I classify a cooperative's systems by what stops when they fail and count its future load only when someone has put money behind it, because members pay for both mistakes for decades.
I am senior vice president and chief information officer of Merrowind Electric Power Cooperative, a generation and transmission cooperative in Stillwater, Oklahoma, owned by seventeen distribution cooperatives in Oklahoma, southern Kansas and western Arkansas. Those members serve about 412,000 meters, mostly farms, small towns and oil-field loads. Merrowind owns 3,050 megawatts of generation and had revenue of US$1.46 billion in 2025. I am responsible for corporate technology, cyber security across business and operational systems, data, and the shared service that runs billing and outage management for our members. I report to our chief executive, Warren Achterberg, and to the board's audit and risk committee on cyber risk twice a year.
I started in 1993 as a staking engineer at Ossory Creek Electric Cooperative in north-central Oklahoma. I moved into control systems at Wessendine Public Power District in Nebraska, then spent twelve years at Hollensby Electric Company in Wichita, running first its energy management systems and then its billing, including a 2012 conversion I still cite as a warning. From 2015 I was chief information officer of Corvallen Energy Services, a Texas retail electricity provider, through the February 2021 winter storm. I returned to cooperatives in July 2021.
Three questions take most of my time. Which of our office systems, if encrypted tomorrow, would stop us scheduling, fuelling, settling or restoring power? How should a cooperative replace a billing system that has quietly stored thirty years of tariff decisions? And how much of the data-centre load our members are being offered is real? My answers have cost members money, delayed things they wanted and lost our billing service two of its participants.
Nine gigawatts of enquiries, counted once
Our large-load register showed that data-centre enquiries to our members totalling 9.6 GW were 41 distinct projects and 4.1 GW. Only the 610 MW under signed facilities agreements enters our base forecast.
Fourteen systems that could stop operations
Of 91 business applications, we classified fourteen as operations-essential and moved them into a separate enclave. In a planned test in November 2024 we restored all fourteen from offline copies in 19 hours.
Billing converted without an estimated bill
Ten cooperatives and 120,000 accounts have moved to our new billing platform in three waves, after their boards retired all but 296 of their rate codes. First-cycle exceptions have not exceeded 0.6%.
An outage model that points to the right fuse
After a 2023 ice storm we spent US$6.1 million correcting network connectivity data before buying a public outage map. Correct first-device predictions rose from 58% to 87% in the next major storm.
Current focus
I am preparing the final billing wave, 49,000 accounts at two members, for March 2027, nine months before the old system loses vendor support. I am also drafting the telemetry and load-reduction terms for every large-load contract, so that a 300-megawatt data centre is visible to our control centre and can be reduced in a grid emergency.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking another executive appointment before the final billing wave is complete. I would consider one non-executive seat on an audit, risk or technology committee at an organisation that neither competes with Merrowind nor sells to it, subject to our chief executive's consent. I take a few advisory and speaking conversations a year, mainly with cooperatives and public power utilities.
