Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now.
I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's News Director.
Our guest on this episode is Erin Keyes, Utilities Director for Columbia, Mo.
Erin started in her new role as Utilities Director in late May after serving as the Utilities Department's Interim Director since March 2025.
Erin, thanks for joining us.
Erin Keys
Thank you for having me.
Paul Ciampoli
Erin, in preparation for this interview, one of the things that jumped out at me is the fact that you spent more than 25 years working at the City of Columbia in a wide variety of roles.
So to get our conversation started, I wanted to give you the chance to provide additional details on those roles.
Erin Keys
When I initially started with the City of Columbia, I was the first stormwater utility engineer that the city had hired.
They had just recently created a utility -- the city did -- and I was the first engineer they hired for that. I did a lot of storm water work. I did some public works work as well.
It was in the public works department at that time.
Then I actually left the city for a few years and did some work for a non-profit. And then when I came back, I continued to do some storm water work and then eventually moved into sewer utility work as well.
Then both of those utilities got moved into the utilities department.
And it was about that time that I was promoted to be the engineering and operations manager for both the sewer and storm water utilities and that eventually turned into being the assistant director.
But basically I was over all of the operations of the wastewater plant and the collection system, the storm water system and engineering for both of those utilities.
So, of course, learning about operating a utility, budgeting, rates.
I did a couple bond elections with the voters and things of that nature. So got my feet wet in the utilities and then I had the opportunity to serve as the acting assistant director for the electric utility.
And, of course, it continues to be a learning curve for me because electric is quite a bit different than sewer and storm water.
We've got our own power production facilities and our own control room with all the associated regulations. We've got a distribution group and an engineering group there as well and so similar to the other utilities.
But again, electric has a lot of unique things about it as well.
So doing that for two years I think gave me an advantage over the other candidates when I interviewed for the director job, which now is the director of utilities -- that also includes not only sewer, storm water and electric, but I also have water, solid waste and we also have our own railroad, the COLT Railroad. So yeah, it's quite a large role, but I'm enjoying it so far.
Paul Ciampoli
I noted at the start of our conversation that you had served as interim director, so against that backdrop…you probably had some priorities or things you were focused on as interim director that perhaps carried over into your now current permanent role as utilities director.
So against that background, what have been your immediate priorities since taking on your new role as the permanent utilities director?
Erin Keys
I did have some priorities, but I have to tell you, when I started serving as interim, there were two major things that that happened within a month of me taking the position.
There was a small tornado here in Columbia and it destroyed our material recovery facility for solid waste, which is in fact one of the utilities…so it destroyed our facility that handles all of our recycling.
And so had to jump into action and figure out what to do next -- how does the city handle its recycling? What do we do with the employees that were working in that facility, dealing with insurance and next steps and all those things.
And so that's one thing that I'm still currently dealing with and the other was quite a serious incident that we had occur where a line worker got injured very seriously. And so that was another thing that right from the get go monopolized a lot of my time in trying to address those issues and how do we move forward and dealing with staff – there were staff there that were able to actually save his life.
But there's just a lot of issues around all of those kinds of incidents that just take a lot of time.
So initially I was dealing with those quite a bit, but things have started to settle down and just trying to keep all the daily projects moving with all those utilities, they all have significant projects that are going on and trying to support staff.
So that's really been one of my priorities is supporting staff as much as I can. One of the big things I need to do is hire some assistant directors to help me. Right there's three assistant director positions that are vacant and so trying to get folks to support all of our operations in that role and then each utility has its own set of projects and goals and things that we need to move forward on and so just trying to incrementally move forward on each of those is definitely a priority.
One of the things that I feel like I've kind of grown up with the city of Columbia and I felt like we've been innovative in a lot of ways especially in sewer and storm water where I came from and so to try to bring that to all the utilities to try to look at each of our problems a little differently and see what kind of good solutions we can come up with for that benefit our community.
Paul Ciampoli
You mentioned some specific job openings that are available at the utility now, but I guess the question that popped into my mind related to that or occurred to me is how concerned are you overall in terms of workforce and perhaps more specifically recruitment for future workers.
Erin Keys
That's been a bit of a roller coaster for us here at the City of Columbia. There was a period of time where we were having significant difficulties hiring staff and we had a significant number of vacancies.
And that's one of the things I'm dealing with now -- some of the deferred maintenance that that occurred during that time frame.
Thankfully, the City Manager and City Council moved forward with some significant compensation adjustments for our staff and for the various positions.
And so we're at a much better place now where we're able to hire staff and retain staff. And so that is our challenge for the city as a whole is to continue moving forward with that.
On the electric side, I've been very thankful -- our line worker group and our substation techs and in those sort of positions, we've been able to maintain a good group of employees and we're starting to really see some really good applicants for those positions and hire into them.
Our control room has been a little bit more of a challenge, but we've seen some success with that in the last year as well.
So I would say we're moving forward. We just have to continue to maintain competitive compensation, I think, and train our own as best we can to fill some of the higher positions as they grow with the city.
Paul Ciampoli
You mentioned earlier that there's a wide range of departments under the overall utility umbrella, but I wanted to take the opportunity in our conversation to talk specifically about the electric side and more specifically power supply planning.
I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about how the utility currently approaches power supply planning and also if you could discuss the projections for power demand over the next several years.
Erin Keys
My one word response is complex. It's very complex.
We are a small community and so I'm sure compared to much larger power companies, my issues are small potatoes.
But we have some challenges ahead of us with regard to power supply. I think our recent auctions in the MISO capacity markets show that there's some serious capacity concerns from MISO and so Columbia is also going to need to address those as well.
We do annual load forecasts of course that look out 15 years and we want to make sure that we can support both our energy and our capacity requirements as a member of MISO.
We're currently forecasting about a 1% increase each year for load. We are a summer peaking utility, but we are seeing increases in both summer and winter, so as we look at forecasting, we're having to look at -- we've got a number of fossil fuel retirements coming in the near future. We have a significant interest in our community to move towards renewables and then trying to balance some of that intermittent load with more of a baseload.
We've got electric vehicle adoption and electrification issues coming in the forefront.
And we've also had some data centers that have reached out to us that have interest in our community, but we currently don't have some of that infrastructure needed.
So that along with everybody else's issues, tariffs and environment regulations, all those things, we're trying to balance all of those as we look forward and so we're going to need to investigate some additional power purchases or maybe even constructing our own generation and those are some big and heavy conversations we're going to have to have with the City Council and the city in general.
So we're hoping to move forward with an integrated resource plan to get started on one of those to really help us dive into where we need to focus our energies because there's so many avenues out there to explore. It's a little overwhelming at the beginning spot for me.
Paul Ciampoli
A common theme that I've noticed with a lot of public power utility executives is we've talked about just the high level, at least from my perspective, unpredictability these days in terms of power supply planning, right?
You've got this ever-changing mix of regulations and data centers -- seems like there's more news about that every day, but that's still a relatively new phenomenon.
So I guess it sounds like you would agree with the idea that that unpredictability is a watchword with this.
Erin Keys
That’s exactly right and it's becoming evident -- not only our forecast of what our loads are going to be but looking at weather forecasts and just all the variables that are out there.
We need to figure out ways to be flexible with our power, and that's not always an easy thing to do.
Paul Ciampoli
One other quick question if I could, which cropped up -- maybe this is indirectly tied into supply planning -- is have you guys looked at all or thought about… utility scale energy storage?
Erin Keys
We recently did a study, had a consultant do a study for us, on batteries and how that might fit into our system and what that might look like and make sure that it wouldn't damage our system, obviously. So that's one of the things we've started looking at.
But again, it seems like we've got a bunch of different ideas and now we need to bring those together with an integrated resource plan to figure out what makes the most sense for us moving forward. Where are we going to get the biggest bang for our buck as far as spending that ratepayer money wisely and effectively to support a reliable system into the future.
Paul Ciampoli
And is there with respect to the integrated resource plan, is there perhaps even a non-formal schedule in terms of next steps for that?
Erin Keys
The next step will probably be getting a task order with the consultant to help us develop that and then I'm sure we're going to need to do some significant outreach with our customers to one, explain the situation, but then to get their input on what they see as important as we move forward.
Paul Ciampoli
Erin, just for my last wrap up question for you, I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell our listeners about any ongoing or recently completed utility projects you'd like to highlight?
Erin Keys
One of the things I didn't mention when I discussed the tornado earlier, in addition to it taking out our material recovery facility, it actually wiped out a significant portion of one of our transmission lines that we were in the process of replacing the poles for and of course the tornado hit the pole that we hadn't replaced yet and took down about 30 other poles.
So that was a significant event that we had to address and we had mutual aid of course to help us with that, but with that in mind, one of the things that we are trying to focus on is replacing a lot more of our transmission poles that are past their useful life.
We recently got notification that we've received a grid resiliency grant to help us with that and so as we move forward, like I said, I feel like there's been a lot of deferred maintenance.
And so as we move forward, I'm excited that that's a big project that we'll get to start working on…replacing some of those old transmission poles that we have.
And then we also have two substations that are undergoing some major upgrades. We're upgrading the transformers, adding transformers, replacing switchgear. Again, some of those substations have gotten past their useful life and we're using bond money for that.
We do have a transmission project that we need to move forward on with the City of Columbia, but it's had a lot of turmoil over the last years about how to do so and so I'm hoping we can move forward with that as well to support the reliability of our system.
And then unfortunately we're a little behind the times and we don't currently have advanced metering infrastructure, so I really look forward to moving forward with that here in the next couple years, implementing that and I think that'll really help us with some of our demand side management techniques.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, I've read a lot of stories lately about how it seems like there's always new things that that utilities can leverage with advanced metering.
Erin Keys
Exactly and I think that'll be a big benefit to our customers and to our utility as a whole, so I'm anxious to get moving forward on that as well.
Paul Ciampoli
You mentioned with respect to the substation work, transformers.
I was just curious as to whether there's been any kind of ongoing supply chain challenges related to procuring those transformers.
Erin Keys
With these particular very large transformers -- I don't recall the exact timeline -- I think initially they told us it was going to be like a two year delivery date and they backed off quite a bit on that and I think it's down to about a year. We were pleasantly surprised by that.
Not long after COVID, we were having significant supply chain issues with the much smaller transformers you see in the neighborhoods and things – we were having very significant delays on those and even difficulty finding companies that would bid on those at all. And then of course the prices for those just went crazy.
So I think since that time -- since about 2022 -- I think things have calmed down considerably with transformers and lead times.
Of course, the prices are still quite a bit up there. I don't see those coming back down really at all. I would say it's gotten a little better for sure. But it's not -- based on what people tell me about how it used to be -- I don't think we're there yet and maybe we won't be.
Paul Ciampoli
Erin, thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with us.
I would love to have you back at some point in the future.
There's a lot of topics I'm already curious about following up with you in the future with that integrated resource plan being one of those that we could perhaps revisit in another episode.
Erin Keys
Absolutely.
Paul Ciampoli
OK. Well, thanks again, Erin.
Erin Keys
Thanks so much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.
Paul Ciampoli
Sure thing.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA.
I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
