More than a utility: Chelan PUD builds a data-driven platform for the Valley economy

For most residents, Chelan County PUD is easy to describe. It’s the agency that keeps the lights on, the water moving, and the internet flowing. It maintains parks, operates dams, and sends crews out when storms knock down lines. From the outside, it still looks like a traditional utility, a piece of heavy infrastructure doing quiet, necessary work.

Inside the organization, the work has been changing.

“We’re really a technology company that delivers essential services,” said Ian Fitzgerald, the PUD’s chief technology officer. “Everything we do now is driven by data, systems, and automation. The physical assets are still there, but how we operate them has changed completely.”

That shift is not just about efficiency. It has changed what the organization is able to support.

In an economy that increasingly runs on tightly coupled systems, the PUD has become something closer to a platform than a provider. Whether the Valley’s output is apples, aluminum, or data, the inputs look more and more the same. Power, water, fiber, and reliability sit underneath nearly every major business story in the region. The more adaptive and reliable those systems become, the more the rest of the economy is able to build on top of them.

Over the last two years, the PUD has been working on what it calls its 2075 Vision, a long-range planning effort that asks what the organization needs to look like 50 years from now. The goal is not to predict one future, but to prepare for many, and to make decisions today that hold up across a wide range of possibilities.

Cybersecurity, wildfire risk, climate stress, grid reliability, and workforce succession are all part of that horizon. Underneath all of it is a recognition that delivering essential services is no longer separable from managing complex information systems.

One of the clearest examples is something most customers never see.

When power goes out, the response no longer begins with scattered phone calls and educated guesses. Today, the PUD’s systems know, almost immediately, which homes have lost power, how many customers are affected, and where in the network the fault likely occurred.

That awareness comes from several systems working together. Advanced meters report status in near real time. A geographic information system maintains a digital model of the physical grid. Customer information systems track who is connected where and which locations have critical needs. All of it feeds into what’s known as an Advanced Distribution Management System, which continuously analyzes incoming data and narrows failures down to specific devices or line segments.

“It tells us if a recloser opened, if a fuse blew, or if a line went down,” Fitzgerald said. “It tells us exactly which customers are out and how many. That lets us prioritize restoration.”

The same tools also make it possible to prevent some outages before customers ever notice them. By watching for patterns of brief voltage drops across multiple meters, the system can identify weak points before a full failure occurs.

“Nobody ever notices when something doesn’t go wrong,” Fitzgerald said. “But that’s actually where a lot of the value is.”

That way of thinking has become especially important as wildfire risk has reshaped how utilities operate.

In recent years, the PUD, like many utilities across the West, disabled certain self-healing features of the grid during fire season to reduce the risk that automatic re-energizing could start a fire. The tradeoff was straightforward. The system became safer, but outages lasted longer.

Rather than accept that as a permanent choice, the PUD built a different approach.

Using real-time data from weather stations, including wind, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, the utility now runs a continuous risk model during fire season. That information feeds into a cloud-based system that recalculates conditions every hour and adjusts how protective devices on the grid behave. In low-risk conditions, the system allows more automatic restoration. In high-risk conditions, it locks the grid into its most conservative mode. Operators can override it if needed, but most of the time the system manages itself.

The work was designed and implemented by an internal team led by Senior Electrical Engineer Hardy Thayer, Control Systems Engineer Trent Grigsby, and System Operator Marc Pothier. Together, they worked across engineering and operations to solve a problem that had become increasingly central to utility work in the West: how to be both safer and more reliable at the same time.

A pilot project in the Lake Wenatchee and Plain area increased reliability by 38 percent while maintaining fire safety protocols. The approach has since drawn national attention and is now being expanded to other parts of the system.

From a business perspective, the significance is not just that outages are shorter. It is that reliability itself is increasingly produced by data, modeling, and automation. Those same capabilities are what allow complex, energy-intensive industries to operate with confidence in the first place.

The same systems mindset shows up in how the PUD trains its workforce. At Rock Island Dam, the utility has built a full-scale digital 3D model of the facility and uses virtual reality to let divers practice complex underwater tasks before ever entering the river.

“They can learn the layout, the clearances, the work steps,” Fitzgerald said. “It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it reduces it.”

Looking ahead, Fitzgerald expects more of the PUD’s tools to move out of offices and into the field, shortening the distance between seeing a problem, understanding it, and fixing it. The aim is not to replace judgment, but to make better information available where decisions are actually made.

“You want the data right where the work is happening,” he said. “Not an hour later, not back at the office.”

There is also a quieter change underway in how the organization thinks about knowledge itself. One of the PUD’s long-term goals is to make sure critical expertise does not disappear when experienced employees retire. Capturing processes, decisions, and institutional knowledge in shared systems makes it easier for new employees to learn faster and for the organization to remain resilient over time.

“The purpose of technology, in my view, is to collect data, turn it into information, and use that to make better decisions,” Fitzgerald said. “If you do that well, you build resiliency into the organization itself.”

For many local businesses, this work is mostly invisible. But orchards, hospitals, schools, manufacturers, and data centers all depend on the same underlying systems. When those systems become more reliable and more adaptive, it lowers risk and expands what becomes practical to build and operate in the region.

“Our job is to enable other people to do what they do,” Fitzgerald said. “When they succeed, the community succeeds.”

From the outside, Chelan PUD still looks like a utility. Inside, it increasingly operates like the foundation layer of a much larger machine, one that supports everything from advanced manufacturing to large-scale computing to new ways of thinking about how resources move through the Valley.

If it is working the way it is supposed to, most people will never notice.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media