Economy
2022 Economy highlights
- $636 million impact: We generated more than $636 million of direct economic impact for our communities through wages, taxes, and payments to suppliers and vendors.
- $130 million impact: We generated nearly $130 million in indirect economic impact within our service area during construction and maintenance projects.
- 64% spent with tri-state vendors: We spent more than half of our total annual expenditures with vendors in the three states we serve.
Delivering impact
Our growth is our communities’ growth. We're proud to operate in our rural communities and to contribute to local economies through our everyday operations. Through wages and organizational spending, we contributed a total of $636,172,572 of economic value directly into these communities.
During 2022 we engaged in construction, maintenance, and replacement projects across our service area. These projects helped deliver further economic value indirectly to our rural communities through actions such as purchasing materials and rent payments locally, totaling $129,642,346 in indirect economic value.
When it comes to external support, our suppliers are extensions of our teams. We evaluate suppliers based on quality, experience, cost, safety performance, adherence to cybersecurity requirements, and other applicable business criteria.
Our suppliers are always ready to respond. We have alliance agreements with key suppliers to support us during severe weather. Just hours before a major storm in May we had a vendor reach out, letting us know they were ready to help with whatever we needed. We sent orders throughout the weekend and deliveries took place within hours of our requests.
Greg Rausch, Sourcing Manager
Meeting everyday needs
Our goal is to grow together with our customers while protecting and improving the quality of life in the communities we power. For more than 100 years, we’ve helped our communities remain vibrant, attractive places to live and do business by delivering reliable, affordable electricity. That tradition hasn’t changed, but updating technology and maintaining infrastructure to meet customer needs still comes with a price.
Without knowing the extent of future external influences, such as inflation, we anticipate all customers averaged together will see electric bills increase less than the Consumer Price Index. We base our cost-change requests to the commissions in the states we serve on forecasted and historical data, and any increases will vary by state, year, and size as we work to keep our electric rates lower than the national average.