History

About the cooperative

Although nearly 90 percent of urban dwellers had electricity by the 1930s, only ten percent of rural dwellers did.  Private utility companies, who supplied electric power to most of the nation's consumers, argued that it was too expensive to string electric lines to isolated rural farmers.  In 1935, under the Roosevelt Administration, the Rural Electric Administration (REA) was created to bring electricity to the rural areas like the remote counties in Iowa. 

Nine area farmers; Bugbee, Cordis, Harlan, Jordan, Laughery, McLuen, Phillips, Rosenbladt, and Weigel represented the first Guthrie County REC Board of Directors in 1938.  They adopted Articles of Incorporation, Bylaws, and policies that have governed your electric cooperative over the years.   Guthrie County REC is a not-for-profit electric cooperative responsible for distributing electricity bought from a larger, power-supply cooperative known as Central Iowa Power Cooperative(CIPCO).  Power supply cooperatives, like CIPCO, are often referred to as generation and transmission cooperatives (G&Ts).

Electric cooperatives nationwide own and maintain more than 2.5 million miles of line and serve an area covering 75 percent of the U.S. landmass.  These same electric cooperatives serve over 18 million farms, homes, schools, churches, businesses and industries and provide electricity to 42 million people in 46 states.

To learn more about electric cooperatives and how they were formed, watch the below video: