Duane Highley

Duane D. Highley is the Chief Executive Officer of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Inc. headquartered in Westminster, Colorado. He has held this position since April 2019. 

Tri-State is a not-for-profit cooperative power supplier with a mission to provide its member systems a reliable, affordable and responsible supply of electricity in accordance with cooperative principles. Tri-State is a generation and transmission (“G&T”) association of 45 members, including 42 electric distribution cooperatives and public power districts in four states that together provide power to more than 1 million electricity consumers across nearly 200,000 square miles of the West. 

As CEO, Highley leads the executive management team in its strategic and operational initiatives while reporting to the association’s member-appointed board of directors. Highley is working with the board to define the 21st century G&T cooperative as one that is reliable, affordable, increasingly flexible, increasingly clean and, as always, member-focused. 

Highley also serves as Co-Chair of the Electric Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC), coordinating security efforts between electric utility CEOs and cabinet-level officials of the U.S. Government. 

Highley is a Registered Professional Engineer in Missouri and has over 39 years of professional experience leading energy portfolio transitions with large electric power supply cooperatives. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science degree in Engineering Management, both from Missouri University of Science and Technology (then University of Missouri-Rolla). He also completed the Executive Program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Management and the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. 

He began his professional career as a resource planning engineer with Associated Electric Cooperative (“Associated”), a G&T cooperative serving six other G&Ts which, in turn, serve 51 retail electric distribution cooperatives in Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma. Collectively, Associated and its members serve over 1 million consumers. During his 28 years with Associated, he held positions of increasing responsibility, supervising transmission planning, resource planning, power marketing, power generation operations, mining reclamation operations, and plant construction, ultimately holding the position of Senior Vice President. In 2011, he accepted the position of President and CEO of two organizations: Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation, a state-regulated G&T cooperative serving 17 retail distribution cooperatives with over 1 million consumers, and Arkansas Electric Cooperatives, Inc., a national utility service cooperative with multiple subsidiaries providing utility equipment sales, warehouse management, right-of-way management, transformer manufacturing, smart grid research and development, utility scale solar and battery storage development, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure.