Prairie Land Electric Cooperative, Inc. is a member-owned, not-for-profit, full-service rural electric cooperative serving almost 14,000 members with over 24,000 meters in parts of 18 Northern Kansas Counties. Headquartered in Norton, Kansas, Prairie Land Electric has more than 80 full-time employees that maintain and operate nearly 7000 miles of line.
Office Addresses:
Headquarters:
14935 US Hwy 36, P.O. Box 360
Norton, KS 67654
785.877.3323
Service Center:
223 West 5th Street, P.O. Box 469
Concordia, KS 66901
785.243.1750
Toll Free Phone Number:
1-800-577-3323
Our offices are open from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.
For after hours outage reporting, call 1-800-577-3323.
To make automated payments by phone at any time, call 1-844-241-0263
Electricity is a unique product in that it can't be stored. It must always be on the move until it's used, and it has to be delivered in just the right amount needed by the consumer. A wholesale supplier generates the electricity, and uses transmission lines to provide it to the utility distribution provider that purchased it.
Electricity can be generated from coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, water and biomass.
Prairie Land Electric gets electricity from a Generation and Transmission cooperative called Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, based in Hays, Kansas. Sunflower Electric owns and operates generation and transmission assets that crisscross 36 central and western Kansas counties. Sunflower was created in 1957 by six rural electric cooperatives in western Kansas, including Prairie Land Electric, because they needed assurance they would have a reliable long-term power supply available to them at a price lower than what each individual cooperative could obtain independently. For more information on the sources of the power generated by Sunflower Electric, click here.
Prairie Land Electric is a distribution cooperative and the direct point of contact with the electricity consumers. Distribution cooperatives purchase power at wholesale from a G&T and deliver it to members by reducing the voltage and transferring it to smaller distribution lines that allow it to travel safely to the consumer.
The mission of Prairie Land Electric Cooperative, Inc. is:
to improve the quality of life for our members and support our communities by providing safe, reliable energy services and education.
Our core values are:
SAFETY • RESPECT • INTEGRITY • UNITY • ACCOUNTABILITY
In the Fall of 1938, interested citizens of Norton and Decatur counties met in various places for the purpose of organizing a rural electric company to bring the conveniences of electricity to their farms. Other efforts having failed, they were convinced that in order to get the job done they would have to do it themselves. The Norton-Decatur Cooperative Electric Company, Inc. received its charter on October 13, 1938 and became the first rural electric cooperative in Western Kansas.
The first meeting of the board of trustees was held at the City Hall in Norcatur, KS on November 7, 1938. The first certificate to operate as a utility was issued by the Kansas Corporation Commission on December 13th that same year. The area covered by this certificate was along Highway 383 from 8 miles east to 20 miles west of Norton and also an area south and west of the City of Norton.
The first meeting of the members was held at the City Hall in Norcatur on February 14, 1939, with 30 members present. The first Norton-Decatur office was in two rooms in the Broquet building in Norton rented for $13 per month. Norton-Decatur's first loan from the Rural Electrification Administration was granted on May 19, 1939 in the amount of $88,000 to construct approximately 104 miles of line. The section of that construction was energized in February 1941. Due to wartime material shortages, further construction became virtually impossible. Power was purchased from the City of Norton.
On January 1, 1997, history was made when the Northwest Kansas Electric Cooperative Association merged into Norton-Decatur Cooperative Electric Company, Inc. The Norton-Decatur territory now included counties from the Phillips/Smith county line westward to the Colorado border. The first annual meeting of the merged cooperative membership was on April 3, 1997. An important item on the agenda for that meeting was the announcement of the merged cooperative's new name: Prairie Land Electric Cooperative, Inc.
History was made again on April 1, 2007 when Prairie Land and the other five members of Mid-Kansas Electric Company, LLC completed an acquisition of the West Plains Kansas electric properties owned by Aquila, Inc. With that transaction, Prairie Lands electric service area extended eastward to include customers in Smith, Osborne, Jewell, Mitchell, Republic, Cloud, Washington, and Clay counties. Several counties already in the Prairie Land service area (Rooks, Phillips, and Norton) gained new customers from the acquisition as well.
