Reliable & Affordable is Our Mission
The mission of Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative is to deliver reliable electricity at affordable rates.
As your local electric distribution cooperative, Coosa Valley Electric’s mission means that we are responsible for building a resilient and efficient electric distribution network. The purpose of that network is to distribute power to your home or business with minimal interruptions.
We distribute electricity, not generate it.
We buy the electricity our consumers use from PowerSouth Energy Cooperative. We are 1 of 16 electric cooperatives operating in Alabama and Northwest Florida that own PowerSouth.
When you pay your power bill each month, you pay us for the electricity you consume as well as the ability to receive that electricity. What you pay for electric energy is just passed through to PowerSouth. On top of that passthrough is the amount we must charge to cover costs related to building and maintaining our distribution system so that you can receive power.
For the average residential power bill (usage of around 1,200 kWh per month) about 60% of that bill is for the electricity you use. The other 40 percent covers our costs to engineer, build, maintain, and repair our electric distribution network. This is a bargain considering how expensive and capital-intensive our business is.
PowerSouth builds and operates power plants and high-voltage transmission lines to generate and transmit electricity to CVEC and its other member cooperatives. Where we deal with projects that cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and occasionally a few millions of dollars, PowerSouth deals with projects that cost tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars on a regular basis.
As your local electric distribution cooperative— whether you use any electricity or not — we still have costs associated with making sure you can receive electricity at your home or business. This means that whether you use any electricity or not, you still must pay for the service that distributes electricity to your home or business. That helps cover our cost of operation as a not-for-profit entity.
It’s similar, in a sense, to your phone. Whether you make a call or not, you must still pay for that phone and the service that allows you to make phone calls. Cell phones have a great deal of cost associated with enabling you to make calls beyond just the cell phone itself. Towers, communications equipment, fiber-optic cables to the towers, electricity, and the employees who make it all happen all carry significant costs.
Our electric distribution system is similar. We have substations, power transformers, power lines, breakers, voltage regulators, power poles and a host of other equipment to make sure electricity can be delivered to your home or business. In addition to that we have our very talented employees who work hard every day to make sure your electric service is as reliable and affordable as it possibly can be.
We are grateful for the opportunity to provide your electric service. We understand our mission to make it as reliable and affordable as possible, and we are fully committed to fulfilling our mission.
We wish you and your family a happy holiday season.