Reliable, Affordable Power for Today & Tomorrow
As we bid 2023 farewell, ringing in a new year serves as a time to reflect on where we are and where we’re going. As the general manager of Clearwater Power, I think about ways we can better serve you, the members of the cooperative.
Our team at Clearwater Power is always looking ahead, exploring ways to innovate and use new technologies to improve our services. As our nation increasingly relies on electricity to power the economy, keeping the lights on has never been more important. We’re committed to powering—and empowering—the communities we serve at a cost our cooperative families and businesses can afford.
We are working to ensure we have access to reliable and affordable power while adapting to a changing energy landscape and our members’ evolving needs.
One critical component of reliable power is the mix of energy resources used to generate the electricity that keeps the lights on in our service territory. Clearwater Power does not generate electricity. Instead, we buy it from our energy provider, Bonneville Power Administration. From there, we distribute it to homes and businesses throughout the rural areas we serve. Our energy mix is made up of 85% hydropower, 11% nuclear power and 4% other power, including wind and solar.
We depend heavily on hydropower to ensure we have reliable power that’s available to our members whenever they need it.
Clearwater Power also uses technology to enhance our local grid, limit service disruptions, and improve outage response times.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure allows communication between the cooperative’s outage management system and its members’ meters throughout the system. In the event of a power outage, AMI helps pinpoint the exact location of the outage and can analyze damaged or tampered meters. AMI helps Clearwater Power save money with real-time data and ultimately improves power reliability for our entire cooperative.
The protection system and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system upgrades we are installing allow our operations team to remotely monitor and operate strategic devices throughout the system. This helps crews identify and locate outage conditions more quickly, improving system uptime. The SCADA system also provides a significant amount of performance data, which gives our engineering team the information necessary to optimize, automate, and plan future improvements.
Drone inspections of lines, pole tops, and rights-of-way have allowed us to reduce labor and equipment costs while bolstering reliability. Through the use of drones, we can accurately monitor the health and growth of trees and identify potential problems.
Proactive tree trimming is another way we limit service disruptions. Scheduled trimming helps keep power lines clear from vegetation. As technology advancements become more accessible, we anticipate using advanced mapping software to better maintain our power line rights-of-way, providing even more reliable service.
1 of the best methods for improving our services to you is monitoring trends and implementing leading best practices from other electric co-ops across the country. Learning from other co-ops is one of the many benefits of the cooperative business model because, for us, it’s about cooperation, not competition.
In 2024, Clearwater Power will continue working to provide the safe, reliable and affordable electricity you expect and deserve— for today and tomorrow. Happy New Year!
K. David Hagen
General Manager/CEO
Clearwater Power