Strategy & Planning

Very fortunately, there are alternative tools available to electric utilities and utility regulation that are more focused on the economic plight of these households with greater potential to make a difference for them.

I have been thinking about persistent myths of affordability. Such as that electric bills in isolation can be unaffordable. Another myth is that low-income households have high electric bills. Many households are unquestionably under great and growing stress. If we aspire to make a difference for them, we ought to better target who they are and reach for the tools in our collective toolboxes at utilities and in utility regulation that can really help.

“If the utilities that own the current assets and their operational experts who understand how the grid works don’t become better educators and storytellers about the technical needs of grid transformation, then they risk future misalignment of business and regulatory models that could negatively impact operations and financial stability.”

“Building on the momentum of COP28, we expect 2024 to be a year where businesses and governments continue to lean in on deploying clean energy technologies. In the U.S., we continue to support siting and permitting reform and the buildout of transmission to support the deployment of clean energy.”

“Managed services, especially in back-office functions like finance, procurement, tax and cyber, can help utilities drive innovation and reshape spending to better manage through the energy transition.”

“The majority of organizations are still in the early stages of fleet electrification and have either not yet started the process or are less than a quarter of the way through.”

“By the end of this decade, we’ll be 89% decarbonized for our Colorado consumers from a 2005 baseline. Across all four states we will be 70% clean energy consumed by the end of the decade.”

“The idea is that you can’t go and make a wholesale change of all that infrastructure, without figuring out how to run your business more effectively and efficiently. In all those areas, we’re using AI to help us drive that transformation and help us better inform where we’re going.”

“Most people don’t understand that there’s a big difference between AI and Generative AI. Generative AI is not equal to AI, necessarily. I’ve been kind of laughing at the fact that with the advent of OpenAI, there has been a lot more interest in good old AI, as I like to call it, of the traditional predictive forecasting.”

“You have to start with a small win before your utility will trust larger things with AI, but utilities aren’t going to be able to deliver clean energy in a scalable, cost-effective, reliable way without AI.”