SATCO Becomes Phone Company Pioneer in Solar

Mark Lundy of South Arkansas Telephone Co. and Mark Cayce of Ouachita Electric Cooperative have teamed up to offer broadband to customers in their market.

With the flick of an oversized dummy electrical switch on Monday, South Arkansas Telephone Co. became the nation’s first completely solar-powered telephone company.

Today’s Power Inc. of Little Rock, in coordination with Ouachita Electric Cooperative Corp., installed a 120-kilowatt solar array at SATCO’s location in Hampton (Calhoun County) that continued a surge of solar projects in OECC’s footprint in south Arkansas.

TPI, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas, dedicated a community solar project in Holly Springs in September, a one-megawatt array of nearly 4,000 photovoltaic panels on a five-acre site that gives co-op members a chance to subscribe to receive solar credits against their power bills.

Today’s Power also recently installed a solar industrial project for Husqvarna Group at one of its manufacturing facilities in Nashville (Howard County), and provided the solar array at OECC’s own headquarters last year in Camden.

OECC was also a central partner in a 100-acre solar field in East Camden that went online in March 2016 to power Aerojet Rocketdyne’s defense industry plant in Highland Industrial Park. At the time, the 12-megawatt facility, generating enough to power some 2,400 single-family homes, was the largest solar array in Arkansas. The solar contractor for that project was Silicon Ranch Corp. of Nashville, Tennessee.

“We are trying to make South Arkansas the most technologically developed, energy efficient and greenest part of the state,” said Mark Cayce, general manager and CEO of Ouachita Electric Cooperative. “We want to encourage businesses that utilize solar and energy efficiency” to consider the area. “We welcome your green business.”

Cayce also said that another cooperative effort with SATCO, called ARIS, hopes to give the region top-quality broadband internet access. To that end, ARIS has installed more than 100 miles of fiber cable across south Arkansas. South Arkansas has traditionally had some of the lowest rates of household access to the internet. “Both the energy and communications industries have great change coming soon with things like solar and broadband,” said Mark Lundy, director of SATCO. “We think both companies are positioned nicely to excel for our customers and owners.”