CCEC Director Fred Fulcher, who visited Coopesantos two years ago, and Fulcher’s wife, Sarah, hosted a fresh seafood, vegetable and fruit lunch for Domingo Umaña and Ismael López at their “Down East” Carteret County home. While there, Fulcher showed the two men a satellite view of the East Coast.

Lewis Hobson, of the Tar Heel Electric Membership Association (TEMA) discusses equipment supply management with Domingo Umaña and Ismael López during their visit this summer to Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative’s facilities in Newport, N.C.

Costa Rica: Global Approach Aids Co-ops

Mark Hibbs - Carteret-County News-Times

NEWPORT — Representatives of an electric cooperative in Costa Rica visited Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative (CCEC) June 18 through 22, hoping to learn more about the American approach to management and planning.

Their cooperative is CCEC’s sister in an international partnership program where American co-ops assist those in developing countries. But CCEC officials said their two guests from Cooperativa Electrica de los Santos (Coopesantos), which serves the region near San Marcos de Tarrazu, have more to share than they have to learn.

The partnership began in 1963 when CCEC sent its manager, W.C. Carlton to Costa Rica to advise officials there on how to get power to their rural areas. Coopesantos was established in 1965 and went into operation four years later, serving about 42 percent of the population in its service territory with about $3 million in annual sales. In 2002, CCEC reestablished its relationship with Coopesantos under the NRECA International Foundation’s Sister Cooperative Program.

Now, Coopesantos, serves nearly every household in
its coverage area. The cooperative is also expanding its infrastructure, diversifying its services and exploring power generation alternatives including hydroelectric and wind turbines.

Coopesantos engineering director Ismael López said
he is most interested in improving long-term planning and accountability. The cooperative developed its first strategic plan a little more than a year ago and implementing that plan has allowed all management to understand the cooperative’s “vision” and have a collective ownership. It’s an administrative change in philosophy, he said. The changes were needed to enable the cooperative to cope with the challenges of its business environment, which is quite different from that of the CCEC market.

Coopesantos is one of four electric cooperatives in Costa Rica and, until last year, it lacked a truck equipped for setting poles; all work was done manually.

Materials and supplies were also difficult to get, until last year when the cooperative formed its transformer maintenance and reconstruction division with Cooper Power Systems, a manufacturer of high-voltage equipment based in Wisconsin. Now, that division serves other cooperatives in the region and having just past the break-even point, it is poised for profit growth.

Coopesantos serves about 32,500 customers who consume an average of about 170 kilowatt-hours of power per household each month. CCEC serves about 36,000 customers who average about 1,100 kilowatt-hours per household monthly. To diversify its offering due to low usage by Coopesantos, they have begun building fiber-optic infrastructure needed to offer cable television, communications and Internet services.

It was CCEC’s administrative and management methods the Costa Rican visitors were most interested in during their exchange. Much of their visit was spent exploring CCEC’s network and accountability methods to gain insight on how to link data collected in the field to the administration level.

Through their sister relationship, CCEC and Coopesantos share more than business ideas and technical advice, CCEC spokesman Lisa Galizia said. Establishing a formal tie to an electric cooperative in a developing country has helped CCEC enrich its cultural understanding and global knowledge.