Todd Moore

The Need for Speed Broadband – it’s not just for web surfing anymore. Having access to high-speed internet is becoming essential for more than just sharing funny memes and videos. Small businesses use it for quick and easy payments, doctor visits can take place right through an iPad or PC and education harnesses the power of connectivity at just about every grade level. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to high-speed internet. And even for some that do, that access can be lacking tremendously. That’s what Jenni Smith and the employees at Oklahoma Electric Cooperative in Norman, Okla., discovered. “We have a lot of schools in our rural areas that have terrible internet service,” said Smith, who serves as the manager of enterprise applications for OEC. “Also, a lot of the current providers, and only providers that are out in the rural areas, are really overcharging. They provide poor service, very slow speeds and they’re just charging too much. We’re big about wanting to serve our community and membership, and this is a service that we can provide them.” As OEC was getting ready to run fiber lines to their substations in order to help improve connectivity, the need for high speed broadband to their community drove the organization to expand their rollout and get members online. Building Interest in Broadband Implementing a broadband rollout is a large undertaking for any organization. The physical rollout and staffing requirements need to be determined. Every organization wants to use resources efficiently and minimize added work for staff. One thing that can dramatically help with a broadband rollout? Interest. With the help of NISC’s SmartHub Connect, which combines the customer engagement portal of SmartHub with the marketing and analytics [...]

Offering broadband services helps public power utilities achieve two goals at once. For one thing, they can incentivize economic development in their service area. They can also add a new source of revenue to help offset any decline in electricity sales. “The electric industry is evolving rapidly as energy efficient products proliferate in homes and businesses, so more and more people are using less and less of our product,” said Jeff Dykes, president & CEO of BrightRidge in Johnson City, Tennessee. “We must diversify our product offerings to stabilize our electric rates.” Plan Put in Motion BrightRidge became nimbler several years ago, converting from a municipal utility to an energy authority, and resumed consideration of offering broadband services. Costs were prohibitive when first evaluated almost a decade ago. To bring down costs — and to make its broadband offering more attractive to customers — the utility adopted a hybrid approach, offering fiber optic service in urban areas and high-speed wireless broadband service in the more rural areas of its service territory. Last July, BrightRidge’s board of directors approved an eight-year, $64 million plan to offer broadband services. In September, the utility cleared its final regulatory hurdle when the Johnson City Commission approved the plan. BrightRidge expects that over time its new broadband division will reduce pressure on electric rates with new electric system revenue from interest payments, as well as shared leases and personnel. It is estimated that the broadband division could generate $41 million in cumulative revenue to the electric division by 2030. BrightRidge began the first phase of its program in early 2019, running fiber optic cable to downtown Johnson City, nine industrial parks, and downtown Jonesborough, as well as initiating wireless service [...]

From the smallest of Members to the largest, NISC products and solutions have a proven track record of meeting our Members’ needs while providing an outstanding return on investment. The very largest of those Members is experiencing the benefits after more than three years of utilizing NISC’s iVUE® enterprise system. Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC), headquartered in Johnson City, Texas, employs about 800 people and serves about 264,000 members across 8,100 square miles. It’s the largest electric distribution cooperative in the United States. PEC has experienced significant cost savings and operational gains utilizing NISC’s enterprise software since its implementation in 2014. The project stands as NISC’s biggest deployment of its iVUE software to-date. PEC's Challenges PEC serves a large and diverse service area within a region called Texas Hill Country, which fans westward from Austin, Texas. PEC’s membership is growing rapidly: From 2017–2018 alone, the co-op grew by nearly 15,000 members. On top of navigating rapid growth, PEC has historically faced exorbitant consultant and paper costs and underwent frequent integrations and testing of several third-party applications. “We needed something that was easy to use, especially for the employees who have direct contact with members. We wanted an easy mobile bill payment solution for our members, and we wanted something that would drive our contractor costs down and our total cost of operation down. The good news is, we got all of those things when we got iVUE,” said Lawanda Parnell, PEC chief information officer. “We are very happy overall with the iVUE system,” said DeLisa Evers, PEC director of support services for member relations. “I have heard members and agents say they wouldn’t go back for anything. They feel it’s the best solution we could have [...]

Two co-ops join forces to boost OSS/Billing integration and support With its OSS/Billing provider of 15 years preparing to replace its existing platform in 2017, Canby, OR-based DirectLink decided to see what kind of improvements it might be able to realize by evaluating what other OSS/Billing providers had to offer, according to Sharon Puhlman, Member Services Support Supervisor for the cooperative, which currently serves more than 8000+ members. The triple-play provider continues to see steady growth across a wide demographic – from farmers to commuters – within its ~100 square mile rural serving area adjacent to Portland. While most members have two or three types of services and make changes from time-to-time, others do not change anything in a three- or four-year time frame, according to Puhlman. In business since 1904, DirectLink takes great pride in its current 90% positive customer service ratings. Many of the company’s 60 employees live and work shoulder-to-shoulder with the co-op’s members in Canby and Mt. Angel, which gave DirectLink all the more reason to choose the very best OSS/Billing platform on the market. Identifying Priorities “No OSS has everything, but when we began looking at what other vendors had to offer, we knew we wanted to work with a company that would provide us with better and more localized support on a consistent and timely basis,” said Puhlman. After all, DirectLink offers its own members a 24/7 technical support line. Expecting the same strong support from its future OSS/Billing supplier made sense. “Our reporting and other needs evolved and demanded more complexity that we were not able to create on our own,” she explained. “Our cost for reports depended on what we needed done and how long it took [...]

Hannibal, Missouri’s dedication to historical preservation offers visitors a sense of what the small city on the banks of the Mississippi River may have looked like when Mark Twain walked its streets more than one hundred years ago. While Hannibal’s residents are proud of the city’s history, its 115-year-old public power utility realized that it needed to break free from its historical way of doing things to better serve its customers and adopt more efficient ways of doing business. By leveraging the latest technology applications, Hannibal Board of Public Works, which provides electricity, water and sewer to the city’s 17,800 residents, has quickly been able to improve operations in many areas including customer service and field work. Until recently, when field workers for Hannibal Board of Public Works had trouble finding a meter or underground asset, they had to call back to headquarters for help. Calling seemed a bit dated in an age of texting and apps. And the task at headquarters was gargantuan. Staff had to “dig through a mountain of books,” eight-inch-thick binders, about 11,000 pages in all, searching for the address, says Matthew Jones, who serves as senior information technology specialist for the public power utility. “As you’d be looking through the antique pages, you would hope that they would not disintegrate,” he says. Eventually these documents were made available electronically but only accessible from an office computer. Similar problems existed in locating water system and hydrant valves. The records were particularly vague for buried equipment, and again only available on the office computer. “The measurement was from the back of the curb or center line of the road. Trying to locate all that in the middle of the night during a [...]

It seems like every day brings news of a new cvbersecurity threat, whether it is a sophisticated phishing attack or the latest malware developed by bad actors. No utility, large or small, is immune from cyber attack. While they recognize the seriousness of this issue, many public power utilities are not sure how to track potential threats or put defenses in place. The path is complex and can seem daunting. A robust option to monitor threats is the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center portal run by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. The E-ISAC portal monitors threats specific to the nation’s electric grid and sends alerts to all subscribed utilities. In terms of taking action to protect against threats, the American Public Power Association’s Cybersecurity Scorecard is a good starting point. The scorecard is an online self-assessment tool to help public power utilities understand their cybersecurity strengths and weaknesses. Along with a score on their cyber posture, utilities completing the self-assessment receive personalized recommendations on systems and processes they need to put in place. John Kuhlman, Information Systems Manager at Decatur Utilities (DU), Alabama, with 165 employees, noted that the utility’s last IT audit showed that employee cybersecurity training needed to be strengthened. “Increasingly, all of our systems and staff rely on the Internet. We are constantly pushing and/or pulling electronic data to and from our customers, vendors and contractors. With that, we expose ourselves to all kinds of cyber risk,” he said. The utility took the risk of cyberattack to heart and decided to partner with National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC) to bolster their programs. The St. Louis-based information technology organization develops, implements and supports software and hardware solutions for more than 850 [...]

Murray, Ky., is known as one of the most livable and friendliest cities in Kentucky. Its unemployment rate, cost of living and commute times are lower than the national average. It has plentiful recreation. And it boasts a college — Murray State University — which consistently ranks as one of the top U.S. regional universities by the U.S. News and World Report. One other little-known fact — Murray, a public power city, is a pioneer in the bundling of electricity with cable TV and high-speed Internet services. It all began back in 1996, when city officials were unhappy with the incumbent cable TV provider and the monopolistic franchise that it enjoyed. They asked Tony Thompson, who was interviewing for the job of general manager of the city’s electric utility, Murray Electric System (MES), if he was willing to take on broadband as a new project. “Not having enough experience or good sense to know otherwise, I said ‘Well, sure, I can do whatever you want to do,’” joked Thompson. But it wasn’t always easy. Private Internet and cable service providers Bellsouth, Time Warner and others opposed the effort. They conducted legal and public opinion campaigns to try and stop the project, generally arguing that since they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to provide internet services — all the while needing to pay taxes and make a profit — quasi-governmental bodies such as utilities shouldn’t compete with them. Their argument didn’t hold up under Kentucky law. Plus, an independent telecommunications feasibility report identified several advantages of the project, among them the advantage to several anchor institutions in the city, including Murray State University, the local hospital as well as industrial customers, of immediate access to [...]

To meet community demand and provide more competitive solutions to end-consumers, utilities are expanding their traditional utility-specific operations to include broadband, cable and phone services. End-consumers want a one-stop-shop to simplify the signing up, payment and ongoing management of their home-related services. However, providing these additional services requires not just infrastructure expansion for a utility, but also utilizing software solutions to manage resulting daily tasks and operational needs. In January of 2018, National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC), a fifty-year-old technology leader in both utility and telecom markets, launched phase one of iVUE Connect™ Service. iVUE Connect™ Service leverages NISC’s existing utility-based Customer Care & Billing solutions that today effectively manages electric, water, gas and more traditional utility services, to also now include management and provisioning of broadband and cable solutions, all on a single platform. Phase two will enable regulated phone billing and management. “In response to the market, NISC recognized the opportunity to bring decades of our telecom experience into our utility software,” said David Bonnett, NISC Vice President of Product Management. “We are able to support the needs of community-owned utilities that have limited resources and need efficient and affordable solutions that unify customer care and billing across all services.” With over fifty years of experience in providing solutions for telecommunications and utility companies, NISC’s development of iVUE Connect™ Service to merge these industry-specific software solutions is a natural evolution. The result is a powerful, single platform to manage customer requests, seamlessly provision broadband and cable services, while also leveraging existing integrated solutions like outage, trouble ticket management and mapping, to provide a complete enterprise solution to meet expanding utility service needs. Recently, Murray Electric Systems (MES) located in Murray, Kentucky, a pioneer [...]

Prior to deploying NISC Operations Analytics (OA), Cass County Electric Cooperative in Fargo, N.D., was feeling inundated with time-series data, unsure of how to turn that data into something manageable and helpful. “We deployed Operations Analytics because we wanted to improve system efficiencies,” said Bryce Johanneck, meter data management technician for Cass County Electric. “Our previous way of managing our distribution system relied on a lot of time-series data. You’re giving it a monthly reading and another monthly reading, and you’re doing some time series analysis on that. Operations Analytics is a great way to utilize a very robust AMI system to make pertinent engineering calculations on your system.” One major feature of NISC Operations Analytics that has proven crucial for Cass County is the transformer loading module. The functionality has allowed them to easily identify transformer issues and move them around to make better use of oversized transformers at existing services. “Using OA has definitely saved us money and prevented us from having major issues,” Johanneck said. “We’ve upgraded transformers prior to outages which would have otherwise been very difficult or next to impossible because you had to aggregate all of that Member data at one location. It’s proven very beneficial.” Johanneck also stressed the importance of having clean source data and paying attention to your AMI system and how it is modeled. Having good, usable data along with OA will provide a very accurate and reliable engineering model. “Today, a lot of us aren’t very good at keeping our source data clean,” Johnneck said. “You have plant changes, additions, removals and your engineering model is now quickly out of date, especially if you’re in an area where there are a lot of changes. [...]