Sangre de Cristo Electric Association, Inc. > Carousel > We launched a new website to better serve our members

We launched a new website to better serve our members

Paul Erickson
Paul Erickson CEO Sangre de Cristo

Sangre de Cristo Electric Association, Inc. is an electric utility company. We pride ourselves on providing our members with safe, reliable power. It’s critical to us to provide excellent service not only in providing that power, but also in providing excellent customer service to the roughly 12,500 consumer-members who mutually own this rural electric cooperative — that is you, our account holders.

We’re working on expanding our customer service options, as well as improving member access to information about the cooperative.

Last month, we launched a new website to better serve our members. Residents in our area often enjoy a very active lifestyle, and we get that. For many of you, it is simply not practical or convenient to do business at our headquarters in Buena Vista or call us during regular business hours.

We hope the new website will help provide a better consumer experience with an informative, attractive, easy to navigate, and intuitive website. We’ll be working diligently to improve the site and the usability of it for our members.

And fear not, we still provide the same in-person or by phone service, too.

One seemingly simple change is it is easier to read material on our site from a smart phone. Consumers increasingly use their phone more often than a desktop computer to browse websites. It is very important to us that our members are able to find our company’s information as it is practical and convenient for them to do so, whether they are at home or away.

We’re actively working to make the site even more useful as we learn what our consumers would like to access.

Among the things that consumers can do now on the site is start or stop service, apply for membership, submit information for rebates, read news about the cooperative, pay your bill or sign up for automatic bill pay, review usage and account information and review SDCEA’s rates and policies.

SDCEA began managing our Facebook page last fall. We also have a Twitter account. We’d like to use those tools to help communicate with our members during emergencies. We’d also like you to more easily get to know us and what we do here at Sangre.

Some other things we’d like you to know about us:

We’re headquartered in Buena Vista. In addition, a four-man crew, a staking engineer and a warehouse worker/custodian work out of our Westcliffe warehouse.

Sangre de Cristo Electric is a rural electric cooperative that has been in business for 75 years.

What we are:

  • A private, independent electric utility business
  • Unlike an investor-owned utility, we are not-for-profit.
  • Owned by the consumers that we serve
  • Incorporated under the laws of Colorado
  • Governed by a board of directors that you elect from the membership

What we do to serve you:

What is an electric cooperative?

  • Rural electric cooperatives like SDCEA started when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1936 establishing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA).
  • With the help of REA financial and engineering resources rural people organized a network of electric cooperatives to build and operate electric utility systems in their own communities.
  • The for-profit investor-owned firms who electrified the cities chose not to serve rural Americans because they could not make a profit in the sparsely populated areas.
  • Rural electrification became one of the great success stories of the New Deal, and today, there are almost 1,000 rural electric cooperatives providing service to more than 40 million people in 47 states, serving 75 percent of the U.S. land mass.

Take a look at our new online presence at myelectric.coop. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. You’re also welcome to give us a call at 719-395-2412 or toll-free at 844-395-2412 or drop by our offices if you have any questions about SDCEA and the services we provide.