GRAF

Paul Graf

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PEC Board Vice-President
District 6 Director

Paul Graf serves as the District 6 Director for Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC). He was elected to the Board in 2015, reelected in 2018 and again in 2021. He served as President for 2 consecutive years from June 2018 to June 2020. In each of the other years he has served as Secretary/Treasurer, Vice President, or the Chair of the Audit committee. He is fiscally conservative and has remained consistently focused on safety, achieving lower rates, and improving reliability for Co-op members. A retired Energy and Power company executive, he works practically full time as a PEC Board Member, investing large amounts of time to the PEC and its Members. He believes he can still make a difference on the PEC Board and seeks your vote to continue working on your behalf.

Graf brings over five decades of electric industry knowledge and experience to PEC as an employee, executive, consultant, and Board Member of utilities such as CPS Energy, Central and South West, American Electric Power, and PEC. This knowledge includes power system engineering, design and operations; financial analysis; power contracting; distributed energy resource planning; rate making; and executive leadership recruitment and development.

Graf ran for the PEC Board nine years ago believing the electric rates were too high and desiring to serve as a Member guardian of electric rates and wasteful/unnecessary spending. Over the past nine years he and fellow board members along with staff have successfully fought to keep electric rates as low as practicable while seeking new sources of energy for the largest and fastest growing group of electric cooperative members in the United States.

"I will continue to work to keep pressure for the lowest rates possible. I take my fiduciary responsibility very seriously. PEC revenues belong to our members and will be conserved, and ultimately returned to you in the form of low-cost, safe energy, and capital credits. I am committed to ensuring PEC provides the electric service needed for the fast-growing region of central Texas for the lowest price possible."

Since joining the Board in 2015, Graf and PEC have:

REDUCED PEC Member electric bills significantly and managed them to be as low as practical while still maintaining strong cooperative financials. PEC has some of the lowest rates in the State and in the Nation.
RETURNED approximately $80 million to Members in Capital Credits and extra revenues.
CONTROLLED the PEC operational and capital budget increases to be funded from growth and not rate increases.
SUPPORTED a 5% growth rate in new meters making PEC one of the fastest growing electric distribution Co-ops in the nation.
PROMPTED LCRA to rebuild the transmission line causing all the problems in the southern portion of the PEC system around Antler Substation.
FOCUSED on continuously improving reliability to the members with excellent success. Through organizational changes and employee incentives, PEC has reduced its average interruption duration to one of the lowest in the nation.
STRONGLY ENCOURAGED AND TRAINED employees to always have safety paramount.
PROVIDED KEY LEADERSHIP on the search team that hired Julie Parsley as the new CEO which restored stability and pride to the Co-op after previously having seven CEOs in 9 years.
FOSTERED better working relationships between PEC and local government and community development entities.
SECURED additional land in Comal County on 281 for a new District office facility to serve the needs of District 6 Members.
SUPPORTED local organizations through an Opt-In "Power of Change" program that enables Members to round up their monthly bills to fund various charitable causes. No budgeted monies are used for charitable causes.
SPONSORED high school students through a generous scholarship program funded by escheat dollars. Only State escheat monies reimbursed to PEC are used for this program.

After every cold weather event PEC reviewed the results and made adjustments. Some of those adjustments include improving member communications during outages, using LIDAR to improve tree trimming practices, and enhancing the Outage Management System to handle a larger volume of simultaneous outages which include equipment failure outages and ERCOT mandated rolling interruptions. The linemen and front-line employees of PEC continue to perform quite well under extreme adverse weather conditions. The lack of significant outages during the recent January cold weather event is indicative of the improvements.

Paul Graf is a native Texan and has lived in Spring Branch since 2004. He graduated from Texas A&I University in Kingsville with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering, Summa Cum Laude. He is a Registered Texas Professional Engineer. Graf and his wife Debi are high school sweethearts. They have two adult children. In his spare time, he still does engineering and management consulting and enjoys hunting.