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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.
Travis Berg:It's flattering to know that it's called lineman appreciation. That's great, but there's so many other groups that we've talked about here today. The telecom and our subtechs, our warehouse folks, our fleet people, our mechanics. I mean, I can go on and on. Thank you to all of you that don't get that recognition because you're a huge part of it.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thank you for joining us for Western Watts. I'm Elizabeth Schilling.
Julia Eshleman:I am Julia Eshleman. And today, we have the
Elizabeth Schilling:pleasure of speaking with mister Travis Berg. Travis, thank you for joining us.
Travis Berg:Thank you.
Elizabeth Schilling:Alright. So let's start with a little bit about your background and your role at Tri-State.
Travis Berg:I've been in the industry right at thirty years, just a little over. Most of that time has been here at Tri-State. I came to Tri-State in 2002, and previous to that, I spent about seven years with one of our neighboring utilities that's also a G and T. My role today with Tri-State is vice president of transmission maintenance.
Elizabeth Schilling:Let's talk about the teams, the people behind it. Which are the specific teams that you oversee at Tri-State
Travis Berg:I'm over the telecom department, the substation department, and the transmission line department.
Elizabeth Schilling:So all three of those are key pieces of what makes transmission work?
Travis Berg:Exactly. The roles and responsibilities primarily of our department is to keep the lights on. Our folks go out and do a lot of the maintenance, preventative maintenance on our equipment, our power lines and telecom equipment. That's our primary responsibility as well as responding to any outages and unexpected situations.
Julia Eshleman:There are a lot of people that really don't understand even if you say, oh, I'm telecoms, and they might understand what that means from, like, a Verizon wireless thought, but I don't think people understand. Like, they've seen a switchyard. They've seen a transmission pole, but they don't know that those are insulators hanging down. They don't know that there are circuit breakers in the switchyard. They don't understand the difference in all the lines.
Julia Eshleman:I think people see it, but I don't think they really understand any portion of it.
Elizabeth Schilling:When we talk about transmission, we're talking higher voltage. Right? What's the main difference between transmission lines and distribution lines?
Travis Berg:We supply the big power, if you will, to the substations and our members. From there, it's transformed down to a lower voltage and then sent out on distribution lines to the end user, to your house, and your facilities. Our voltages range from the smallest being we have some 69 kV lines in the south, then our primary is 115 through 345 kV voltages. A lot of your distribution voltages are a 7,200, a 14 4, 12 5 things of that nature. So a much smaller voltage.
Elizabeth Schilling:It sounds like getting from wherever the power is created to where it needs to be used, transmission is a huge part of that. What is something that you think is misunderstood about that transmission work in general?
Travis Berg:I think the public's used to seeing your distribution, the REA linemen and folks that worked there, the substation people, more often than you see the transmission. We've got a big footprint. We're in four different states. We have close to 6,000 miles of transmission line. There's nearly 500 substations across our entire region.
Travis Berg:Then on our telecom, we have just over 800 telecom sites as well. All of this sounds like a lot, but when you think about it, we're so spread out you don't see us that often. I don't think people quite see or understand the difference between the distribution folks that work distribution and the transmission because you don't see us as often. When we are out and about, we're typically not in town. We're out in the middle of nowhere.
Julia Eshleman:6,000 miles, 500 substations, and then 800 telecom sites. How many transmission employees do you have covering all that?
Travis Berg:There's right at a 160 of us total. There's a few layers of management in there that aren't in the field, but we're at a 160 employees in the maintenance.
Julia Eshleman:A 160 people watching over hundreds, hundreds of sites and miles. That sounds like a ton of work.
Travis Berg:They stay on the move quite a bit. That's why you don't see us very often.
Julia Eshleman:How do you manage scheduling and keeping up with that amount of resources?
Travis Berg:That typically falls primarily on our supervisors and foremen, as well as some of the managers in looking at that and taking care of each region. It's divided out into three different regions. We have supervisors and foremen for the three different disciplines. That really falls on them to evaluate what is most important and not and what time of the year they may address certain tasks.
Julia Eshleman:With all those resources. And I know that you guys prioritize reliability and safety. But does it feel like managing all those resources, it's drinking from a fire hose, or does it feel under control?
Travis Berg:Personally, it's not that bad because I've got such great folks underneath me that manage it so well. It is a lot to take care of, but most of them have been doing it for a long time and have got it figured out.
Julia Eshleman:What's the time sink it takes to even enter this industry?
Travis Berg:Most of the time, we typically hire somebody that's been through a trade school, whether that's an electrician type school or a lineman school. There's some accelerated programs out there, but generally we say it's a minimum of one year. Then if you're fortunate enough to make it through the interview process, we then have a four year program. I believe there's eight steps in four years that you would go through. You typically need a year to two years of schooling, and then there's a four year apprenticeship at most any of the utilities you go to anymore.
Elizabeth Schilling:Let's talk a little bit more about what the work looks like for each of those groups. For alignment, what does their work look like on a day to day?
Travis Berg:It consists of annual patrols as well as any outages and then maintenance, anything that they found from those patrols that they go out and repair and fix after the fact.
Julia Eshleman:Can you define what patrol means for alignment?
Travis Berg:In those nearly 6,000 miles, there's almost 40,000 different structures ranging from wood to steel, single pole, H frame structures, things of different natures. Through that and our structure replacement program, we identify as well, which comes through those inspections, the structures that need to be replaced. We do a lot of our pole testing in house now. We're able to identify poles and structures that have rot below ground line, things of that nature, and then we put those into a replacement.
Julia Eshleman:How long does a pole typically last?
Travis Berg:For our system, it's not unheard of to see sixty plus years out of a wood pole. We're pretty fortunate through the four states that we have that were fairly arid, which leads to long lifespan of water poles. You'll a lot of times start to see degradation around that forty year on up.
Julia Eshleman:I've seen tall, basically, like a solid metal transmission poles. You have the wooden h frames, and they're called H frames because they kinda look like an H, and the really large lattice structure. That's all those pieces of metal put together. What's the rationale in between picking either one of those types of pull?
Travis Berg:Primarily, that's decided on by our engineering department, but I can speak a little bit of what goes into that. It would be the voltage, first of all, our 345 k v and voltages are typically on your steel lattice type structures so that you can get the clearance. The conductors are heavier. They sag more, so you need to get higher in the air to maintain clearance to the ground. That plays some of it as well as terrain.
Travis Berg:What are you going through? Are you going through the Western Plains Of Nebraska and through New Mexico where it's relatively flat, or are you going across the mountains in Colorado?
Julia Eshleman:Do linemen need different types of training per transmission pole type?
Travis Berg:Yeah. So I wouldn't say maybe training is so much different as the tools that they would use, the climbing tools for steel as opposed to your wood, things of that nature. But generally speaking, though, there's not a lot of different training. Some of the Pert man rescue training certainly is different between a steel structure, more specifically lattice than it would be on an H a wood H frame type structure.
Elizabeth Schilling:We've learned a little bit about line work. Let's talk about substations. I feel like sometimes line work can be a more visible job, but there's a lot of critical things that happen inside of substations based on them being the points where things are coming together. Can you tell us about what makes that substation work either especially complex or high stakes or unique?
Travis Berg:The substation guys, they have nearly 500 across the entire system, whether we own those or they're owned by others, we have equipment that we maintain inside of those substations. Those folks deal as you referred to it as a hub. The lines come into it from any and all directions, and the fiber optic from the telecom group is coming in there as well. And that's where all of our transformers are breakers and relaying, metering, everything sits inside those substations. Those guys have a big task monthly, weekly, sometimes daily in maintaining those substations and that equipment.
Julia Eshleman:I learned recently that those things that look like giant party hats in the substation are actually circuit breakers, which makes me realize the whole thing is like a mad science experiment. It almost looks like Frankenstein. The things that are like, my creature lives, and he pulls the switch. We have a bunch of those in the substations, and those are these gigantic circuit breakers, which makes sense for the voltage. But until someone literally told me last week, I didn't realize that that's what those were.
Travis Berg:So the transformer's the one that looks like a party hat with the bushings coming out of it as well. The transformer step up and step down voltages. Our voltage that comes in is typically a 115, a 230, or a 345, and that can be stepped down to a lower level so that we can eventually get it to our customers. The circuit breaker, on the other hand, is before or after and sometimes both sides of the transformer, and that interrupts the electricity so that if we need to take a line offline and de energize it, we would open circuit breakers at each end assuming that it has circuit breakers at each end. But they both look they both look similar.
Travis Berg:One's way bigger than the other.
Julia Eshleman:Do we wanna talk about how telecoms also gives operations visibility on outages? Without that communications piece, you wouldn't be able to tell what's going on with the line, especially in these really rural sites.
Travis Berg:The telecom is the eyes, if you will, of dispatch or the outage coordinators. When your lights go out at your house, it's not always on the transmission side, but through our telecom system and equipment, our operators are able to see and verify that it is or isn't on our side of the system. Our fiber optic system gives them visibility of what our system's doing in the substations. And make adjustments through that fiber system, they're able to open circuits, open breakers, close breakers, and change the system up. The telecom and the subs intertwine in that aspect, meaning a sub tech may do some maintenance on something that is telecom related and occasionally vice versa.
Julia Eshleman:As a lineman, did you ever work where there wasn't telecoms running with the line? How was pre-telecoms versus post-telecoms?
Travis Berg:The telecom is probably the least visible of the three disciplines that we have here at Tri-State. However, the importance of what they do and the equipment that they take care of is huge. When I started in the industry, I guess that was 1994, the company that I was at previously had what we called a messenger wire on the transmission lines or a carrier wire, if you will. It was an insulated shield wire at the top of our 345 k v lines. That was the primary way years ago of communicating between substation to substation.
Travis Berg:Now when you look up at a transmission structure, you'll see the two little wires up there. One of those was this messenger wire. We've removed most of that throughout our system. There's still a little bit left in the Wyoming area. But nowadays, it'll be a OPGW, an optical ground wire, that has been put in its place.
Travis Berg:Almost all of our new construction will be outfitted with an OPGW. Things have changed quite a bit and that allows us and our operators to see the system and verify what system is and isn't doing, where we have failures or outages, things of that nature. It's much more accurate.
Julia Eshleman:What was the improvement when you move from that messenger wire to the optical ground wire?
Travis Berg:Speed, reliability, and it's more accurate. It's more precision.
Julia Eshleman:Are there ever emergencies at a substation, or is there a critical, like, oh, a line goes down. We need someone to be at that substation right now to fix something.
Travis Berg:Our substation folks do monthly and bimonthly inspections of the substation, which consist of looking at the yard, the building, and then of course all the equipment inside the substation house. They take samples on transformer oil, send that off for evaluation, tells us the health of the transformer, which is huge. Nowadays, we look at a minimum of two years for a transformer replacement. We do our best to not have any failures due to the fact that it's such a long lead time to get a replacement for that.
Julia Eshleman:What's transformer oil?
Travis Berg:The oil in the transformer is mineral oil, surprisingly enough. Pretty basic. I know they check for gassing, which is a byproduct of arcing within the transformer. This gassing that I'm referring to that you would see in a oil analysis test has to do more with if the internals of the transformer start to go bad, they'll typically arc. When they arc, that puts off a gas that contaminates the oil.
Travis Berg:Then this testing tells you basically how much contamination you're getting in your oil.
Elizabeth Schilling:If we were to take this whole system of moving power and compare it to the circulatory system of a human body, we have this blood that needs to get to all the places that it can be used. Maybe that's your fingertips. We have this heart that is pumping and taking it through different levels, maybe arteries to veins to capillaries so that it can be used at the end by whatever your body needs to use it for. So if we wanted to make a comparison, would it be accurate to say the substations are that heart pumping the blood through arteries, which would be our transmission lines? Then it needs to get stepped down into those veins or capillaries where it's gonna be used, the distribution lines at our member systems down into the homes where the end use consumers can use it.
Elizabeth Schilling:Would then telecom be the equivalent of the nervous system transmitting messages throughout all of this along the way?
Travis Berg:It's a great explanation of how it works. We are the arteries, and we've got the higher voltage that the breaker panel at your house can't handle. Therefore, it goes into a transformer, which steps it down to a smaller voltage of 120, 240 style voltage that you have in your house that works when you flip the switch on.
Elizabeth Schilling:Another comparison thinking about the work being done at substations and the things you're testing for, what you're looking for in oil, it's kinda like when you get a blood test every year, and they're looking for indications that something might be wrong or something might need to be looked at more. Would that be accurate? Like, the types of things they're looking for in that substation give us a signal that there's something else we should be investigating.
Travis Berg:That's spot on. It's giving them a cholesterol reading, which as you explained. There's various things they're looking for, and, yep, that's a great analogy of it.
Elizabeth Schilling:Some people go to work in an office, and they're in the same place every day. And it's very predictable. A lot of these jobs feel less like that. Your work might be in a variety of different places. Maybe you're working at one substation versus another, on one line versus another, telecom work could be all across the system.
Elizabeth Schilling:What does that look like for the day to day and just being away? Where does the work take place?
Travis Berg:I think that's a big difference between your distribution and your transmission. Even though our distribution system has lots of miles of it, it's typically not in this big of a footprint for each REA or utility of that nature, whereas it's spread out so much more. These guys are traveling over a lot of country and different landscapes. Some of it requires a fair bit for certain disciplines, linemen primarily. So a lot of windshield time for our folks, and some of them are a fair bit of out of town stay motels.
Julia Eshleman:What are their work schedules? Is it four ten? Is it four 10s plus driving?
Travis Berg:Most of our trades and crafts folks are four ten hour days. Typically, we'll see a quite a bit overtime, which obviously entails Fridays, Saturdays, and through the weekend, sometimes on holidays as well, unfortunately, which can take a bit of a toll on personal lives, family time. That's kind of expected in this trade.
Julia Eshleman:Do the trades and craftspeople that do have to do all this traveling, do they resent it?
Travis Berg:No. It's probably not always preferred or desired, but I think it's known in most transmission companies that there will typically be more travel and more out of town stay than you will with your distribution systems or your REAs. It goes back, again to such a big footprint.
Julia Eshleman:What calls people to work in the electric utility? There's a ton of travel. It can be really physical, and the hours can be pretty demanding. What keeps people in this field?
Travis Berg:I think initially, it's probably folks that wanna be outside, careers to work outside in things of that nature. I'm guessing that's probably the start of it. I think unbeknownst to a lot of us morphs into more than that. When you're helping folks, when there's a power outage due to a storm, tornadoes, fires, ice storms, things of that nature, and you see the struggles that people are having when the power is out, changes your perspective on why you're doing it. You may initially start it because you enjoy outdoor type activities or careers, but it eventually changes into something more than that.
Travis Berg:You're helping people and understanding how critical of a role electricity plays in our lives daily.
Julia Eshleman:When you think about the people working in our transmission department, what do you wish people understood about their day to day reality?
Travis Berg:Their care, their compassion, their passion is outstanding. It's seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. We take vacations here and there, but even your time off, folks are always watching the weather depending on the time of the year and checking emails. It affects a lot of what these folks do day in and day out, or even on a weeknight. If they're at one of their kids' games or something, you're always paying attention to your phone and looking at emails and looking at the sky.
Travis Berg:We don't have a callout program here. There's really not much of a rotation. It's just kinda knowing that you let your supervisor know that you are aren't gonna be around certain evenings or weekends and kinda roll that direction.
Elizabeth Schilling:Then when the teams are responding to a storm or a major event, what's happening behind the scenes that members of the public wouldn't necessarily see but that you're needing to coordinate?
Travis Berg:Usually, phone rings to one of the line foreman or supervisors, substation foreman or supervisor, they're going out to take a look and assess what it is. A lot of times our members can respond quicker. They're more local to where the outage might be. We oftentimes call our members if they have anybody available to go look and whether it's in a substation or on the line while our folks are in the process of getting there depending on where it's at. Once we have some information, whether that's from our people or the members or even the public, A lot of our stuff's rural as I spoke to earlier.
Travis Berg:You might have the farmers or somebody living in the country that reports something. As we get that information in, then the wheels start to turn as far as what's needed, what's not needed, whether it's significant or a couple hour deal or maybe even, a couple week deal.
Elizabeth Schilling:The 2025 Lee fire is a recent example of crews really having to go above and beyond to restore service. Can you give us a little bit of background on that event as well as the planning, coordinating, and what the work was that crews had to perform?
Travis Berg:So that fire started due to multiple different lightning strikes, maybe two fires that grew into one. We ended up replacing 19 of our structures on our system, then we helped White River replace a couple of theirs on their 69 k v line that was their main feed to their system. It was pretty extensive. It ranked right up there with one of the biggest and worst for the state of Colorado.
Julia Eshleman:From what you said before, the foreman that's in charge of that region is gonna get the initial call. How does that work, especially when you've got fire involved? Do you wait to assess all of the damage, or do you have to go in early? How do you even coordinate getting more poles to that area?
Travis Berg:It depends on each fire, obviously, and the location of it. It's typically fairly tough to get in even though we're a utility and it's our assets that might be damaged or at risk. The fire squads or the wildfire groups typically keep us out. The guys, they're in constant contact with the instant command post and whoever's charged on each shift. They switch shifts on who's in charge on that wildfire side of it.
Travis Berg:We stay in as much in constant communication as we can, and then they will let us know typically when we can get in to assess our damages. A lot of times in a fire, depending on how quickly it has started or gone through and or where it's at in relation to our line, our system, it might be quite a while before you can get in and take a look.
Julia Eshleman:So you have regular maintenance and regular pull and cross arm replacements. How does repair go differently? Do you have to assess it differently, especially in a storm or wildfire situation? There's more debris you have to get rid of. Do you have to make new access roads if they've been destroyed?
Travis Berg:There's already been a lot of destruction, whether it was from a tornado or an ice storm or, in this case, a fire. Dare I say folks are more willing to, you know, let you get to where you need to be. Some parts of that are easier, but you're needing to get in there for a reason, whatever that is. As already stated, a tornado, ice, or a fire, typically, the material, the existing, whatever's left is in a shambles and maybe more treacherous to deal with.
Julia Eshleman:In those more dangerous situations, how are those guys staying safe after storms, after fires, after tornadoes?
Travis Berg:The initial call out's usually the most strain on a handful or maybe even a couple handful of folks. They've typically been up for multiple hours. We try to relieve them. We try to get them a solid eight hours off, if not more, if we can bring other resources in from other regions. Folks in the safety department are typically on the job with us as well.
Travis Berg:Maybe not the first day or two, but they're there pretty quick and kinda help and watch and observe and help take care of us.
Elizabeth Schilling:You mentioned that the Lee fire was in our member White River's electric territory. In examples like that where it's either extreme weather, something that needs an immediate response, as well as the day to day, how does our interaction with the member systems look?
Travis Berg:In those situations, typically, the interaction's way more than on a standard day. Our field personnel maintenance folks are kind of the face of Tri-State to the public and to our members. Our maintenance folks interact with our members and their employees a lot daily in the field. In these instances where we have extraordinary situations, we often are engaged with them even more and other departments even more, meaning our engineering department or our lands department are engaged with them.
Julia Eshleman:Your guys do really frequently interact with the members, even lending expertise or manpower. Not only are you doing maintenance, but you'll help out. You brought in the mobile substation for Gunnison. You helped YW stand up those baseball field lights. You're helping Poudre Valley get the substation installed.
Julia Eshleman:You also lend a hand with members when they need stuff, either if it's in the community or if it's with their own infrastructure.
Travis Berg:Absolutely. So we help when we can in various ways with our members. We have what we call an RFA, which is a request for assistance that our members can submit. That might be anything from helping replace some structures on their sub transmission system. Maybe it's assisting them with equipment, telecom pole or something that they need installed, but their trucks aren't maybe big enough to handle the size of the pole that's needed.
Travis Berg:We've assisted with equipment, taking snow cats up to some of our members in Wyoming and helping them out to access some of their down structures structures too. In our planning department, expanding our system, whether that be substations or tie lines to other facilities that our members are wanting to supply and more assets. In some of those RFA requests, we provide services on the substation side of things. We do some testing for our members' transformers as well as some bushing type testings and things that our substation folks do as well.
Julia Eshleman:I didn't realize that a substation was this hub or, like, a more collaborative effort. You will have pieces of equipment from WAPA or from basin or from a member all contained in these substations. It really is this joint center that a lot of information and power is coming in and out of.
Travis Berg:There can be a whole lot of things going on in a substation with a whole lot of different players.
Julia Eshleman:Including snakes, I hear.
Travis Berg:Once in a while, you get a few of those around. Mhmm.
Elizabeth Schilling:Okay. So you're responsible not just for infrastructure, but for people. How do you make sure your teams feel heard, respected, and supported, especially when the work is tough and expectations are high?
Travis Berg:The obvious thing is just acknowledging it. Sometimes I've noticed that I don't think they care about hearing that anymore, and they actually do. I haven't continued to not say thank you or much appreciated for what you've done. But sometimes as you you're not directly involved with the manual labor, the getting dirty, and the running of the long hours, you kinda feel like maybe that's not enough. And it's surprisingly, they're just saying thank you and showing them that they're appreciated.
Travis Berg:Oftentimes, it is enough. We shouldn't, as leaders, forget that.
Julia Eshleman:Who is your best boss that you've ever had?
Elizabeth Schilling:Best boss. I had actually, it was my first internship. My boss was the best at pushing me, knowing what I was capable of, and kindly pushing me there. Like, thanks for this. I think you can do better, and handing me back the assignment to start over.
Elizabeth Schilling:Somebody who's like, I know what you're capable of, and you can do better than this.
Julia Eshleman:Obviously, Melissa 5-ever, but I worked at Cold Stone in college. And I had a really good boss who was my age, but even though she was my age, she was not my friend. She set very hard boundaries, and I knew exactly what was expected of me. When you set the boundaries that hard and you're not all best friends, You really know what your responsibilities are, and then as long as you meet those expectations, everything was very fair.
Travis Berg:I've had several different leaders through the years from the field side of things at previous companies as well, 24 years here as well. Different leaderships throughout the different levels has helped me a lot through the years.
Elizabeth Schilling:What kind of themes did you see in your good bosses? Did anything about clear expectations and communication come in?
Travis Berg:Yeah. Certainly, the better ones communicated quite well. Another thing I found was a good boss will see things in you that you don't see in yourself, and they will expound on that or push you on that. I found that some of the better bosses see in you what you don't see in yourself.
Elizabeth Schilling:Yeah. I'd rather have high expectations than the opposite.
Travis Berg:They're not setting you up for failure, believe it or not.
Elizabeth Schilling:Yeah. They know you can do it. In our industry, we have Lineman Appreciation Month, which we're coming up on. That's something that is probably bigger than the name describes when we think about all the work that is done to get power where it needs to go. What would you want the maintenance teams, the telecoms, and the substation employees and their families to hear directly from you on that topic?
Travis Berg:It's flattering to know that it's called lineman appreciation. That's great, but there's so many other groups that we've talked about here today. The telecom and our subtechs, our warehouse folks, our fleet people, our mechanics. I mean, can go on and on. The engineering group, our admins that are oftentimes orchestrating things behind the scene that nobody ever sees.
Travis Berg:And then you get into a shout out to the families in these situations where there's storm jobs, and a lot of times their significant other is gone for days on end, puts a strain on the family. That being said, they're a player in this too. They're a behind the scenes player of the family. Because if you don't have the support of your family that's at home that you're not getting to see in the evenings every night, that can be really tough on you personally, and it's tough on the family. Support from the family is huge.
Travis Berg:Thank you to all those that don't get their picture in the news. Thank you to all of you that don't get that recognition because you're a huge part of it.
Elizabeth Schilling:Well, I think we got a better look into the picture of all that it takes to make all of this work. So appreciate everything that you shared, the insight into the different parts of our system, and how it really helps us just fulfill our mission overall. Thank you, Travis, for being with us here today. We appreciate you taking the time.
Travis Berg:Yeah. I appreciate it. It's been fun, and I'd like to say thank you to you guys as well that get the word out of what we do. And you're some of the, in my opinion, unsung heroes as well. So thank you.
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.