According to a recent Today in Energy, published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), farmers make up a large share of electricity use in the industrial sector. A significant portion of a growers’ electricity needs is for farm irrigation systems, which are categorized by electric utilities as industrial load.

For example, Nebraska is largely rural and agricultural, but it has the third-highest count of industrial electricity customers in the U.S. The same factor drives up the number of industrial electricity customers in Idaho and Kansas, which are also among the top 10 states in number of industrial electricity customers. States with a large agriculture industry also tend to have among the lowest industrial sales of electricity per industrial customer.

EIA has found that because of the high cost of connecting dispersed systems to the electric grid, along with the high cost of adequate capacity available during peak load, farm irrigation systems can be costly to serve. For example, in keeping in line with electricity use in Nebraska, Dawson Public Power District, a rural electric cooperative in an agriculture-heavy region of Nebraska, accounted for less than 3 percent of statewide industrial electricity sales in 2012 but had one of the highest average prices for industrial power. In general, the highest industrial electricity prices in Nebraska tend to be located in the rural southern and western portions of the state.

The two largest utilities (Omaha Public Power District and Nebraska Public Power District) that distribute electricity for about 40 percent of all the megawatthours sold to industrial customers in the state in 2012.

To help address agricultural seasonal peak load issues, many agricultural-heavy electric utilities use demand-response programs to manage the costs of connecting a large number of small users to the grid. For example, Nebraska’s Dawson Public Power offers lower rates for agricultural customers who allow the utility to control the electric usage of these systems when demand for electricity is high, a form of demand response. This allows the grid operator to adjust the load shape in a given day and reduce the need to bring on more expensive sources of electricity generation.

For growers looking to reduce electricity cost through the integration of renewable electricity such as solar or biomass bioenergy, the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) program is accepting applications. The REAP program, part of the Farm Bill, aids growers in covering the costs to converting farm operations to more energy efficient and lower cost forms of energy.