VALLEY ELECTRIC history

Edwin Ballman and Emil Doerr founded Baldor Electric Co. in 1920 while Ballman was employed at Valley Electric.

A 1930 issue of The Iron Age.Valley Electric Corporation, 4221 Forest Park Boulevard, St Louis, manufacturer of ball-bearing electric motors, has taken over building at 2121 Westwood Boulevard, Oklahoma City, Okla., and will remove to that location and increase capacity.

Things began to change rapidly, however, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order on May 11, 1935, creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture charged with lending money to help get electricity to rural areas.

Chartered in 1936, SVEC maintains nearly 8,000 miles of electric lines and serves over 97,000 meters in the counties of Augusta, Clarke, Frederick, Highland, Page, Rockingham, Shenandoah and Warren in Virginia, and the city of Winchester.

The Cooperative was organized in 1937 by a group of farmers and businessmen from Crawford, Logan and Johnson Counties in west-central Arkansas.

In 1938 the company—still located in St Louis—incorporated, becoming Valley Electric Corp.

WRVEC first flipped the switch in 1939, bringing 505 members into the modern age of electricity.

In Henderson County and surrounding areas, New Era Electric Cooperative followed a similar path starting in 1940.

On June 24, 1941, the Alabama Electric Cooperative (AEC) was organized in Covington County to generate and transmit electricity to rural electric co-ops in south Alabama.

Based in Seattle and Everett, Washington, Valley Electric was founded in 1982 and has grown into one of the largest, full service electrical contractors in the Pacific Northwest.

After decades of growth, the two co-ops voted to consolidate operations in 1997 to form Trinity Valley Electric Cooperative, with a combined total of about 50,000 meters served.

In October of 1999, White River Valley Electric Cooperative (WRVEC) joined Touchstone Energy, a national alliance of local, member electric cooperatives.

In January, 2000, Dakota Valley Electric Cooperative was born.

In June 2005, Dakota Valley Electric Cooperative and a neighboring electric cooperative, Northern Plains Electric Cooperative, entered into an Agreement for Shared Services.

The system peak demand of 360 Megawatts (million watts) was set in June 2013.

On September 1, 2018, after much study and discussion, Dakota Valley Electric Cooperative and Northern Plains Electric Cooperative mutually agreed to dissolve the Shared Services agreement.

The Cooperative purchased more than 1.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity during 2020 with a system peak demand of 308,472 kilowatts recorded in the month of July.