If you visit a coffee shop before work or grab a cheeseburger in the drive-through of your favorite fast-food chain at noon, you may have to wait in a long line. During busy times like these, businesses may open more registers or offer multiple traffic lanes to handle additional traffic. Even when there isn’t a rush of customers to serve, they still need to have enough food and drinks available to meet customer demand at any time while they are open.
Though the process is more complicated than this illustration shows, demand for electricity follows similar patterns and varies throughout the day.
Electricity demand tends to be highest in early evening while people are making supper, catching up on household chores and connecting to various electronic devices. Unlike restaurants, though, electricity providers need to supply power 24/7 — no matter how much electricity you need or what time you need it.
Reliably generating and distributing power can be challenging. Electric demand is dynamic and varies hourly, daily and seasonally. Electricity demand and energy needs are expected to continue to grow in this always-on, always-connected world.
Victory Electric and its energy provider network must plan for and supply enough electricity so that it’s constantly available for members to power their homes, businesses, schools and farms. While making sure we have an adequate supply of energy resources available to meet the highest demand, we also need to maintain grid reliability and manage costs.
We do that by working with a team of valuable partners. Victory Electric is an electric distribution cooperative, so it does not generate power for cooperative members. Sunflower Electric Power Corp., Victory’s generation and transmission (G&T) electric cooperative, generates or purchases power and delivers it to Victory Electric via high-voltage transmission lines. Victory then reduces the voltage and transmits power directly to you on smaller distribution lines.
Sunflower Electric is part of the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), a regional transmission organization that acts like an air traffic controller as it directs the flow of electricity for the power providers in its 14-state network. SPP’s wholesale energy market is designed to provide cost-effective power delivery, protect grid reliability and relieve transmission congestion. The organization helps ensure that electricity providers have the capacity to keep providing power, even during extreme weather and other events that put additional strain on the grid.
As part of our combined efforts to make sure that members’ electric supply meets demand, we depend on a diverse fuel mix of natural gas, coal, wind and solar. Taking a wholistic, all-of-the-above approach to energy generation means strategically using both traditional and renewable energy sources.
We appreciate the efforts made by member-owners like you to save energy.