CALAIS – Maine’s largest electric cooperative has joined the Washington, D.C.-based Touchstone Energy Cooperatives, a national alliance of local, consumer-owned utilities, utility officials announced Thursday.

EMEC is the 626th cooperative to join the national organization.

The cost to the co-op is about $10,000 a year.

In making their announcement, EMEC officials said they believed that pooling resources with other cooperative utilities would help amplify the same message they have always communicated – that Eastern Maine Electric is a different kind of utility because it is owned by those it serves and because it is part of a national network of cooperatives.

EMEC officials also said that joining Touchstone Energy was also a renewed commitment to higher standards of service.

“We had been trying to communicate the cooperative’s difference by ourselves, with our own efforts,” EMEC chief executive officer Jim Dean said in a prepared release. “Aligning with Touchstone Energy gives us new tools for getting that message out. We think that Touchstone offers so much more – ways to involve local business, find potential sites for new industry to locate. Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out Touchstone Energy-related programs that will underscore the benefits of cooperative membership.”

Among the advantages of the Touchstone co-op are:

. High standards of service for all customers, residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural.

. A branding initiative that communicates electric cooperatives’ unique characteristics in a changing marketplace where these values and differences matter more each day.

Touchstone emphasizes the significance of each electric cooperative’s local presence and ties to its community, but offers the resources of a nationwide network to bring added value and benefit to customers.

Charlie McAlpin, EMEC’s manager of communication, explained why the co-op joined now. “We were looking at new ways to get our message out, and as we started looking at our options, we realized the answer was right in front of us the whole time,” he said. “It’s also a renewal of a commitment to a high quality of service and there are programs that we will be talking about in the near future that will be of a direct tangible benefit to people.”

Among the projects and activities sponsored by Touchstone are television ads on all the national networks and print ads in national magazines and newspapers, including Reader’s Digest.

Eastern Maine Electric has often been a leader in marketing and technology.

“Eastern Maine Electric was the first utility in the state to use widespread automated meter reading,” Dean said. “The Turtle meter reading system was funded by research dollars from co-ops like EMEC. Now it’s also used by investor-owned utilities like Maine Public Service as well. By improving a utility’s efficiency, this technology saves energy users money.”