Innovative Programs for Electrifying Tribal Communities: Interview with Walter Haase, General Manager at Navajo Tribal Utility Authority [Recognizing the 2023 Energy Central Innovation Champions]
Earlier this year, Energy Central dispatched our annual call for nominations for power professionals leading the way in Innovation, and we're proud to announce the 5 winners and 4 honorable mentions, which you can read about here. This week, we'll be spotlighting each of those winners after conducting interviews to learn more about their great work.
Please help us celebrate Walter’s and the other champions' successes by reading some of the insights garnered from these exclusive Innovation Champion Interviews.
One of the most unique aspects of the U.S. utility landscape is the vast variety of utility types and situations that stretch across the unique geographics, communities, and situations all across the country. While most people would tend to assume the utility landscape looks pretty similar from one area to the next, some utilities have specific challenges based on their landscape. A key utility as such includes power utilities for tribal communities, and their situations create the need for a different type of innovation to solve their precise needs. For his efforts leading Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) in tackling myriad challenges through the embrace of innovation, Walter Haase has been recognized by Energy Central as a 2023 Innovation Champion.
Walter is the General Manager at NTUA, and over the past 15 years he’s guided this largest multi-utility system owned and operated by a Native American tribe. The utility peer nominating Walter highlighted that from the time he arrived on the Navajo Nation, his primary objective was to improve the quality of life for people living in a part of the United States where electricity still had not reached thousands of homes. Innovation has been key to the ways Walter has identified to reduce the number of families not connected to the grid and how that progress will continue to shape the coming years.
In this exclusive interview with Walter, we hear about how innovation has pushed forward his mission-driven pursuit at NTUA.
Matt Chester: Congratulations on being selected as one of our Champions of Innovation for 2023! Can you tell us a bit about your role in the utility sector and how you got started in this space?
Walter Haase: Certainly. I'm an electrical engineer from the University of Illinois, and I hold a professional engineering license in multiple states. Additionally, I have an MBA from Keller Graduate School in Chicago. In terms of my experience, I've been working in this field for over 35 years and have managed four different utilities across the United States. What sets these utilities apart is that they are all multi-service, providing electric, water, wastewater, natural gas, and even communication services such as broadband and mobile phones.
I found that I enjoyed working in the utilities sector, so I transitioned to a small municipal utility called St. Charles in the Chicago area. There, I gained experience in both water and electric services. Since then, all the utilities I have worked for and managed have been multi-service utilities. I found my passion in constructing and making things work, and I have been dedicated to this field ever since.