Welcome to CobbEMCWatch.org, an initiative of the Cobb Alliance for Smart Energy, Inc. (CASE).  CASE is the independent voice of the Cobb EMC reform movement.  Our goal is to keep customers of Cobb EMC and the public informed on co-op issues. Please register with our site to receive Cobb EMC election updates. (We’re on Facebook, too.) CASE normally meets the second Tuesday of each month at 7:00 PM at the Rib Ranch restaurant, 2063 Canton Rd., Marietta 30066.

VICTORY!

The Cobb EMC Board of Directors on January 24 voted to end the co-op’s involvement in the Power4Georgians consortium committed to building the coal-fired power plant, Plant Washington.

MDJ report

AJC report

This decision, of course, has been the goal of the Cobb Alliance for Smart Energy since its creation in 2008—in response to CEMC’s announcement of its support for Plant Washington. CASE soon concluded that the scandal-laden co-op leadership under Dwight Brown would likely be incapable of adopting a sensible, 21st Century energy policy that did not depend on dinosaur, pollution-spewing fossil fuels to generate electricity. CEMC’s grant of a no-bid contract to develop Plant Washington to Allied Energy Services, headed by Brown’s business partner, Dean Alford, seem to CASE to provide further cause for concern. Allied Energy Services was previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Cobb EMC’s for-profit spin-off Cobb Energy.

CASE decided that the only way to preserve a clean environment and to restore clean corporate governance would be to bring about a change in Cobb EMC’s leadership by electing reform members to the Board of Directors. CASE for two and one-half years made that goal its number one priority. We launched a grassroots mobilization campaign to inform co-op members on the full range of issues facing the co-op and to prepare them to vote once the court-ordered suspension of elections was lifted. Most of you reading this newsletter were recruited during that campaign! We realized early on that members were eager to rid the co-op of its discredited leaders.

Our goal achieved initial success in November 2011 when four reform candidates were elected to the board. Meanwhile—exactly as CASE had predicted for over two years—the fact that the construction of new coal-fired power plants would be a colossal financial mistake became increasingly clear. Expert and member opinion coalesced around CASE’s warning that Plant Washington would be a boondoggle that would make the Cobb Energy fiasco look tame in comparison.

Now, suffused with new leaders, and, apparently, more enlightened decision-making by some incumbent leaders, the board has made the right decision. Let’s complete the process by returning to the polls on March 31 and putting six more new faces on the board.

The board’s decision points Cobb EMC in the direction of what it should have been and can now become: a leader not only In Georgia, but in the nation, in adopting modern energy policies already available that will benefit our pocketbooks, our health, and our environment. CASE looks forward to working with the new board to achieve that goal. 

To begin the dialogue, we have published on our Plant Washington pages links to the most important recent studies of Plant Washington and alternative energy solutions.