Shelby Energy customers:

The annual meeting for your rural electric co-op is Thursday, June 25, 2009. Here is information about the annual meeting from the Shelby Energy website:

Shelby Energy Cooperative plans to hold its 72nd annual membership meeting at the Henry County High School, Thursday, June 25, 2009.  Registration will open at 4:30 p.m. with the business meeting starting at 6:30 p.m.

If you are Shelby Energy customer, your electricity comes from the East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC), which generates and transmits electricity to each of the 16 rural electric co-ops (including Shelby) in eastern and central Kentucky. EKPC is proposing to build a new coal-burning power plant in Clark County that is estimated to cost $766 million dollars.

Rather than taking out a high-interest loan that co-op customers like Shelby Energy customers will have to pay for, EKPC should invest aggressively in energy efficiency, weatherization, and renewable energy. If they did this, they could avoid the financial risk--as well as the health and environmental risks--of a coal burning power plant...and good, local jobs could be created throughout all the counties served by the co-ops.

Co-op members are encouraged to attend their local co-op annual meetings to learn more about the voting process during the business meeting and to have conversations with the representatives on the co-op's board of directors. Tell the Shelby Energy board members that they should not support the new Smith plant, but that they should support more energy-saving programs and clean, renewable energy.

For more information about how stopping the Smith plant and investing in energy efficiency and renewables is the right decision for co-op customers, visit KFTC's pages by clicking here.

For more information on the Stop Smith campaign which KFTC, the Kentucky Environmental Foundation, and the Cumberland Chapter of the Sierra Club is part of, visit our other pages by clicking here (or follow the links on the top left of this page). You may also contact KFTC organizer Sara Pennington at sara@kftc.org or call 606-276-9933 for more information before or after Shelby's annual meeting.