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East River Electric Works on Your Behalf to Keep Rates Low
East River Electric staff guided the entire region through an unprecedented energy emergency recently – with no Dakota Energy members losing power through the cold weather. East River Electric and Basin Electric protected your interests through the storm as we have for the past 70 years.
That’s what you pay us to do. We’re proud and honored to do it.
You may have seen messaging from Dakota Energy that made claims about the “salaries” of East River Electric’s senior leadership team. Dakota Energy printed inaccurate salary numbers that were exaggerated by 30 to as much as 60 percent. We’re not going to get personal and publish the salaries of Dakota Energy’s executives because our board of directors – which includes a director from Dakota Energy – approves the compensation package annually based on annual competitive market surveys. We assume Dakota Energy’s board does the same.
East River Electric is a South Dakota-based cooperative – the largest utility group in the state. Our salaries are based on annual, independently compiled market data from other utilities in the region and across the country. The employees at East River Electric are South Dakotans, not investment bankers and private equity interests that live in Denver and Florida.
As we saw in Texas during the energy emergency, consumers that rely on the market can be financially harmed. As cooperative members, even though market based power went from a normal cost of $20 per megawatt hour ($0.02/kilowatt hour) to over $4,100 per megawatt hour ($4.10 per kilowatt hour) during the storm, your power costs from East River will not see any increased rates because you own East River and the generation and transmission assets we rely on to provide reliable and affordable power. East River’s rates have gone down three straight years even as we’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our transmission system to serve consumers in Dakota Energy’s area and across the region.
Cooperative consumers that are connected to the East River Electric family are protected – and we continue to make sure our power is reliable and affordable for all of our consumers.