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Rural electric cooperatives - first created by local communities in the United States in the early twentieth century and later expanded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to electrify rural America - operate in decision-making environments fundamentally distinct from other parts of the energy system. Today, rural electric cooperatives provide electric power to forty-two million people in over twenty million residences, businesses, farms, and schools across forty-eight states. Rural electric cooperatives were formed to serve dispersed energy needs in rural areas and today they cover over 50% of the U.S. landmass. To serve this wide area, rural electric cooperatives own approximately 40% (over two million miles) of the nation's electric distribution lines, which connect electricity users to the electric grid.

While rural electric cooperatives are rapidly transitioning their energy supply mixes, they also hold significant debt associated with aging fossil power plants. Strategically transitioning rural energy systems toward cleaner energy sources would reduce the nation's contribution to global climate change and help ensure that rural America is not left with billions of dollars of stranded assets. Further, a cost-effective national transition to clean energy is likely to require both utilizing significant land area for deploying solar and wind resources and building substantial amounts of new power lines across large regions. Thus, the broad geographic coverage of rural electric cooperatives can enable them to be key players in the deployment of clean energy and its supporting infrastructure, which will bolster the benefits of the clean energy transition for rural Americans. (Klass and Chan, 2021)