The Power of Connections

The New Century is an Innovation Catalyst As the year 2000 approached, computer experts around the world raised concerns that the two-digit year format used by early computer coders might cause critical systems to fail when the year changed from “99” to “00.” CREC mobilized its internal teams and resources to minimize the potential of a system failure when the new millennium arrived. Y2K—as the phenomenon came to be known—prompted a series of equipment upgrades and innovative enhancements to the utility infrastructure: from the meter to the substation to the power plant. The co-op’s information technology (IT) team oversaw the process of ensuring all its software programs incorporated custom changes that used an eight-digit date field (01-01-2000) rather than a six-digit date field (01-01-00). “It took many weekends of work to make all of the changes, but our team completed the install of the new release over a weekend,” says IT Supervisor Steve Schomburg. Following months of extensive planning and testing, CREC teams gathered on New Year’s Eve to monitor all systems as the clock struck midnight. The gathering grew into an all-hands-on-deck employee watch event to ring in the new millennium. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief when 2000 arrived with no disruptions or negative impacts for members. Lake Saint Louis Office Relocates The construction of a new intersection at Prospect Road and Highway 40 required the cooperative to relocate its existing Lake Saint Louis office on Prospect Road. In 2007, CREC opened a new Lake Saint Louis office in the Hawk Ridge Industrial Park at 8757 Highway N. Located on a fourteen-acre industrial site, the 22,000-square-foot office includes community meeting rooms, a warehouse, a truck bay, a maintenance building, and an outdoor covered storage area. As a unit, the warehouse and truck bay extend the length of a football field. The new office location also provides convenient access to the fast-growing St. Charles County area for service equipment. Eventually, the co-op consolidated resources by relocating all staff and equipment to the new Lake Saint Louis office from the former Harvester office on Highway 94, where highway expansion

CREC passed its Y2K readiness audit by the Department of Energy, as noted in a Current Times article in November 1999.

Steve Schomburg, IT supervisor, served CREC from 1985 through 2021 and led the IT team to transition systems into the new millennium. Photo from Lyle Whitworth Photography

was also affecting road access. “The consolidation of the two St. Charles County locations into a single office made a lot of

20 Cuivre River Electric Cooperative