Quote Originally Posted by Zen View Post
I recently received an offer ot be part of an electric co-op but they could only guarantee rates for 2 years. I don't know how much of a difference there was in KW hours but there were four of us discussing it and I left it to the others (all pretty well versed in these things) and ended up dismissing the offer.
I don't think our rates are much different from the IOU's. Where the co-op really shines is in the service.

We've been in this house almost 12 years and the longest we've been without power was a little over two days after the hurricane last year. A tree came down across our lane and took the power lines with it. Lots of people with the IOUs had no power for a week or longer. With the ice storms about every other year, we might lose power for a few hours, people on the IOUs are out for days. Before the hurricane last fall, the longest we'd ever been without power was 18 hours, once.

It took about two hours after I called yesterday morning, for the guy to get out here, throw the dead raccoon into the woods , and install a new fuse. It was cool, he didn't even have to climb up to the transformer, did it all with a telescoping fiberglass pole with a hook on the end.

It seems weird to me that co-ops are competing with IOUs in your area post-deregulation. I think of utility co-ops as a holdover from their origins (the REAs, when it wasn't profitable for IOUs to run electricity to less densely populated areas).