How Electricity Gets to Your Home

Understanding the Journey of Electricity with Jones-Onslow EMC

At Jones-Onslow EMC, we know electricity powers your everyday life—from brewing your morning coffee to turning on the lights at night. But many people don’t think about how that electricity gets to their homes. As your local electric cooperative, we believe it’s important for our members to understand the journey electricity takes and the role we play in delivering safe, reliable power to you.

First, it’s essential to know that Jones-Onslow EMC is a distribution cooperative. That means we don’t generate electricity ourselves. Instead, we purchase it from large power producers and then deliver it directly to homes and businesses throughout our service area. Think of us as the local team that makes sure electricity gets where it needs to go—quickly, safely, and efficiently.

Here’s a simple breakdown of how electricity reaches your home:

1. Power Generation: It all starts at a power plant. These facilities generate electricity using a variety of fuel sources, including natural gas, coal, nuclear energy, and renewable sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower. The electricity generated here is what eventually powers your home.

2. Transmission: After generation, electricity travels over long distances through high-voltage transmission lines. These large towers and lines carry power from the generation plants to substations located closer to your community.

3. Distribution: This is where Jones-Onslow EMC steps in. From the substations, we take over. Our network of poles, wires, transformers, and underground lines distributes electricity throughout neighborhoods, towns, and rural areas—right to your front door.

This last step is at the heart of what we do. We maintain and operate more than 2,400 miles of power lines, serving over 71,000 members across many communities. Behind the scenes, our crews work day and night—in all weather conditions—to monitor the system, respond to outages, and ensure that power is delivered safely and reliably to each member we serve.

As a member-owned cooperative, we’re not just your power provider—we’re your neighbors, too. Our focus is on serving you, not shareholders. That’s why we invest in our system, improve reliability, and look for ways to keep costs reasonable and service dependable.

Understanding how your power gets to your home helps you see the big picture— and the vital role each part of the process plays. We’re proud to be the link that brings electricity from generation to your doorstep, and we’re committed to keeping that connection strong every single day.

For more information about how we deliver power and how you can manage your energy use, visit joemc.com.