NRECA economists leverage data to support co-ops

September 19, 2011

When a power line snaps in the middle of the night, a co-ops line crew drops everything else to rush to the scene and restore power to the affected members. Similarly, when an unexpected hearing pops up on Capitol Hill, a team at NRECA jumps into action to protect the interests of electric power cooperatives. While these employees work with data instead of copper, their role is just as important in ensuring that reliable, affordable power reaches co-op members.
 
Mike Ganley heads Strategic Analysis efforts for NRECA, leading a team of five that supports the association’s Government Relations and Energy Policy operations, and that also provides critical information to G&Ts and statewide co-op organizations. “Very often what we do is take complicated topics and make them accessible for bright people who don’t spend every day working with them,” Mike explained.


 
For example, when a Congressional staffer contacts NRECA looking for information to present at a hearing, Mike’s team gets the call. “I learned from a lobbyist long ago that Congressional aides don’t want to know everything there is to learn about a topic. They just want to know enough to get through the afternoon’s hearing. So we’ve learned to impose a certain discipline to be able to summarize issues into a single page.”
 
Wabash Valley Power recently called upon Mike and his colleagues after a Business Week Online story identified some of its member systems as having the most costly power in their states. The team gathered information to help those systems respond to Business Week and prepare for the inevitable calls from local media.
 
Much of their work involves extremely short turnaround times. “We’ll get a question and explain that we could use six months and extra staff to get the answers, and then be told we need the best answer we can provide by 2:00 that afternoon,” Mike joked.
 
Legislative projects dominate their workload. “When President Obama came into office, climate change was a huge issue,” Mike recalled. “Co-ops had a lot at stake, because about 80 percent of the power that G&Ts generate themselves comes from burning coal. We performed an analysis of the carbon auction proposal that was included in the President’s budget, and that became a focus for that year’s legislative conference. Later that year, the Waxman-Markey proposal was introduced in the House, and we performed a very extensive analysis of that to help co-ops understand what was at stake.”
 
The group has built up a huge repository of data, and much of their work involves organizing that data in ways that are useful, added Information Representative Dave Olivier. “We’re working with Touchstone Energy on their Scorecard project, which will let co-ops benchmark themselves against other co-ops. We’ve assembled a lot of data and are putting it on the web so that co-ops can measure their performance in financial measures, customer satisfaction, reliability, and safety.”


(click to open PDF of complete scorecard)

An ongoing project will occupy much of the group’s time once congressional redistricting is finalized next year. “We buy a data set that gives us the zip codes associated with congressional districts, and we combine that with our data to provide demographics on co-op membership within each district,” Dave explained. “We’ll show average household incomes, how many co-op members in a district live in mobile homes, all sorts of data like that.


(click to open PowerPoint slide)

It’s a great tool for lobbyists to review before they visit a congressional office. They can tell the staff that there are 50,000 co-op members in that congressman’s district, and show how their demographics compare to the rest of the population. We’ve also done some work with statewide organizations to provide that information to state legislators.”
 
Ultimately, the team’s job is to ensure that informed decisions are being made at all levels, from Capitol Hill to a co-op’s annual meeting. “Directors are smart people, but they don’t have as much time to study information as we do,” Mike said. “They can make good decisions if we make sure they start with good information.”