Rick Schmidt

Rick is a longtime electric utility digital consultant providing technology planning and associated consulting services relating to various types of infrastructure modernization programs. Rick has led dozens of Field Area Network (FAN) technology planning projects and has authored more than 150 RFPs ranging from AMI, MDM, CIS, SCADA and other systems and many communication infrastructure RFPs. Rick’s communications background involves expertise with a licensed and unlicensed Point-To-Multi-Point, mesh, peer-to-peer technologies and FAN/HAN communications such as Wi-SUN, ZigBee, OpenADR, LoRa, cellular, the new IoT communications media and legacy technologies such as one-way VHF/900 MHz for protocols. For the last 20 years, Rick leads an FAN communications course at DistribuTECH and routinely speaks at other conferences such as UTC and APPA. For most of these engagements Rick performed as either for project manager or lead consultant/architect.  Rick is now leading the digital deployment efforts at the City of Longmont Colorado Power and Communications. He has an MBA from Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin lives with his wife Julie in Madison WI and has two adult children.