Co-Op Heroes: Stories from Electric Utility Operators

027: Scroll to Safety: One Co-op's Bet on Short-Form Video for Field Training (with Walt Stephens)

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Walt Stephens, Safety Manager at Brunswick EMC in Shallotte, North Carolina, recorded live at the NRECA Safety Leadership Summit in St. Louis, Missouri. He makes the case that the way electric cooperatives have been communicating safety for 30 years is not broken, but it is not enough anymore. Most co-ops still run safety the way they always have. PowerPoint in a conference room, a classroom full of mixed generations, and the expectation that information delivered equals information retained. And for a long time, that worked well enough. But the workforce has changed, and the way people learn has changed with it, and Walt Stephens has spent the last few years watching the gap between the two grow wider. Walt has been in safety for 31 years. He has sat through the evolution of the industry and watched each new generation come in with a different relationship to information, authority, and technology. What he noticed is not a problem with the younger generation. It is a problem with the medium. A 25-year-old who needs to fix his car does not open a manual. He pulls up a YouTube video. Walt asked himself a simple question: what would happen if we met them there instead of asking them to come to us? The answer he landed on is a short-form video library, built and maintained by the crews themselves, hosted on a closed social platform, and designed to feel more like scrolling than sitting through a seminar. The idea is still young. The infrastructure is still being figured out. But the CEO bought in, a neighboring co-op CEO heard the pitch and immediately asked how to get involved, and Walt already has a working Instagram account running a proof of concept inside Brunswick EMC. Featured topics: * Why 30-second videos may do more for safety retention than a 90-minute PowerPoint * The culture shift required to let employees post from the field instead of locking everything down * What Hurricane Helene revealed about the value of shared, searchable field knowledge across co-ops * How crowdsourcing safety content could build a statewide library connecting mountain crews with coastal crews * What Walt learned from his daughter's cat account about meeting your audience where they are Walt is not proposing to throw out the apprentice program or the LMS or the safety manual. He is proposing to add something that the current system cannot provide on its own: content that feels native to the people it is trying to reach, made by the people doing the work, and available whenever they have 30 seconds and a reason to look. This is a conversation about what it actually takes to stay relevant to a new generation of lineworkers, and what happens when a 31-year safety veteran decides to stop fighting the scroll and start using it.

026: Building a Safety Culture That Outlasts the Rules (with Micah Thompson and JD Cox)

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Micah Thompson and JD Cox, recorded live at the NRECA Safety Leadership Summit in St. Louis, Missouri. They make the case that safety culture lives or dies on something most people in the industry are not comfortable talking about: love. Most co-ops approach safety the way you would expect. Policies, training, federal standards, meetings in the break room. And then someone gets hurt anyway. Not because the rules were wrong. Because rules alone have never been enough to change what a person does at 2 in the morning after a five-day stretch in the rain. JD Cox spent 38 years in the industry, 24 of them on a line crew. On his 21st birthday, a cable failure dropped a steel ball 29 feet onto the top of his head and broke his neck and back in two places. He came back to work 75 days later. What changed was not his knowledge of the safety manual. It was his understanding of why any of it actually matters. He has spent the years since building a message around the idea that compliance follows love, not the other way around. Micah Thompson heard JD speak at an NRECA certification class in Madison and says nobody in the room made an impression like he did. He has spent his career trying to close the gap between what organizations say about safety and what they actually do when no one is watching. His test is simple: what do your people feel on Sunday night at nine o'clock? Together they make the case that safety is not a goal, it is a promise. Goals get abandoned. Promises stick because they are tied to something real, the people waiting at home, the kids in the stands, the coworker riding shotgun every day. Featured topics: * Why love is the missing word in most safety conversations * JD's accident on his 21st birthday and what it changed about how he sees the work * The difference between a safety goal and a safety promise * Moral courage and what the 1942 Lineman and Cableman Handbook got right * What the Sunday night feeling tells you about the culture you actually have Micah and JD are not the kind of safety professionals who lead with citations. They lead with character and conviction. Their message is that if you want people to follow the rules when things get hard, you have to give them a reason that matters more than the rules. This is a conversation about what genuine care looks like in the field, and what it costs when it is not there.

025: The Ken Macken Interview and Tribute: A Life Lived in Service of Electric Cooperatives.

Ken Macken dedicated his life and career to electric cooperatives. He knew the job from the inside: the crews, the culture, the moments where safety either holds or it doesn't. As Director of Safety and Training at NRECA, he became the leader of what is now one of the most attended electric utility safety conferences in the country, growing the Safety Leadership Summit this year in St. Louis to nearly 1,300 attendees. He didn't do that by talking about compliance. He did it by connecting with people. Ken believed the shift from a process-first culture to a people-first culture was the most important thing happening in the cooperative world. He talked about it plainly, the crew of three or four guys who are irreplaceable, the wife at home waiting, the soccer game after the shift. He believed that when you understand your why, safety stops being a rule and starts being a commitment. He also believed that leadership is not a title. It is a price you pay, a willingness to set aside your own interests long enough to bring someone else to a higher level. Ken's legendary 10-10-2-2 (come home with ten fingers, ten toes, two arms, and two legs) will live in the consciousness of electric cooperatives for generations. Ken unexpectedly passed away two days after this conversation was recorded. What he left behind is a body of work, a conference that will keep growing, and a way of thinking about safety that has shaped how cooperatives across the country show up for their people. This episode is our conversation, exactly as it happened. Featured topics: * Why leadership has to be at the center of any real safety culture * The price of leadership and what it actually costs * Technology, complacency, and the question of who owns who * The aging grid and what Americans may have to rethink * What 25 years in the cooperative world taught him about legacy After the interview, we appended tributes submitted by some of the people Ken worked with who were deeply impacted by him. The cooperative community lost one of its best. Ken will be deeply missed by everyone whose life he touched. May this episode serve as a humble tribute to a man who lived for others. And may we strive to follow his example.

024: The Challenges and Advantages of Leaving Your G&T (with Chris Hansen)

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Chris Hansen, CEO and General Manager at La Plata Electric Association in Durango, Colorado. He shares what it takes to walk away from a long-term G&T contract, rebuild trust from scratch, and build a co-op ready for what comes next. Most co-ops do not set out to reinvent how they buy power. They are focused on keeping the lights on, serving members, and managing risk. But when La Plata's board made the decision to leave Tri-State and become an independent co-op, they were up against a hard reality. The co-op was capped at 5% local generation, had a growing solar footprint with nowhere to put it, and needed a CEO who could turn a controversial strategic pivot into something members could believe in. Chris Hansen's path to that job is anything but conventional. He started his career as a nuclear engineer, moved into utility consulting, left to run for the Colorado state legislature, and spent a decade in the state house and senate before a friend reached out about an opening in Durango. Fourteen months in, he is building a power supply portfolio from the ground up, navigating energy politics in real time, and making the economic case to members one conversation at a time. The proof is starting to show up in people's bills. Rates at La Plata will be roughly 15% lower than they would have been under the old contract. That kind of outcome does not happen by accident. It comes from direct PPAs with solar, wind, and hydro projects that were off limits before, from joining SPP to access the regional market, and from a disciplined approach to utility-scale storage. But Chris is quick to point out that the engineering was never the hard part. The hard part was earning trust in rooms full of people who were not sure the decision made sense. Featured topics: * Why La Plata left Tri-State and what the board was trying to solve * Turning a 5% local generation cap into a reason to build something new * The economic case for independence when rates had just gone up * Integrating renewables and storage in a winter-peaking, oil-and-gas-heavy territory * What a former nuclear engineer and state senator thinks about SMRs and the energy culture wars Chris shares how he thinks about communicating energy policy without getting pulled into the politics around it, what skills a co-op actually needs when it steps out of a G&T relationship, and why skating to the puck is the right frame for where La Plata is headed. His story is a reminder that some of the most consequential decisions in the co-op world happen quietly, in board rooms, years before anyone outside the territory notices. This is a story about a bold bet, a deliberate transition, and the work of building trust fast enough to make it stick.

023: A Changed Man: Why Safety Became My Number One Priority

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, James Tanneberger, CEO of South Central Indiana REMC, shares the story that permanently changed the way he thinks about safety and how it shaped the leader he is today. ames opens up about his early career working around substations without fully understanding the risks involved. Safety felt like a formality back then, not because he was reckless, but because nobody had ever shown him how close to danger he actually was. That changed when a colleague with 36 years of experience was killed during a routine switching operation after a breaker closed into a hot bus inside a metal clad unit. What happened next wasn't just a policy change. It was a complete reckoning with what safety culture actually means. The conversation goes deep on the idea that accidents like this one rarely come down to a single mistake. The real root cause is almost always culture, the invisible message an organization sends its people about what actually matters. James explains how leaders communicate priorities without saying a word, through budget decisions, PPE approvals, and whether they stop to listen when a lineman flags a hazard. At SCI-REMC, that recently meant burying a stretch of line overrun with rattlesnakes because the crew asked and leadership listened. We also talk about the role of technology in keeping linemen out of harm's way, from remotely operated switching devices to automated outage management systems that can reduce an outage from 600 homes to 60 before a truck ever rolls, removing the need for a lineman to stand underneath a switch that throws sparks on a fireball. Featured topics * The incident that made safety James's permanent number one priority * Why the root cause of most accidents is culture, not individual error * How budget decisions send louder messages than any safety speech * Building a culture where every employee owns safety personally * How fiber optic infrastructure and smart grid technology are keeping co-op linemen safer * The Checklist Manifesto and why even experienced crews need written procedures This episode is a reminder that safety is not a program you roll out. It is a culture you build, one decision at a time.