Heartland Rural Electric Cooperative, Inc.

Heartland Rural Electric Cooperative, Inc., a tax-exempt non-profit organization headquartered in Girard, Kansas, operates exclusively as a federal grant sub-recipient, delivering broadband infrastructure deployment and electric grid modernization services to state grantees administering federal broadband and grid-resilience programs. The cooperative has no prime contract or grant awards and does not hold seats on government-wide vehicles; all thirteen awards in recent years are sub-awards flowing through state entities as prime recipients.

Heartland's customer concentration is bimodal and reflects the structure of its sub-recipient role. The top two funding agencies — the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Energy — account for 100% of recent awards by count, though the customer split obscures the underlying grant programs. Eleven of thirteen awards reference the Department of the Treasury Departmental Offices, while two reference the Department of Energy. The cooperative's work has centered on broadband infrastructure deployment under what appears to be Treasury-administered federal broadband grant programs, with a secondary focus on electric grid resilience.

By dollar magnitude, the cooperative's largest exposure sits with a $13.347 million sub-award from the State of Indiana (prime grantee) dated April 28, 2022, for broadband infrastructure deployment across 4,452 passings in six Indiana counties (Allen, Grant, Huntington, Miami, Wabash, and Wells), with a local match of $72.334 million for a total project cost of $85.681 million. The project targets symmetrical 100 Mbps download and upload speeds, scaling to higher speeds where practical. In 2024, the cooperative received two sub-awards from the Kansas Corporation Commission (prime grantee) dated November 1, 2024, for installation of ten SCADA-controlled reclosers to enable power rerouting along existing lines serving Linn County, Kansas, and purchase of supporting communication equipment and installation costs. Combined dollars obligated across all thirteen awards total $147.6 million, though the sub-award structure means the cooperative is not the primary obligor on most dollars.

Activity appears concentrated in 2022, with eleven awards in that year and only two in 2024, suggesting a front-loaded grant cycle rather than sustained procurement volume. The cooperative does not compete for federal contracts and has not pursued prime grant awards; its footprint is limited to sub-recipient roles on state-led broadband and grid-modernization projects funded by Treasury and Energy programs.