinda/sorta advisory board for our local rural electric cooperative. Simply put, it was kind of a farm team to prepare people for possible service on the actual Board of Directors.

One thing that has stuck with me is that every rural electric cooperative in the country uses exactly the same equipment=transformers/poles/whatever. That way when a hurricane or ice storm strikes and major outages occur-other rural electric coops can send their guys down to help and they all know exactly what they are doing.

The investor owned utilities such as PG&E are different animals and may have different stuff than other IOU's.

The big guys can afford to upgrade facilities and technology due to scale and inventory a larger % of replacement as well where the cooperatives can buy and transfer from each other but would be alone if upgrading. One of my company's clients is Lee County [FL] Electric Coop. We also do a lot with Duke and Florida Power & Light.