Dave Puskala knows how vital innovative technology is for the future of his industry.

Serving as Superintendent since 2021, Dave has led Glasgow Electric Plant Board with an emphasis on strategic technological deployment in an effort to protect and strengthen his system.

“We were very fortunate that we didn’t sustain direct damage from the tornados at the end of 2021, but that made us realize that we wanted to ensure our system was strengthened for future events, which is why we’ve been preparing for the deployment of our outage management system this year. We’re also relaunching our fiber-to-the-home project and anticipate we’ll be connecting customers to the second phase of it in June, with the hope that any customer, in our electric footprint, who wants to be part of our fiber network would be able to connect by the end of 2025. Our goal is to use a wide variety of technology to not only protect our system, but to ultimately allow us to provide better service and reliability to our customers.”

Dave credits Seven States with being trusted energy experts in a time where the industry is changing rapidly and LPCs can suffer from information overload.

“For smaller LPCs, change and technology can often be overwhelming. Often, it’s hard to know what technology is the right fit, and there just isn’t enough manpower and time to devote to the investigative work a new project usually requires. There are real opportunities for LPCs to take advantage of a partnership with Seven States in order to help navigate the waters for technology deployments.”

With his years of leadership, Dave’s advice to a new GM is to keep the customer and your LPC team at the forefront of every decision you make, especially when considering implementing innovation.

“Look to technologies that improve reliability and the delivery of the electric product to the customer. Making sure the system operates as it’s supposed to ensure reliability is an extremely vital aspect, but another aspect that is just as important is ensuring that your system and operations are running safely. Whether it’s someone out in the field operating a breaker, or someone sitting in the office operating SCADA, you have to be confident that everything is running reliably so that everyone makes it home at the end of the day. Providing safe, reliable power for our community is the heartbeat of what we do every single day.”

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