Contact: Priscilla Knight, 703-392-1580, pknight@novec.com
NORTHERN VIRGINIA—The Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative celebrated its 25th anniversary on January 1, 2008. The Cooperative began distributing electricity to members in six Northern Virginia counties on January 1, 1983 when Prince William Electric Cooperative and Tri-County Electric Cooperative consolidated to form NOVEC.
NOVEC has planned a year-long celebration, which will include historical accounts and remembrances in the Cooperative’s publications and on its Web site, www.novec.com, and a special celebration for all NOVEC customer-owners at the 2008 annual meeting.
“We want to recognize and thank everyone from our founding members to our linemen who worked diligently to bring power to Northern Virginia’s suburbs and rural areas,” said Mike Curtis, NOVEC’s vice president of public relations, at an anniversary celebration on January 2, 2008 in NOVEC’s Leesburg, Va., office. “We stand on their broad shoulders and we will continue to provide reliable power to our customer-owners.”
Thomas Edison opened the nation’s first electric utility in New York City in 1882. Soon, people everywhere clamored for electric power. Utilities sprang up in towns and cities, but most rural communities were powerless, because delivering electricity to farming regions reduced investor-owned utilities’ profit margins. Consequently, rural America lagged behind thriving Industrial Revolution cities.
In 1935, during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to pass legislation to help electrify more than five million farms. With funding from the
Rural Electrification Administration, farmers formed co-ops to obtain “the electric.”
Farmers in Loudoun, Fairfax and Clarke counties met on October 31, 1939 and formed Tri-County Electric Cooperative. The new co-op set up office in the Town of Leesburg.
In July 1940, the new co-op energized its first lines in Centreville and gave 108 homes special Independence Day fireworks--electricity.
Townspeople and farmers formed Prince William Electric Cooperative on April 25, 1941. The co-op provided power for Manassas and parts of Prince William, Fairfax, Fauquier, Stafford, and Loudoun counties.
History tells of jubilant celebrations when the co-ops flipped the switch to power Northern Virginia’s rural communities. Electricity that once divided the powerful from the powerless now united them in a wire web. No longer did farm families have to pump water from outdoor wells and haul it to wash tubs, or brace freezing temperatures to cut ice from winter ponds for iceboxes, or cut firewood for heating and cooking. One farmer felt so blessed he told his neighbors, “The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house.”*
The 1973 oil embargo escalated the cost of fuel and thereby the cost of electricity. To meet financial challenges, the two cooperatives agreed to consolidate and become the Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative. NOVEC began distributing power to approximately 38,000 customers on January 1, 1983.
Today, most of those farms have given way to densely packed communities of homes, businesses, and commercial endeavors. NOVEC is rated one of the top electric utilities in the United States. For eight consecutive years, NOVEC has been the most reliable electric utility in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area by keeping power flowing 99.98 percent of the time. The Cooperative’s president and CEO, Stan Feuerberg, reported on December 31, 2007: “Our corporate balance sheet is the strongest of any electric cooperative in the three-state area…One of our lenders has given NOVEC its highest rating for a distribution system.”
