Oliver CampbellChief Technology Officer · Essays & perspective
Field notes / Oliver Campbell
Chief Technology Officer · Canada
Dispatch 01 / Canada
Smart metering and grid visibility5 min read
Keeping the grid visible when normal tools fail
Ontario's first smart meters were bought to change how customers used electricity and were rarely used to run the grid. The replacement generation should be justified, sequenced and governed as an instrument for the low-voltage network, with the data rules published before the first meter goes on the wall.
Cyber security reports for distributors usually measure controls and maturity scores. The more useful evidence for a board is how long the control room has actually run the grid with its corporate network disconnected, and what broke when it tried.
Carbon capture proposals often reach boards quoted per tonne captured, at nameplate hours and with credit prices taken at face value. Directors should insist on the cost per tonne avoided, a realistic operating profile and a clear split between what the tax credit pays and what the carbon market must.
A leadership conviction
I trust a piece of grid technology when I know who owns its settings, what it does when its communications fail and how my colleagues will work if it is taken away. Most of my career has been spent finding numbers and connections that nobody owned: a recloser setting from another decade, a supplier's modem in a substation, a meter bought for the bill and never used to run the network. I would rather spend money on the unglamorous answer that survives a bad night than on the visible one that reads well in a newsletter.
Customers served by Quillmere Hydro
287,000
Homes and businesses in fourteen Ontario communities, 2026
Meter replacement programme
C$112m
Feeder-sequenced, 2025–2029; 121,000 meters installed by June 2026
Longest drill running the grid in isolation
72 hours
October 2025; the first drill, in May 2022, lasted nine hours
I judge a distribution utility's technology by how much of the grid we can still see, switch and defend after the weather or an intruder has taken the usual tools away.
I am chief technology officer of Quillmere Power Corporation, which is owned by six municipalities in central and eastern Ontario and, through Quillmere Hydro, delivers electricity to 287,000 homes and businesses in fourteen communities and the townships between them. I am responsible for grid control systems, metering, distribution automation, information technology, cyber security and data: 151 colleagues, a C$36 million operating budget and about C$47 million a year of technology and automation capital. I report to our president and chief executive, Aileen Strachan, and to the board's audit and risk committee every quarter on cyber security and technology risk.
I am a distribution engineer by training. I started in 1994 at a small municipal utility in northern Ontario and spent eleven days on mutual-aid crews after the January 1998 ice storm. At a maker of substation protection systems I learnt how suppliers reach into a utility's network. I ran a first-generation smart meter rollout for 96,000 customers, then spent six years at an Alberta oil-sands producer, latterly on a carbon capture pilot whose economics disappointed its sponsors. I came home to Ontario in 2015 and joined Quillmere.
Four questions occupy most of my week. What should a second generation of smart meters be for, now that the first has shown us what hourly data is and is not used for? How do we keep supply on, or restore it within hours, in freezing rain that we can no longer call rare? How would our control room run the grid if an attack took away its corporate network? And how do we work with the First Nations and Métis communities in and around our service area as partners in projects rather than as an approval to collect? My answers are partial, and I say where the evidence stops.
A meter programme sequenced by feeder
Our C$112 million replacement of 287,000 first-generation meters runs feeder by feeder, starting where heat pumps, vehicle chargers and voltage complaints concentrate. By June 2026, 121,000 new meters were in service, and their voltage and load data had deferred C$19 million of transformer replacements.
Automated switching before buried cable
After a February 2022 freezing-rain storm I argued for C$44 million of automated switching and covered conductor rather than C$138 million to bury the lines in two town centres. In the March 2025 ice storm, automatic switching restored 37,000 customers within five minutes of their faults.
A control room that has run for three days alone
We closed fourteen always-on supplier connections into our control systems and now rehearse running the grid with the corporate network disconnected. Our first drill, in May 2022, broke down after nine hours. The October 2025 drill ran for seventy-two.
Capture economics stated per tonne avoided
At an Alberta oil-sands producer I recommended a C$31 million pilot instead of a flue-gas capture plant whose cost we estimated at C$146 a tonne avoided, when the provincial compliance price was C$15. The pilot found solvent losses more than twice the supplier's estimate.
Current focus
I am preparing the technology evidence for our 2027 cost-of-service application, including the second half of the meter programme and a proposal to use meter and transformer data to defer capacity upgrades on fast-growing feeders. I am also working with a neighbouring First Nation's development corporation on a jointly owned substation and the data, access and training arrangements that should come with it.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking another executive role while the meter programme and the rate application are under way. I would consider one non-executive seat outside Ontario electricity distribution, away from Quillmere's suppliers, at an organisation where technology, cyber or climate risk is a board matter. I accept a few advisory and speaking conversations each year, with our chief executive's agreement.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Tillbrook CollegeMember of the board of governors · September 2021–present
Quillmere Fibre Inc.Director (executive appointment) · June 2020–present
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering in electrical engineeringDunmorrow University · 1994
Master of Engineering in electrical power systems (part-time)Carronbridge University · 2002
Oliver told this committee in plain words that his first isolation drill had failed, and why. We have since received a drill report every year, and each one has told us something the maturity score did not.
Graham PettigrewChair, audit and risk committee, Quillmere Power CorporationThe full record ↗
Contact
I am not seeking another executive role while the meter programme and the rate application are under way. I would consider one non-executive seat outside Ontario electricity distribution, away from Quillmere's suppliers, at an organisation where technology, cyber or climate risk is a board matter. I accept a few advisory and speaking conversations each year, with our chief executive's agreement.
