Ameren Missouri
Tim Lafser is Ameren Missouri’s Senior Vice President of Delivery and Engineering and Project Management.
Ameren Corporation is the parent company of Ameren Illinois and Ameren Missouri and its Ameren Transmission Company of Illinois designs and builds regional transmission projects. Ameren was created by the combination of three Illinois utilities — CIPSCO, CILCO, and Illinois Power Company — and Union Electric Company of St. Louis. The name comes from combining the words American and Energy.
Ameren employs some nine thousand people and provides energy services to approximately 2.5 million electric customers and more than nine hundred thousand natural gas customers across sixty-four thousand square miles in Illinois and Missouri. Ameren Missouri provides electric and natural gas services and ranks as the largest electric power provider in Missouri.
Keeping the large utility system in Missouri operating reliably is a big job. To understand how it all gets done, Public Utilities Fortnightly Executive Editor Steve Mitnick spoke with the man in charge of that, Tim Lafser, SVP for Energy Delivery and Operations and Technical Services at Ameren Missouri.
PUF’s Steve Mitnick: What is your role at Ameren?
Tim Lafser: I’m Senior Vice President of Energy Delivery and Engineering and Project Management. I oversee our distribution operations group, which consists of our control rooms for the distribution system, all our first responders, and linemen.