Central Electric Cooperative Inc. is headquartered in Parker, Clarion County.

It provides reliable electric service to nearly 25,000 members in Venango, Clarion, Forest, Butler, Armstrong and parts of Mercer and Allegheny counties. Central employs 70 people and maintains about 3,200 miles of line.

We are proud to be celebrating 70 years of service to our rural communities and are actively pursuing opportunities to provide our members the "power to make a difference" in their communities. Central continues to improve cooperative members' lives by investing in the maintenance of our electric distribution system, investing in cost and time-saving new technologies, and making investments in the communities we serve.

Central Electric's primary focus is on providing reliable electric service to our members at reasonable rates through challenging rural terrain. Central is proud to announce that we had one of our lowest levels of power outages in our history with only 3.37 outage hours per consumer recorded this year.

"We continue to invest heavily in the maintenance and improvement of the electric distribution system. We recognize that with today's technologies, there is little tolerance for power outages or even blinks, and our members have high expectations for service reliability," said Larry Adams, CEO and general manager.

To keep service reliability high, the cooperative has been working to replace defective poles, cross arms and old, less-reliable wire types. During 2007, the cooperative replaced 72 line miles of older wire, including the installation or replacement of 928 electric poles.

The cooperative's independent contractor, the Osmose Co., inspected 5,365 poles and treated any pole issues with its sophisticated treatment system to cost-effectively extend the life of those poles.

Since the beginning of the wire change-out program, Central Electric has replaced 574 line miles of old copper wire. About 320 line miles remain to be upgraded over the next several years with new, more durable aluminum wire.

Maintaining the existing electric rights-of-way also is important to maintaining reliable electric service. Two hundred and sixty-six miles of rights-of-way were cleared in the Mineral, Bullion, Sandy Creek and Lucinda substation areas. Additionally, 8,089 trees were trimmed, and 8,450 trees were removed.

Central Electric's locally elected board of directors and their staff work diligently to keep the power on and to keep the rates as stable as possible. This year, bowing to the pressures of rising costs for fuel, material, equipment and administrative cost, a modest change in the cooperative's distribution rate was required and implemented in March. This change to the distribution portion of residential members' bills amounted to $3.55 per month for residential members.

Many utilities have been announcing rate increases which will be taking place over the next several years because of rate caps coming off as part of Pennsylvania's deregulation laws. Fortunately, Central Electric does not anticipate any rate change in 2008.

It still only costs the average Central Electric Residential consumer $3.14 per day to provide all of the power needs of their home.