107 A SPIRIT OF INNOVATION CHAPTER FIVE PowerMeter app. Two weeks before they were due to launch, General Manager Ryan Hentges learned Google was pulling out. NISC’s Meter Data Management System and later SmartHub provided the backstop. “It was just another example of the cooperative value of long-term investments in our Members and not just being here for the short term,” Hentges says. Mike Tirpak, then President and CEO of Northwestern Rural Electric Cooperative Association in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania,wasoneofthefirstathisco-optouseSmartHub. His first thought: Why is my energy usage suddenly so high? When he came home, he began looking around and discovered that a pipe had come loose in the drainage area near his garage. His sump pump was running nonstop, churning water but not removing it. He reattached the pipe and literally watched his energy usage go down. “At district meetings, some members told me they had figured out problems they had with water wells, heating systems and other things because of the [SmartHub] data,” he says. Tirpak retired in 2014 and moved to Florida. He asked Duke Energy if he could monitor his hourly usage, and they told him that the service wasn’t available. “We had better technology in northwest Pennsylvania than they have down here for electric utilities,” he says. “NISC Members don’t know how special they really are.” Imagine the amount of data it takes to create individual usage charts for millions of customers on SmartHub. Some Field Operations staff at Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative in central Illinois use tablets to track work, log notes, capture photos and perform other tasks using iVUE AppSuite.