Energy Education

“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.” This quote, from historian Daniel Boorstin, sums up the challenge that we face in the electric utility industry.

As we get older, we (hopefully) become fairly well educated and consider ourselves to have a wider breadth and depth of knowledge. We tend to have a reasonably good knowledge in our job and perhaps a few other areas. But it’s a big world and it’s difficult to be an expert in every field.

I have – at best – a cursory knowledge of farming. In fact, if we’re dependent on my farming skills to feed us, we’re all going to starve. Recently, a friend and colleague of mine told me about an innovation that he was using at his farm. He began using large grain bags as temporary corn storage. He tells me that this technique is used in other countries, but isn’t common in the United States. His farm uses specialized equipment that attaches to a tractor, which provides the power source for an augur that fills the bags. Each plastic bag is 10 feet wide by 300 feet long, holds 12-13,000 bushels and is not reusable. He described them as “Hefty bags on steroids.”

The point of the story is that this is something that I never knew existed, but this temporary storage can help make the difference in his farming operation being successful and grain being available when needed. That’s important. I now know something that I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

By its very nature, electricity is charged – positive or negative. Unfortunately, energy policy has become politically charged. That’s not something of our choosing, but it is the reality in which we operate.

That’s where we come in. We need to be their source of information. Because of the abundance of opinions – many of them incorrect – in the energy policy arena, we have an obligation to our members to provide them with facts. Many people are making decisions based on erroneous information.

Let’s help them know what they don’t know they don’t know.