Making Connections

NorthWestern Energy’s Kirt Mayson will soon finish his term as Chair of the Utilities Technology Council’s Board of Directors.

As a Senior Engineer in NorthWestern Energy’s Network Engineering and Operations Department, Kirt Mayson works behind the scenes to make sure all of NorthWestern’s infrastructure works correctly and communicates as needed.

Kirt handles many critical systems for NorthWestern, including radio frequency networks, microwave networks, fiber optic networks, mobile radio networks, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, networks.

“Historically, our area is one that is a little-known part of the organization,” Kirt said. “It’s key and integral to everything we do. We’re a key stakeholder in most projects and company initiatives, as each has some level of technology requirements to make them successful.”

Kirt has worked in the field for nearly four decades, including 27 years with NorthWestern Energy, and has found a unique niche in the world of utility communications and networking. Like most people working in his field, Kirt doesn’t have a degree in telecom engineering. He has a petroleum engineering degree from Montana Tech and has learned a lot on the job.

“There’s some amount of trial by fire,” Kirt said. “There aren’t text books to fall back on.”

With the digital revolution and most all telecommunications circuits being packet (Ethernet)-based there are standards to reference. However, critical applications and circuits still have the same performance criteria and requirements from when he started in this area 27 years ago.

Kirt has also gained knowledge from his involvement in the Utilities Technology Council, a trade association dealing with emerging utility technologies and the communications and networks that support them.

“The big benefit of UTC is you’re forming professional relationships with folks from across the industry,” Kirt said. “It’s the ongoing education. We’re in truly a niche world.”

Kirt has been involved with UTC for about 20 years and recently climbed to the highest leadership position in the organization. For the last year, he has served as the chair of UTC’s Board of Directors. On May 22, he will complete his term as chair.

Networks and communications are hugely important for energy companies. Our Business Technology Network Engineering and Operations group provides network services (connections and paths) from servers to field devices to collect that data and transport it to where it needs to go.

Our new advanced meters need these networks in order to let us know when there’s an outage. Networks allow Grid Operations to know which power lines are energized and when a line becomes de-energized. It also allows us to monitor equipment in the far corners of our service territory from a centralized location.

“Everything we do has some sort of communication and networking aspect to it,” Kirt said.

Technology and the massive amounts of data being collected and stored are a “new normal” for our company. That data provides opportunities for analytics and solutions using AI and other tools to make our operations more efficient and support the customer experience. Safeguarding that data is of utmost priority as well.

During his time as chair of UTC, Kirt led the hiring process for a new CEO, which was the biggest challenge of his tenure. Although he’s nearly done with his term as board chair, Kirt plans to stay involved with the organization. He’ll continue to serve on the Leadership Advisory Committee and help mentor future UTC leaders.

Kirt has also mentored many other engineers at NorthWestern Energy.

“Our area is so specialized,” he said.

Telecomm and networking requirements for utility applications require high availability, high performance and high security all of the time. That is why our foundational design criteria starts with 99.999% availability.

During his 27 years with NorthWestern, Kirt has seen many changes. When he started with the company, the analog-to-digital revolution was just beginning. Now Kirt is engineering the replacements for some of the digital systems he designed because they have reached the end of useful life.

Kirt still has a few years to go before retirement, but looking back, he’s proud of all he’s accomplished.

“It’s been a very rewarding career,” he said.