2025 YEAR IN REVIEW
As a non-profit electric cooperative, we exist to serve you with reliable, affordable electric energy and related cooperative services. To accomplish that mission, our focus remains on rates, reliability and safety.
This year was a time of internal growth. Operations returned to normal following several years of challenges. This allowed us to focus on in-house processes, eliminating what didn’t work and finding alternatives that do. We implemented new technologies to improve reliability and managed inventories to run efficiently. With an eye on the future, we focused on employee training, team building and internal leadership.
COST OF ELECTRICITY
Maintaining reliability and affordability in the electric industry requires constant attention. Our goal is to deliver electricity to you at the lowest cost possible while still providing reliable service.
We purchased 173,820 megawatt-hours of wholesale electricity from Sunflower Electric Power Corporation in Hays and delivered it to you at cost. Wholesale power costs per kilowatt-hour (kWh) increased by 1.7% to $10,091,873 and accounted for about 53% of your total power bill.
The cooperative collected $19,069,680 in energy sales revenue with an average rate of return of 3.40%. Our average home used 889 kWh per month at a total cost of $123.18 per month. Our average “profit” margin on a single home is $50.25 per year.
RELIABILITY
Affordable power doesn’t mean much if the lights aren’t on. Lane-Scott tracks several utility industry standard reliability metrics. Our system average service availability index (ASAI) for 2025 was 99.97% while the average number of interruptions per meter (SAIFI) was 1.09 per meter. That means that electric power was available for your use 99.97% of the time and averaged just over one outage per member.
If you had an outage, it lasted on average just under three hours and likely happened during the major winter storm last March. The storm was responsible for 13,247 member outage hours or about 79% of all the outage hours we had in 2025.
Power interruptions can be separated into two general categories: those we cannot control (major storms and wholesale supplier outages) and those we can control or at least minimize with system hardening. Last year 97.2% of our system outages resulted from major storms and supplier disruptions that we have no control over. The rest, 2.8% or 4.9 minutes per meter, were the result of minor storms, animals, and other common disruptions.
SAFETY
Employee and community safety is always first in our thoughts. We continue to expand and improve our internal safety processes, training, equipment and documentation. We partner with the Kansas Electric Cooperatives to offer employees timely and useful safety content at required monthly safety meetings. All linemen are trained in pole top rescue, first aid, CPR, and safety inspections and observations. All crews are required to conduct “tail board” safety briefings before every job.
Our commitment to safety extends beyond our employees. The Lane-Scott Electric Cooperative offers high voltage safety education in our communities at no charge. Our high voltage safety demonstration trailer is a valuable tool that helps us better serve community members of all ages and occupations. We offer these services because protecting our most valuable resources, our employees and our community, is simply the right thing to do.
The bottom-line is that your cooperative stayed focused on our core business of providing reliable, cost-effective power safely and finished 2025 increasing total utility plant by 2.59% to over $66.8 million while reducing long-term debt by 4.7% to $32.4 million.
CAPITAL CREDITS
Cooperatives are non-profit. That’s the way we were founded and that’s the way we continue to operate. If we make more than we need, we pay it back to you, our owners.
I am very happy to report that last year the cooperative returned $494,472 to members, bringing our total retirement to $2,414,126 over the past five years. That represents 46.2% of the total $5,223,383 that Lane-Scott has returned in its lifetime.
COOPERATION AMONG COOPERATIVES
One of our most valued of the Seven Cooperative Principles is Cooperation Among Cooperatives. Cooperatives nationwide serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.
Last year, the National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association (NRECA) recognized our common-sense business approach to the cooperative model and asked us to share the Lane-Scott story with our national electric cooperative family. We started as main stage speakers at the Regional Cooperative meeting in Seattle, Washington, then were humbled and honored to be included in a national article on cooperative innovation. After that, Board Vice President Craig Ramsey and Secretary Randall Evans presented at the NRECA National Directors Conference in Palm Springs, California.
They called it “a superpower,” “innovative” and “collaborative.” We just call it “working together” and “common sense.”
Every day we work toward our common goal of keeping the lights on and your costs reasonable. We continue in our commitment to our communities, keeping dollars locally. We investigate new technologies and efficiencies in workflow management, distributed energy, microgrids, batteries and demand side management options.
We are very optimistic about the future of your cooperative. We are focused on the original mission of the cooperative — to serve you. That is the heart, the soul, and the future of the electric cooperative movement.
We are 24 employees strong, one cooperative in two convenient locations, and we are honored to be a part of the Lane-Scott Electric Cooperative family and to work alongside these great and dedicated individuals, serving you, every day.