CEO Karen Moore

Protecting the environment is as simple as recycling your waste, turning faucets off while you’re brushing your teeth, and switching to metal straws instead of plastic. Right?

While those choices can certainly add up and have a positive effect on Mother Nature, a company like Baldwin EMC needs bigger strategies.

For us, it’s a balancing act. Our members want electricity that has a minimal impact on the environment, without having to sacrifice a huge portion of their household budget to pay for it.

There’s a wide range of ways utility companies can practice environmental stewardship. But not everything is a perfect fit, and there are no silver bullets.

For some utility companies in other parts of the country, reducing their environmental impact can be as simple as relying on an abundant supply of wind or solar energy. In Alabama, it’s a little more complex. A greater reliance on renewable energy resources would mean higher costs for our members. That’s not a trade-off we take lightly.

Does that mean we have no options? Not at all. We just have to be more calculated and careful about the renewable projects we enter into. We’ve worked closely with our wholesale power supplier, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, on projects such as the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant and the 80-megawatt Wing Solar Project, both of which can provide energy free of carbon emissions.

From an operations standpoint, we have procedures in place that prompt us to consider the environmental impacts of our distribution system – everything from the way we handle transformer oil, to our vegetation management program. Every now and then, we also get to go the extra mile, through programs like our recycling efforts.

We can also enable and empower our members to take advantage of environmentally conscious ways to conduct business with us. We provide paperless billing options to reduce paper waste, and we offer online payment options to minimize how much our members have to drive their cars to interact with us.

For those members who also want to reduce their energy use, we can serve as knowledgeable and trustworthy advisors. A simple phone call to one of our energy marketing specialists can be the first step to changing habits around your home. Not only will these changes affect your power bill, they’ll help reduce the amount of resources being consumed to generate electricity. After all, the most environmentally friendly kilowatt-hour is the one you never use.

Protecting and preserving the environment for the generations that will come after us is no small task. But the more we work together, the greater the impact we can have.