Amana Society Services Co  

Amana Society Service Co.

The Amana Society Service Company provides electricity and water utilities to the approximately 1500 residents and over 160 businesses in and around the seven Amana Colonies.  The Amana Society has been the provider of utilities for the Amana Colonies since their founding, but the Amana Society Service Company, Inc. was incorporated in 1936 as the provider of electric service for the colonies.  Water service was provided by each individual colony to its residents and businesses until the early 1970s, when this function was also taken over by the Amana Society Service Company.  While it is an investor-owned utility, owned by the Amana Society shareholders, it operates more like a municipal utility, providing street lighting and other miscellaneous services to the community, in addition to water and electricity.

The Service Company has, over the years, built a very modern and reliable system and now boasts underground electrical distribution lines to all seven colonies.  Recently, a project to convert all the customers to automatic meter reading technology was begun and will be completed in 2015. 

Electricity for distribution in the colonies is purchased through an electric buying group, the Resale Purchasing Group of Iowa (RPGI), an alliance of municipals, rural electric cooperatives and one investor-owned utility across eastern and central Iowa.  The aggregation of many smaller individual loads gives RPGI greater negotiating power to achieve the lowest possible rates for the customers of its members.  The Service Company also buys “green energy” from the 2.8 megawatt Amana Farms anaerobic digester, which processes beef cattle waste and offsite industrial and food wastes to produce methane and, in turn, to generate electricity.  The wastes, once processed through the digester, are stored in an 18 million gallon lagoon and land applied as crop fertilizer through the use of a nine-mile pipeline which distributes the wastes to much of the 25,000 acre land mass that is the Amana Colonies.  The Service Company also owns and operates a 24 megawatt diesel generating plant that provides storm protection and other interruption protection for the Amana Colonies in the event of an interruption in the supply of power from the transmission lines bringing in power from remote generation.  Ownership of this stand-by capacity also helps in negotiation of lower electricity rates for the Service Company customers.

In the past, the Amana Society Service Company also provided the telephone service for the Amana Colonies.  The telephone service company was sold to a private telephone service provider in the early 1990s.