November 2015

A Productive 2017 and An Exciting FutureIN THIS QUARTERLY ISSUEThe Future at FRECelebrating 80 Years!Chester Sets RecordFall River Cares

NEED HELP PAYING WINTER ENERGY BILLS?

Winter has officially arrived and colder weather is here, which usually means high-er monthly energy bills, but help is available. The Low Income Home Energy Assis-tance program (LIHEAP) can be utilized by Fall River Elec-tric members. To inquire, call the office in your state:IDAHO – 208.522.5391MONTANA – 800.332.2796WYOMING – 307.739.4500

JANUARY 2018

Committed to safely and economically provide reliable energy and other services which bring value to its membership.

Wishing you a Happy and Prosperous New Year! As an owner-member of the Cooperative, you

will be glad to know Fall River Electric achieved several significant accomplishments in 2017.

With increasing wholesale power costs facing us this year, including another BPA rate increase, Fall River’s board determined the Cooperative could meet its financial goals and absorb the cost increase for 2018. This is the result of strong fiscal management, cost containment strategies, and strategic decisions that are financial-ly helping the Cooperative. Fall River’s board and management set a long-term goal to increase the financial strength of the Cooperative by increasing our equity ratio from a low of 26 percent equity to an optimal equity level of 38 percent. This goal has been accomplished a year earlier than anticipated.

Your Fall River staff was also busy main-taining a very reliable electrical system. Once again, the Cooperative has beat industry benchmarks tied to system reli-ability and timely power restoration.

The Chester Hydroelectric Facility had a record production year. Your clean, renew-able hydroelectric plants operated by Fall River account for nearly 10 percent of the energy provided to our owner-members.

Your Cooperative added over 300 new services; invested over $3M into electric facilities; answered over 42,000 incoming phone calls from our owner-members; automated several busi-ness processes; added Henry’s Fork river content to our Fall River Electric website; and provided our operations staff with new technology that will allow real-time access to maps, outage infor-mation, hazard assessment systems, and more to expedite work.

Fall River Propane, which is also owned by you, set new records. Fall River Propane has increased the number of new customers in 2017 by over 10 percent to-date, as well as increased the number of gallons sold by 20 percent.

The expansion of our propane business into Wyoming has kept staff very busy with all the new customers switching over to Fall River Propane.

As you can see, 2017 was a very productive year. Our work plans and goals for 2018 are just as aggressive. In this new year, we will be:

• Adding to our safety efforts by using a new safety demonstration trailer to educate school students, community first responders, and others;

• Conducting a pilot test program to deter-mine how effective smart home technology is in reducing and managing homeowner energy use;

• Asking our members to amend our bylaws to allow Patronage Capital to be retired on a dis-counted basis when members permanently leave the Cooperative’s service territory; and

• Placing distributive generation (solar and/or wind) for educational purposes at local high schools.

Fall River hopes your new year is full of success and fun! Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you, our owner-members.

A message from Bryan Case, Fall River Electric CEO/General Manager

Mark your calendar for Fall River Electric’s 80th anni-versary annual meeting to be held on Saturday, June 16, 2018 at Teton High School in Driggs, ID. Enjoy free prizes, a health and energy expo, kids rides and games, free food, the annual business meeting, and the election of three board members repre-senting districts one, five, and six.

2018 ANNUAL MEETING DATE

Throughout the three states and seven counties that Fall River Electric serves, owner-members are hard at work in a variety of in-dustries, including the region’s oldest industry: agriculture. Idaho alone is home to more than 24,000 farm operations. Fall River Electric powers each farm, big or small, and continues to keep energy-saving practices at the forefront.

Upgrading lighting or irrigation systems are two common ways businesses and ag producers save energy and costs, but owner-members in the agriculture sector have another option for big savings: vari-able-frequency drives (VFDs).

Recently, Driggs-based Penfold Farms worked with Fall River Electric on a conservation project to install VFDs and subsequent control panels in their potato storage units.

Nosh Makujina, a liaison between the Bonneville Power Admin-istration (BPA) and Fall River Electric, helped manage the project.

Potato storage facilities use air circulation to maintain the

Celebrating 80 Years!

Rebates Result In Energy Savings For Farmers

At the turn of the twentieth century, nine out of ten rural homes across the United States had no electricity. While homes within towns might have access to power, residents in the outlying countryside did not. Because of sparse population, investor-owned utilities could not justify the expense of building lines to those outlying areas. Rural residents were left to solve the power problem themselves. An amendment to this issue was brewing on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. President Theodore Roosevelt knew the importance of getting power to rural Americans, specifically farmers.

“The farmers above all should have that power … for lighting their homes, and for innumerable uses in the daily tasks on the farm,” said Roosevelt in a 1909 message to Congress.

Within the efforts of the New Deal, President Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in early 1938 to provide loan money and expertise to help rural Americans bring electricity to their farms. Farmers joined together as cooperatives and were seen as more legitimate borrowers by the REA. The idea for a cooperative was born!

More than 2,000 miles away, Idaho farmers began joining together for the purpose of acquiring power. A group of men met in Ashton, Idaho, in 1938 to discuss bringing the fruits of the New Deal’s efforts to their area. Little did they know that they

would spark a move that would ignite 80 years of bringing power to every farm, business, and household within Fall River’s service territory.

On December 15, 1938, the first official meeting of what would become Fall River Rural Electric Cooperative was held. George Amen, the president of the group, conducted the meeting. They hired an office person to handle the clerical tasks, rented office space on Main Street in Ashton, and hired an engineer. Membership fees were $5, and new members were loaned $10 to help wire their homes for electric service. The first power project consisted of 67 miles of line.

Ashton area residents George Amen, Rudolph Habekost, Glan Baird, George Marotz, W.F. Griffel, E. D. George, Alex Hill, Francis Bratt, and Glan Sharp laid the groundwork as the directors for what is now a cooperative that serves electrical consumers in three states (Idaho, Montana and Wyoming), reaching seven counties with 2,378 miles of lines. Fall River Electric now has over 14,000 electric owner-members and more than 17,000 electric meters.

As Fall River Electric celebrates 80 years of commitment to safely and economically providing reliable power and other services which bring value to its owner-members, it is remarkable to look back on what came from that first meeting of farmers working to get electricity to their homes and farms.

proper temperature and humidity for storage with high horse-power fans. To reduce these expenses and save energy, Penfold turned to upgrading their fans with VFDs and a control panel.

“The VFDs are coordinated by a master control panel that monitors potato tem-perature, ambient air temperature, humid-ity, and other factors for optimal potato storage.” says Nosh.

The addition of the VFDs allowed Pen-fold to save approximately 104,00 kilowatt hours per year, which accounted for thou-sands of dollars in annual savings.

As the spring season approaches, Fall River Electric encourages owner-members

in the agricultural and industrial sector to consider taking steps to not only conserve energy, but receive big savings in their op-eration costs.

For more information, visit www.fallriverelectric.com/agricultur-al-irrigation-rebates-savingmoney/.

Top: Eating dinner by oil lamp before electricity. Bottom: George Amen, the first president of Fall River Electric’s board.

Photo courtesy of Potato Grower Magazine

800-632-5726208-652-7431

ASHTON1150 North 3400 East

Ashton, ID 83420

DRIGGS1605 N Highway 33

Driggs, ID 83422

WEST YELLOWSTONE436 Madison Ave

West Yellowstone, MT 59758

All Our Offices Are OpenMonday - Friday8:00am - 4:30pm

Dan SkeneDistrict 1Rexburg/Rigby

Jay HansonDistrict 2West Victor

Georg BehrensDistrict 3East Victor

Debbie SmithDistrict 4East Driggs

Brent RobsonDistrict 5West Driggs/Tetonia

Dede Draper District 6, AshtonSecretary/Treasurer

Ron DyeDistrict 7South Island Park

Ralph BurtonDistrict 8 North Island ParkVice President

Doug SchmierDistrict 9, West YellowstoneBoard President

Bryan CaseFall River ElectricCEO/General Manager

B OA R D O F D I R E C TOR S

Chester Hydro Sets Power RecordAs Fall River welcomes the new year,

we are also celebrating the successes that marked the past twelve months. In 2017, the Chester Hydroelectic Facility produced the greatest amount of green power to-date, over 8 million kilowatt hours, which represents a 22.5 percent increase above the previous high.

“It has been a record year of production at Chester,” says Dave Peterson, the man-ager of engineering at Fall River Electric. “Chester produced more power this year than we ever have. We are excited to cele-brate the many efforts of our staff to main-tain this record-setting production level.”

The third of Fall River’s four hydroelectric facilities, Chester is a joint venture between Fall River Rural Electric Cooperative and the

Fremont-Madison Irrigation District. It was licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2008 with construc-tion completed in 2014.

The dam also features a fish ladder that allows trout, for the first time since the 1930s, to move upstream in the Henry’s Fork as far as the Ashton Dam and upstream into Fall River. A collaboration between Fall River, the Fremont-Madison Irrigation District, the Hen-ry’s Fork Foundation, Trout Unlimited, and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the fish ladder project helped further Fall River’s commit-ment to enhance regional rivers and streams.

For more information about Fall River’s green power efforts or to join the co-op’s Green Power program, visit fallriverelectric.com/green-power-res.

Fall River’s FLASHES news-letter is printed on re- cycled paper and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Products certified

by FSC directly support responsible forest management.

Want your Fall River FLASHES faster? Click the Quick Link Newsletter on our web-site’s home page at fallriverelectric.com.

Keep up to date on news, including pow-er outage information, by “liking” Fall Riv-er Electric on Facebook at facebook.com/fallriverrec.

Fall River Cares

OFFICE CLOSURE FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. HOLIDAYFall River Electric and Fall River Propane offices will be closed Monday, January 15, to

commemorate Martin Luther King’s birthday, a federal holiday. Since 1986, the third Monday in January has been a federal holiday in observance of the

birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and civil rights leader dedicated to nonviolence. This is a day to honor King’s principles.

During this holiday, if you experience an unexpected power outage, our crews will be on stand-by to respond as quickly and safely as possible. If you experience an outage on a holiday, weekend, or anytime after normal business hours, call 1.800.632.5726. You can also call this number for propane emergencies.

Daniel Sabolsky, the West Yellowstone, Montana, Town Manager, accepted a do-nation from the owner-members of Fall River Electric to assist in the construction of the new Siegel Learning Center located on Yellowstone Avenue. The learning cen-ter is a nonprofit organization and is the only resource in the community provid-ing pre-kindergarten daycare for infants and children up to five years old. The new center can accommodate 70 children. The building will be owned by the Town of West Yellowstone and leased to the nonprofit. Community members are expecting the center to be operational by June 2018.

Left to right, Bryan Case, Fall River Electric CEO; Town Manager Sabolsky; Randy Wakefield, Fall River Engineering Services representative; and Doug Schmier, Fall River Electric board president.