The Month of Love

Some months of the year carry their own identity. Just like November and December are often identified with Thanksgiving and Christmas, February is synonymous with Valentine’s Day and a time of love.
But here in Alabama, February is also the month that deer season ends, which reminded me of a story about 2 mature bucks locked in a fight. A farmer was walking over his land late 1 winter when he came across the bodies of 2 great bucks that had died with their huge antlers eternally locked. There was no way of knowing which buck had won the fight, but the farmer decided to mount the antlers and skulls in his home as a conversation piece.
He did this as an example to the youth in his community, whom he would often open his farm to as a way of helping them understand the importance of agriculture. When mature bucks with good antlers fight, he would explain, they run the risk of locking up with each other. Even if the winning buck kills his opponent, they could remain helplessly locked, spelling doom for the victor. Whether they win, lose, or draw, simply entering the fight increases the odds of death.
What’s the moral of this story? The way I look at it, if you choose to fight everything life throws at you, you spend all your time fighting and not living what God has planned for us. We don’t have to take on every fight that crosses our path because, like those 2 bucks, we often won’t even be able to tell who won.
We should all try to be wise in selecting our battles so that the outcomes do matter. In the electric cooperative world, many of the battles we are fighting are to maintain long-term reliability. Over the next 10 years, our country is at risk of energy shortfalls, with electric demand growing and baseload power plants being retired. This trend leads to a lot of reliability challenges.
But there’s a group of individuals who want to fight everything and are pushing for an electrification of our economy that is supplied only by renewable energy sources. Those sources will not meet our long-term reliability needs. And with more data centers being built that almost need their own power plants on-site, the demand problem is only getting worse.
Electric infrastructure is not being built fast enough to keep up with the projected demand. You may think it’s the American way to say, “Just build it,” but it isn’t that simple. In terms of electric utility, we are small. That goes for every electric cooperative in Alabama and our generation and transmission cooperative. The financial commitment to build the infrastructure we need is huge, so careful planning has to be done to provide our members with the long-term reliability you depend on.
Even once it’s built, what if the group I mentioned before starts attacking the new baseload power plants and demanding their closure? They have a proven track record. We have to educate our members about the truth of the electric industry. It must be taught at home, at work and at school. As a cooperative, we also must do a better job communicating with you.
The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association has brought this issue to the incoming administration and has highlighted the need for smart energy policies. The president appears to be open to supporting policies that promote energy generation and infrastructure that are critical to our rural communities, but also to the entire country. We have to get this reliability train on the tracks quickly because 10 years of planning and building in the electric industry is like the blink of an eye.
In this world, where there is so much fighting, we all have to wisely and prayerfully pick our battles, even if we love the issues we’re fighting for. Love is what called those 2 great bucks to fight and what led them to their demise. With both of those bucks out of the picture, I bet there was a wise little six-pointer that slipped in and found the love they were fighting for. Until next month.