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Discover how Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West in our new podcast, Western Watts!
We'll dive into the heart of energy issues, from reliability to wildfire mitigation, and share firsthand insights relevant to rural, agricultural and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
This podcast may contain certain forward looking statements concerning Tri-State's plans, performance, and strategies. Actual results may differ materially because of numerous factors, and Tri-State undertakes no obligation to update these forward looking statements. We urge you to review Tri-State's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of these factors.
Nick Franklin:I'm Nick Franklin, and I'm the telecommunications foreman for transmission maintenance east Colorado. Work out of the Northern Colorado Maintenance Center.
Julia Eshleman:Can you share a little bit about your background and how you got to Tri-State?
Nick Franklin:I came to Tri-State from the Navy. I served in the Navy for just over eight and a half years, and I started at Tri-State's Kremling Field Facility. Then had an opportunity fairly shortly after that to move down to the Front Range and work out of the Northern Colorado Maintenance Center. We moved here from Hawaii, so it was a big change to go to Kremling from Hawaii for my wife. At the time, I would have told you I was a communications expert, but I got here to Tri-State and I realized very quickly that the knowledge and experience I had didn't translate very well to the utility industry.
Nick Franklin:I think it gave me a good base of foundation to learn through the apprenticeship program. Military, obviously, safety is paramount, and a lot of those core safety values are mirrored in Tri-State safety culture as well. It was good to see coming to the Tri-State team, seriously Tri-State takes safety and the continued focus on providing all the necessary safety equipment you need to perform your job.
Julia Eshleman:Can you just kind of explain to me what telecommunications is?
Nick Franklin:We provide visibility to system operations for the status of substations. Our communications network is set up in a way that we have several redundancies built in, and we use our communications network to provide real time visibility of our substations. Our system operations can remotely operate a lot of the equipment at the substations through our communications network, and we carry IT traffic in between many of the field locations. The power marketing department monitors the real time metering through the substations and the generation facilities and makes a lot of their decisions based off of that information they're receiving over the telecom network. A real world example, whether it's ice build up on lines or maybe a tree gets into a line, system operations is gonna be able to see which line and which substations are affected through the SCADA information they receive over the telecom network.
Nick Franklin:SCADA is supervisory control and data acquisition, and it provides all the status and control points for system operations. Additionally, if there is a fault on the line, the relay communication channels are gonna allow the place to function much faster to trip that line off, hopefully protect the equipment on the end.
Julia Eshleman:Where are we headed and what kind of work is being done?
Nick Franklin:We are headed to Erie Communications site, which is also in the Erie Switchyard. Today, we are performing maintenance on the communications equipment at ErieCon. The majority of those communications for the TME region come through the Erie Communications site. The vital sites for all the remote sites to communicate. We are performing routine maintenance today.
Julia Eshleman:What does routine maintenance mean for telecoms?
Nick Franklin:For telecom, routine maintenance is testing our equipment and ensuring it's performing as expected. If we're talking about a radio, for example, we're gonna measure the performance levels, the performance values of the radio, and ensure that the radio is reliable when needed.
Julia Eshleman:I don't think people know what substations are. I don't think people know that there's telecommunication running through the line.
Nick Franklin:It's tough. We have such a wide range of responsibility in telecom, and we are in a unique position where we do get to work closely with the substation technicians regularly on capital projects. We get to work closely with the linemen. If there is overhead fiber optics that they're pulling in for us, then we get to coordinate with system protection or either testing existing system protection infrastructure or testing new channels that we're turning up for a new delivery point.
Julia Eshleman:It's hard. You're almost working seamlessly.
Nick Franklin:Ring of communication that goes around the entire state of Colorado, for example. And the reason they develop it that way is if you lose communications in one section of the ring, it can continue to communicate the other direction. Where we have issues is if there's an outage in two sections of the ring, we could potentially lose communications to the whole state of Colorado, which happened recently where in Eastern Colorado, South of Brush, there's a section of fiber optics that we share with WAPA, and they had a planned outage. So they took that section of fiber out of service. And then on the Western Slope, there was a fire that burned a section of buried fiber optics, melted it, and took that fiber out of service.
Julia Eshleman:Was that the Lee Fire up near Meeker?
Nick Franklin:It was. And with those two outages on opposite ends of the state, system operations lost visibility to over 44 substations. Fortunately, my team was in a position to respond to that outage, called out in the middle of the night and troubleshoot with the communications center, and we're able to restore communications to over 44 substations.
Julia Eshleman:How did you fix it? Because the fire was still burning. Right? Like, you don't go in while it's still burning. Right?
Nick Franklin:No. So over on the weaker side, there was nothing they could do at that time to restore the communication. I worked with the communications center to determine where we may have an option to restore that fiber, and we were able to go out and reestablish connectivity through that section that WAPA had been working on.
Julia Eshleman:How deep is fiber buried?
Nick Franklin:Typically, a minimum of five feet, but we have a section of fiber that goes underneath I 25 down in Monument, and it's very 20 or 30.
Julia Eshleman:I guess you'd have to replace all that stuff in Meeker since it melted. Right?
Nick Franklin:Yes. They'll do a temporary repair at first. That would either include burying it deeper or they may choose to transition to overhead fiber if that's an option. We'll typically bury some orange conduit or inner duct in the ground, and that just adds an extra layer of protection. But they do make direct burial fiber.
Julia Eshleman:Is that fragile because it's so small?
Nick Franklin:It's not too bad when it's inside of the jacket, the plastic that it's inside essentially. But when we have to splice it, we strip all of that back. We cut the outer jacket off and then there's tubes inside of there called buffer tubes. Typically, if we have a 48 count fiber, there's four of those with 12 fibers in each. We'll cut those tubes away and get down to the individual fibers.
Nick Franklin:And even the fiber themselves has a cladding on the outside to color coat them. So there's a color standard. You expose the glass core and it's glass resin. You bend it enough, it's gonna break. It's kinda hard to imagine, but it's more than the diameter of piece of your hair.
Julia Eshleman:How do they even manufacture that?
Nick Franklin:They just smell glass and
Julia Eshleman:Well, like those candy pulling videos.
Nick Franklin:I think they do, to be honest. You can get a reel of fiber like OPGW, the optical ground wire fiber. I think you can get a reel of two miles of unbroke
Julia Eshleman:Glass sounds insane.
Nick Franklin:Glass tube, glass core that they just shoot lasers down, and the lasers bounce through the glass. It's so efficient. We don't know the maximum capability of fiber yet. Japan just achieved over one petabyte per second of data transfers. Petabyte is a thousand terabytes and a terabyte Thousand terabytes.
Nick Franklin:It's insane. Right. Terabytes, a thousand gigabytes. They said you could download all of Netflix in a second.
Julia Eshleman:That's insane.
Nick Franklin:They achieved that through a process called DWDM, dense wavelength division multiplexing. But that glass core that they're shooting lasers down, they shoot multiple lasers at different frequencies to achieve those kind of data rates. We have a DWDM system that tries to use this, but we're not downloading all of Netflix in a second.
Julia Eshleman:Can you give people, like, a high level list of maintenance tasks?
Nick Franklin:At a communication site, everything we test includes checking the performance levels of the radios. We test the dark fiber, which is unused fiber optics to ensure that it has continuity all the way through from the site we're at to the next point. And we test the fiber muxes to ensure that they're performing as expected. We're also responsible for the site maintenance itself. So we inspect the building, the foundations of the building.
Nick Franklin:We test the function of the backup generator for power. We're also responsible for testing the communications on the batteries at these sites and in substations. In the event of a power outage, the intention is that a lot of this equipment will continue to operate on battery power and continue to provide that visibility for system operations until power restored.
Julia Eshleman:As a foreman, what is your role?
Nick Franklin:As a foreman, my role is to ensure all of our preventative maintenance is being completed as well as coordinate with the other teams within transmission maintenance and our member utilities on capital projects.
Julia Eshleman:What kind of hours do you and your guys typically work?
Nick Franklin:Typically work seven to 05:30, Monday through Thursday, but we are on call twenty four seven. There's scenarios where we may be called out after hours to restore communications path if system operations loses visibility of a substation. In the event of a storm job, my team may be called out to ensure that communications between the affected line are still intact.
Julia Eshleman:How many of those work hours is drive time? Is that included in that?
Nick Franklin:Drive time is absolutely included in that. I'd say on average, my team drives 500 to a thousand miles a week. You certainly have to take into account drive time when you're coordinating work at some of the more remote locations.
Julia Eshleman:How do you prepare your crew before working on critical communication infrastructure?
Nick Franklin:I prepare my crew before working on critical communications infrastructure by reviewing the scope of the work well before the work is scheduled and ensuring that they have all the resources they need to complete that job successfully. That includes coordinating with the telecommunications engineers, making sure the designs are complete and the necessary materials ordered. Then we will often have meetings with the engineers and the construction, anyone that's gonna participate in that project to coordinate what tasks my team needs to complete. We get it on the calendar and make sure everyone shows up where they need to be when they need to be there to get the job done.
Julia Eshleman:How is new technology changing the work you do?
Nick Franklin:There's a lot of new technology that's impacting how we operate within telecom and at Tri-State. We're working closely with the telecommunications engineers to deploy more reliable equipment systems over fiber optics and radios to carry data for Tri-state. We're also transitioning away from older TDM technologies to either carrier Ethernet or MPLS. TDM is time domain multiplexing.
Julia Eshleman:Is it you're able to communicate more, or is it that it's faster, or is it that it's both?
Nick Franklin:Yeah. The communications technology that we're migrating towards is gonna allow us to communicate more information faster. There's a higher demand for information.
Julia Eshleman:Speed is one of the most important things when addressing an outage. Right?
Nick Franklin:That's true. Obviously, if there's a line outage, you're gonna know because there's gonna be power out. Right? The local REAs are looking to try to stay in many scenarios for support to restore those lines. And the communication system that we have in place provides detailed system operations oftentimes regarding what may have caused that line outage or where the line outage got started.
Julia Eshleman:What does it mean to you to maintain communication lines and keeping power reliable? Or maybe it keeps you here at Tri-State. Why do like your job?
Nick Franklin:So to me, the importance of communications in the telecommunications team is operating in a way that supports the core function of Tri-State, which is providing reliable, affordable, and responsible energy to our members. I believe that Tri-State would not be able to meet that mission without telecom. We have a unique opportunity to work with all disciplines, whether we're working with the linemen to turn up new OPGW fiber optics, that's optical ground wire fiber optics. They hang that fiber for us, and then we have an opportunity to terminate it and connect it and establish communications to potentially a new substation that's providing power for equity. We're also supporting the sub techs by providing communication status for their equipment.
Nick Franklin:And we're also providing phone circuits at the substations, which is important for safety and coordination.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.