Democratizing Energy Cooperatives in Rural Alabama

Alabama, USA

By Emily Sloss
cooperatives, energy, democracy

REC Democracy Project, a grassroots organizing campaign, uses mapping as a tool to democratize Black Warrior EMC, a rural electric cooperative.

Black Warrior EMC is an electric cooperative serving 12 counties in Western Alabama. Every household that receives energy from BWEMC is technically a co-op member-owner. However, BWEMC’s board of trustees have been operating the company as a private monopoly rather than a democratic consumer co-op that prioritizes the needs of its member-owners. REC Democracy Project is a grassroots organizing campaign educating and mobilizing BWEMC member-owners to take back control of their co-op. A key part of their campaign is to make data more visible through mapping.

The issues plaguing the cooperative are extensive. BWEMC member-owners face exorbitantly high electricity bills, ranging from $300-$1200 for two bedroom homes or trailers, while many households live below the poverty line. The predominantly white board of trustees lacks transparency and refuses to hold public elections, distribute dividends to members or operate democratically in a region that is majority African-American. Many of the 14,000 co-op members do not know what it means to be a co-op member. Educating members on their rights and responsibilities of belonging to a co-op has been the primary goal of REC.

My deliverable for the semester was to create an interactive web map which had two goals: first to improve REC Democracy Project’s field organizing methods; and second to communicate the story of Black Warrior EMC to broader audience, potentially other cooperatives facing similar issues. While I did face some significant challenges like the lack of data and messy data, and a cancelled trip to Alabama, I was able to find enough datasets to make a map that achieves both the internal and external uses of the map. Based on the input from project partner, REC, I created three scales through which to investigate these issues - national, state and local.

The map starts zoomed out to the national level, showing energy burden for every county in the US. Energy burden is defined as the amount of money spent on electric bills by those living 50% below the federal poverty line. The national level also includes a map layer of all electric cooperatives throughout the country. In the future, this layer will use pop-ups to provide case study summaries of other cooperative who have successfully democratized or those currently organizing to do so. To make this a useful tool, it will be necessary to create some kind of index that compares the organizations to the theoretical values coops are supposed to uphold to their actual practices.

The Alabama state scale displays county demographics including race, income and age. Currently, only county demographics are available for Alabama but if this map were to be expanded as a tool to evaluate cooperatives nationally, adding these demographics for all counties would be important.

The final scale is the local 12 county territory in which Black Warrior EMC operates in west-central Alabama. It includes the service territory as defined by the co-op bylaws, which a former REC organizer manually drew the lines from. BWEMC will not release the territory map and the accuracy of the map drawn from the bylaws is uncertain, which makes the door-to-door organizing on which this campaign is based particularly difficult. The organizers spend the summer covering a significant geographical area in predominantly rural areas meaning houses are spaced far apart, going door to door asking folks if they receive power from BWEMC. The territory map is critical to make these organizing efforts productive. The door-to-door organizing method is incredibly time intensive and while creating face to face relationships is essential, they are often shooting in the dark just trying to find members. All the time and energy spent on finding members could be better spent on educating and organizing if they just had the addresses of the 14,000 members. My map includes the 1000 coop members to date who have been identified through the door-to-door campaign. It also includes community organizations like project partners, newspapers, churches, safe meeting spaces and other community organizations.

When both the BWEMC service territory and coop member layers are turned on, it is clear that either the territory map is incorrect, or the co-op member locations have been entered incorrectly because many of the member locations are outside the service area.

In addition to creating this primary map, I also made a google form where future additions to the coop member database can be entered and then they will automatically be added to the map. The point of this form is to eliminate the human error that was common in the database entry by previous summer fellows.

This project will continue to evolve and hopefully this is just the framework for a more comprehensive mapping project to help member-owners of electric cooperatives regain democratic control over these companies.