Our History
It all began with the Rural Electrification Act and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. The Act put funds in place for farmers to begin building their own electric lines to farms and homes in the rural areas. These areas had not seen the expansion of privately-owned utilities and municipalities who felt the profit potential was not worth the investment needed to set poles, string wires, and deliver electricity.
So, the federal government financially backed the people in the rural areas allowing them to organize into cooperatives to buy and supply electric power to themselves. As cooperatives, the people buying the electricity would also own the provider of the electricity.
Now Southern Indiana Power is one of 17 cooperatives in southern Indiana generating and buying electricity as a unit known as Hoosier Energy. Hoosier Energy is located in Bloomington, Indiana.
Southern Indiana Power supplies electric power to over 8,500 homes and businesses in the rural areas of Perry, Spencer, southern Dubois, and eastern Warrick counties. We maintain over 1,600 miles of power line.
We’ve gone through some significant changes over the years. One of the most recent was our name change. On June 20, 2008, Southern Indiana Rural Electric Cooperative, Inc. became Southern Indiana Power.
How We’re Organized
There are four main departments at Southern Indiana Power: Office, Engineering, Operations, and Member Services (Marketing). The employees that make up these four departments have been trained to provide you with the exceptional service you expect and deserve.
This department includes some of the ladies you see upon entering our doors. Our office staff communicates to members who visit or call the office, takes payments, corrects bills, does our internal record keeping/finance work, and handles all other day-to-day administrative work needed to run the cooperative
Any time a member installs a new electric service or adds a service, they talk to our engineering department. This department gathers information, plans, and coordinates adding new services to our cooperative. Our engineering department has a system engineer, one staking technician, and an administrative assistant. Our system engineer maintains all the information by computer about our different line sections, substations, loads, and occasional problems. Our staking technician inspects potential new projects to determine what equipment is needed and what work must be done to bring the new service on-line.
The people from our operations department are the ones you see along the roads working on electric lines and poles. They are trained to operate a variety of equipment and are easily identified by our company logo on their uniforms and vehicles. When a new electric service is installed, a member adds a security light, or there’s an outage, these are the hardworking people you see any time of the day, in any kind of weather, doing all they can to keep your electric service reliable.
This department provides valuable information about electrical services including all of our programs, offerings/rebates, not to mention bill inserts, Indiana Connection magazine, direct mailings, energy efficiency ideas, as well as distributed generation knowledge.