Look what we've achieved in five years, getting into an RTO, making a transition in the energy portfolio, getting the communications right with the members and and improving the whole regulatory environment.
Welcome to Western Watts, the podcast where Tri-State and our cooperative members explore what it takes to power the West. From reliability to wildfire mitigation, we dive into the energy issues that matter most to rural, agricultural, and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming. We're here today with Tri-State CEO Duane Highley to learn a little more about his personal life and about his experience coming to Tri-State . So Duane, you're the first guest on the podcast. Are you excited?
I'm very excited to be the first guest on the Tri-State podcast.
You listen to podcasts yourself too. Right?
I actually really enjoy having a whole bunch of podcasts on rotation just for that drive in and out. Ordinary news just bores me to death, and I don't like the stuff they talk about. I pick the podcast I wanna listen to, and I just binge on them massively.
What is your genre of podcast?
As you might imagine, there's probably 20 energy-related podcasts in there. So Energy Central and the CoBank one.
Did you just start listening to energy podcast? Because I feel like nobody cared, and then all of a sudden, everybody's talking about energy, and it's very political.
Everybody has a podcast now. I think that's the thing. But, no, I've been probably doing that for a while, at least since I've been here at Tri-State for the five years and a little bit before that. And it was just more news general stuff before that. And then there's the music podcasts and the mixing and mastering podcast, and there's different religious bible study type podcasts.
I just binge it all. If I'm curious about something, I'll just listen to a podcast for a couple of months. Pool math, like, how do you balance the chemicals in a pool? Man, I spent three months listening to pool podcasts. If anybody wants to know how to balance their swim Do you have a pool? I had a swimming pool.
Oh, so you're learning about your imaginary pool that you don't have.
Everybody might need this knowledge. You never know when you're gonna need to go balance a pool, get the water set right. Just the average person might need that.
So aside from pool balancing, give us some insight into some of your other interests. You mentioned music. Is that something you're into?
I enjoy that a lot. I play with the church praise team. I call myself a guitar owner, not a guitar player, but I do hack around on it. And then I have a number of horns that I like to play. Saxophones, clarinets of all different sizes.
Did you do that too? Yeah. I guess I started playing French horn in fifth grade and clarinet in sixth grade and played throughout the band and orchestra in high school and then bought a saxophone and ran out of money in college and had to sell it and finally got to get another one. And I got a lot better one finally when I got one, and then I bought seven other saxophones. This is an embarrassment for me.
It's a an addiction. And then probably my current favorite instrument is an electronic wind synthesizer called an aerophone, and it's controlled by your breath and how hard you pinch on the fake reed that's built into it. So you can change the timbre of the sound and the volume of the sound as you're playing it, and it can make any sound you want.
Sounds like your next instrument is a theremin probably.
I have a theremin app on my phone, in fact, so we could do theremin spooky nineteen-fifties, sci fi sounds if we wanted to. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about where you're from.
Oh, goodness. So where am I from? I call myself a product of the Midwest because growing up, I lived in a different city every year for the first twelve years of my life, and I think a couple times more than one city a year. And then everybody says, oh, your dad must have been in the military. No.
He was a retail store manager for Woolworths, which was the little five and dime store on every square of every small town. And so he became the new store opening manager, meaning they go set up a store, get all the inventory, set up the displays, hire the staff, train everybody, have the grand opening, and then move to the next town and do it again. So I lived in several different towns in Missouri, in Illinois, east of Saint Louis, east Saint Louis and Granite City, Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, Vincennes, Indiana, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Muskogee, Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Springfield, Missouri, Lee's Summit, Missouri, Rolla, Missouri. I'm losing some.
What did you learn from moving around that much?
The interesting thing for me going to school was I went to a different school every year. And it was the first day of school, I think fourth grade. And that's when I realized, oh, these people don't move every year. And I thought it was normal that just everybody packed all their stuff every summer and moved to a new house.
That's very sink or swim. Were you like, oh, I gotta start making friends right away and strategize, or you just have to get used to ingratiating yourself with all these brand new friend groups every year?
I think I learned something about what kind of friends group not to get in with. But, I mean, it was important if you're gonna have friends to make friends quickly. I don't know that I did that consciously. It's just what you had to do. But I also got to do a reset every year.
Every place you go.
I think you get to reboot every year.
Yeah. You've done this cooperative thing for a while. You've done the CEO thing before you got here. What made you wanna come to Tri State, move to Colorado, uproot what you had Mhmm. In Arkansas?
There's a couple things that go along with that. It was probably the summer of 2018 when my wife and I were having a glass of wine on the back patio and just enjoying the time together. And it's a warm summer afternoon, and she says, just surprisingly, Duane, you're bored. And I'm like, no. She goes, oh, I think you are. I think you're bored with your job. I said, no. I'm not. No. I'm not.
So, of course, I argued with her and didn't agree with her, but thought about it. Then a few months later, I hear Mike McInnes is retiring from Tri-State . Now I had always had a heart for Tri-State. From 2008, I was actually a candidate for the CEO position then, but didn't get it, and that's fine. That's how life is.
But always since then, I had just observed and watched everything happening at Tri-State and had this dream. Maybe someday, I'll say my wife and I also had just such a great love for this the West in general, New Mexico and Colorado in particular, and had thought, someday when we retire, we'll buy a place out there. So it was the culmination of a number of dreams. And when we're here then in 2019 doing the interview with this board of directors, and it was a big snowstorm. In fact, it was very difficult to get here.
Flights were canceled. Rick Gordon was calling me. He's the chair at that time, and he's I'm not sure if you're gonna be able to get here. You need to be able to get here, Duane. It's the interview.
I'm like, I know. I'm trying. So we get here, and we're in the morning, and Lisa looks out the window of the hotel, and it's just everything's covered with snow. And she says it's just just thought comes to her like a voice from heaven, and it says, may be hard, but it may be beautiful. And so that was the mantra for our transition here is it may be hard, may be beautiful.
And when you say, what attracted me to Tri-State? It's literally the challenge that was before Tri-State. To me, I just had this strange thought that maybe I could be part of that and help with that challenge that we were facing. So I'm proud to have been part of it and, grateful that the board allowed me to try.
And you came in at a time where changes were already starting to get rolling at Tri-State driven by our members. How did that feel coming in and knowing they chose you to to lead through those changes, transitions?
The board and I came to agreement on a path. To me, that was it. Look what we've achieved in five years, getting into an RTO, making a transition in the energy portfolio, getting the communications right with the members and and improving the whole regulatory environment, and then the idea that there might be federal money to help with some of this. All those were ideas, the genesis of which came in those very first meetings with the board. Although that was, by the way, my three year plan.
So it's taken five years to execute the three year plan, but look at what's been achieved.
Yeah. You have a unique position leading your leadership team and all Tri-State employees, but you're reporting to the board. You're answering to the board knowing the priorities coming from them or how we need to keep making all these decisions. Is it a hard balance or do you feel like it's pretty clear the direction you need to take things at any given point?
I felt pretty clear about it. I felt like I've had a lot of clarity. And I think my role is one that kinda bridges the two sides. So I represent the employees to the board and the staff, and then I represent the board back to the employees. A lot of our employees get to be in the boardroom, which I think is great.
I've been with organizations before where the board was uneasy having staff in the room, and they only wanted to bring them in for their presentation and send them back out. I thought that was really bad because the more people that can get more familiar with our board, then everybody innately knows what that right? So that's been a strength for this organization. We might have that whole back row full of employees in the boardroom, and every one of those employees is learning something about how the board thinks that they take back to their everyday decisions.
And there's such a diversity too from the board. The issues that you're gonna face in Northern Wyoming versus the very South tip of New Mexico, like, the weather isn't even the same.
Exactly. Yeah. The diversity of Tri-State was one of the things that really attracted me to Tri-State. The people and the cultures and the the geography is is just, I think, the most magnificent in this country.
This was a while ago, but I got a list from GIS listing the national parks and landmarks and forests and cultural sites, and it's it's pretty impressive. We're in almost 40 because we're rural. That's where all the stuff is.
All the stuff is all the coolest stuff. Absolutely.
All the canyons that all of the transmission goes over for some reason. Why are there so many canyons on our system?
It's just where we are.
Yeah.
Everybody loves a good canyon.
Everybody loves a good canyon.
Makes great pictures.
Oh, one last thing. Do you have a motorcycle?
I have two motorcycles currently. Yeah.
How did you get into motorcycles?
Oh, dear goodness. My first car was a motorcycle. I think probably my dad had always wanted a motorcycle and never got one. So when I'm turning 16, he's, do you think you'd like a motorcycle? Now what 16 year old wouldn't say, hey. Sure, to that? And so we went out and bought this Honda three fifty Scrambler, and I'd never driven anything, car or or motorcycle or otherwise, and went out in the street and just started figuring out how to let the clutch out without killing the engine. And before you knew it, it was riding and was hooked and and rode it in all weather to high school every morning, no matter how cold it was, except when there's ice on the ground. Otherwise, I was riding it, and I used to just you show up in there by be like, isn't it cold, Duane? Like, I'd be sighted to say, it's all in your mind.
Cold is in your mind. It's just an illusion, but it's just what you're used to. And so that started a lifetime of riding. I, of course, when my wife and I started dating, she was from a different high school, and, she asked her friend who went to my high school, do you know this guy, Duane Highley? He just asked me out. And he goes, oh, yeah. He's got a car and a motorcycle. Now at that point, I'd progressed to having a car. And so she thought, wow. That's really pretty cool.
He's got a car and a motorcycle. So she somehow was willing to go out with me on a purely speculative basis. But when I show up at her house to pick her up on the motorcycle, I don't think her dad was very much in favor of that. No. He wasn't very much in favor of it at all.
And then I corrupted her so badly, she decided she wanted her own bike. And so she bought a Honda three sixty t high pipe, really nice for the day, motorcycle, and she rode it back and forth to work some until it rained on her a few too many times, and she thought maybe I'd rather have a car. But then I think some of the best times in our marriage have been some of the tours we've done together on bikes in Europe. That's the coolest thing we ever did ever was
Fancy.
Go get on the bike and ride and see things like you can never see them. And it's safer, by the way, too, because the drivers aren't all on their cell phones.
So you and your wife are high school sweethearts?
I just graduated, and she was, still in high school. So yeah.
Do you have a favorite ride in Colorado that you like to do?
I used to always just ride up on the front range, and you go up that what's that you go from my house to Nederland, and then you take the Peak To Peak Highway back to Estes Park and back. That's pretty drive. That's just a short ride. Now my bikes are relocated a little further west, and I'm gonna be doing more riding on, like, Monarch out there.
Do you and your wife still ride together?
Oh, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We enjoy that.
That's I don't is that common actually for, like, husband and wife to ride together?
We ride together two up on one bike, typically. Okay. Yeah. She's had her own motorcycle, and the motorcycle I call her motorcycle is one I ride more, and she thinks that's a joke. Like, when I say that's Lisa's motorcycle. She can ride. She's got her endorsement. She just prefers to ride on the back with me, and I prefer for her to do that too. So we're both happy that way.
I guess for anybody listening in, what's your rig right now, your riding rig?
So I've got a BMW R 1200 Roadster. It's just a fast and very nice motorcycle. It's my favorite bike I ever had. And then I've got a little Yamaha dual sport on off road that's just for exploring those dirt roads. I'm not a heavy hardcore dirt rider. I'm not gonna be doing any jumps or leaving the ground hopefully at any point in time. Do you like to get on a forced service road and go explore?
Yeah. This is, insider info, but for a second, when we were doing the Momentum annual report, it was like, oh, yeah. What if we have Duane for a CEO letter, like, with his bike, with his helmet? Oh, what a dream.
No. Not needed.
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. Thank you for joining us for the Western Watts podcast. I'm Elizabeth Schilling here at
Oh, and I'm Julia Perry. Sorry. I ruined it already.
We can do it again.
That was pretty good, actually.
Yeah.
Spontaneous.
I'm Julia Perry, and that was Watt's Up.
Ow. Ouch. I hate it. I'm sorry.
Tell them if you're asked to do the podcast, you have to do it under pain of death. Carte blanche.
So this is for, like, employees. Right? So it has been my great pleasure to share this time with you today, and I'm gonna expect any employee that you ask in the future to be just as generous with their time and come in and answer any possible question that you would ask.
We'll attach that to the email we send out to people
Absolutely. A lot. Yep. You heard it here.