Renewable Energy

What is Renewable Energy?

Mutu­al ben­e­fits are what co-ops are all about. That’s why you’ll find this whole sec­tion on YEC’s web­site focus­ing on alter­na­tive forms of ener­gy and renew­ables.

Elec­tric co-ops sup­port the use of a wide range of fuels for our elec­tric pow­er, reduc­ing costs and keep­ing rates low. Today, a “fifth fuel” joins coal, nat­ur­al gas, nuclear and renewables—energy effi­cien­cy. That is, when we all con­serve ener­gy, we won’t need to pro­duce as much.

Elec­tric coop­er­a­tives across the coun­try are active­ly expand­ing their fuel port­fo­lios to include an array of renew­able sources, includ­ing wind, solar, geot­her­mal, bio­mass, manure and hydro.

Did you know?

• Nation­wide, co-ops own and pur­chase a total of more than 4 GW of non-hydro renew­able capacity—in addi­tion to rough­ly 10 GW of pref­er­ence pow­er con­tracts with fed­er­al hydro­elec­tric facil­i­ties.
• Co-ops own 908 MW of renew­able ener­gy gen­er­a­tion and have pur­chased con­tracts for 3.14 GW.
• In 2010, co-ops received 13 per­cent of their pow­er from renew­able sources, as com­pared with a lit­tle more than 10 per­cent for the nation’s entire elec­tric util­i­ty sec­tor.
• Cur­rent­ly, 94 per­cent of the nation’s co-ops (790 out of 841 dis­tri­b­u­tion util­i­ties) offer renew­able ener­gy options to a total of almost 15 mil­lion res­i­den­tial co-op mem­bers.
• The IRS has approved $900 mil­lion in Clean Renew­able Ener­gy Bonds (CREB) allo­ca­tions for coop­er­a­tive renew­able ener­gy devel­op­ment.