Chelan County Public Utility District
Steve Wright is the General Manager of Chelan County Public Utility District.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Tell us about Chelan County PUD. What part of the country are you in and how large is your utility?
Steve Wright: Chelan County is in north central Washington, close to the Canadian border.
We're at the base of the North Cascades Mountains. The reason why Chelan has the generating resources it does is the Columbia River is the eastern border of Chelan County.
That led to the opportunity to own and operate some large hydropower facilities and the opportunity to produce an amount of power, which is more than five times the load we have. It's an unusual utility in that regard, as we have a substantial wholesale marketing portion of our responsibility and a relatively small retail load.
PUF: You must have some of the top hydro experts around?
Steve Wright: Yes. We're proud that we have put together something called the Hydropower Research Institute. The concept was that big data needs to be applied to hydropower, and we have more opportunities to collect data than we did historically.
We have better sensors, and better ability to understand what's going on inside our turbines. It's useful to do that with your own turbines. You multiply the benefit when you can get that data applied to turbines across the country.