An engineer who learnt to distrust a map that no longer matched the line

The first system I relied on was a paper map. In the summer of 1993 I joined Ossory Creek Electric Cooperative in north-central Oklahoma as a staking engineer, two months after finishing an electrical engineering degree at Arkenridge State University. My job was to design line extensions to farms, grain dryers and oil leases, and the cooperative's record of which transformer served which member lived on hand-drawn sheets in a cabinet behind the dispatcher. During an ice storm in my second winter I watched crews drive twice in one night to the wrong side of a section line, because a tap had been moved and the sheet had not. Nobody had been careless. The map had simply stopped describing the line it was meant to describe. I have spent much of my career since on the same problem in more expensive forms.

At Ossory Creek I also built the cooperative's first remote monitoring link to its substations, using leased radio, a borrowed laptop and a manual I read twice. That work took me in March 1998 to Wessendine Public Power District in central Nebraska as a SCADA engineer. Nebraska is served entirely by public power, and Wessendine's directors were elected by the customers they served. I learnt early that such a board asks about a failure in the language of its neighbours, not of engineers. I studied for a master's degree in information systems in the evenings at Hartsell University, finishing in 2002, by which time I was supervising the district's operations technology.

In June 2003 I joined Hollensby Electric Company in Wichita, an investor-owned utility then serving about 560,000 customers in Kansas, to run its energy management and SCADA systems. In 2009 the company asked me to take over customer information and billing, partly because the replacement of its billing system was in difficulty and partly, I suspect, because nobody else wanted it. The new system went live in October 2012. In its first two cycles about 38,000 bills were delayed or estimated, the state commission received several hundred complaints and I presented the review to the audit committee early in 2013. The software was not the root cause. We had carried more than 900 rate and rider combinations into the new system without asking which were still needed, and each had to be configured, tested and explained. A billing system, I concluded, is where a utility's old pricing decisions go to hide.

I moved to Texas in April 2015 as chief information officer of Corvallen Energy Services, a retail electricity provider owned by a private equity sponsor, with about 410,000 residential and small-business customers in the competitive market. Retail electricity in Texas runs on thin margins, frequent switching and hedging, and technology is most of the operation: enrolment, meter data from the wires utilities, billing, collections and the call centre. In February 2021 the winter storm left millions of Texans without power for days, and wholesale prices sat at the market's cap. Our customers were on fixed-price plans, so the losses fell on Corvallen, but the bills were my problem. Meter data arrived late and incomplete, and I recommended to our chief executive that we hold 61,000 bills for up to three weeks rather than send estimates to people who had spent days in cold houses. It cost cash at the worst moment. The sponsor sold our customer book that summer, and my role ended with the transfer.

I came back to cooperatives in July 2021 because Merrowind's chief executive described a job I recognised: a cooperative whose systems had grown up around its power stations, and a shared technology service for members that nobody had redesigned since the 1990s. Two months before I arrived, a ransomware attack on the business network of a US fuel pipeline company had led it to shut the pipeline for several days. Our board's first question to me was whether something similar could stop Merrowind. The honest answer was that we did not know which office systems the control room, the gas schedulers and the trading desk depended on, and I spent my first year finding out.

I work best with people prepared to tell me in writing that I am wrong. My team writes a one-page decision note for anything that will cost more than US$1 million or change what a member cooperative does, and the note carries the dissent as well as the recommendation. I ask for the records behind a number before I repeat it, especially a large one. People who have worked with me would say that I am slow to call a system finished, that I spend more time with linemen and billing clerks than most technology executives and that I distrust any dashboard I have not seen fail.

Open to Board appointments · Advisory roles · Speaking invitations

Languages / English