For DATC, grid expansion is a team effort.
Bruce Radford is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly. Contact him at radford@pur.com
As an industry, electric transmission today embodies both old and new. For every established, old-line utility building new lines to ensure reliability within its regulated service territory, there's a private developer, looking to unlock the potential of far-flung windpower resources.
Here, we interview the two top executives at Duke-American Transmission Co., LLC (DATC), a joint venture between Duke Energy, an historic utility now fully integrated across numerous energy-related products and services, and American Transmission Co. (ATC), a grid-only "Transco" formed initially by Wisconsin policymakers from divested portfolios of the state's electric utilities, in an effort to modernize the Wisconsin grid:
• Phillip Grigsby, coming on board from Duke Energy's commercial transmission group, is president of DATC and a member of the company's Board of Managers.
• Randy Satterfield, arriving from ATC, now serves as executive vice president of DATC and also sits on DATC's Board of Managers.
Bringing together expertise from those two leading electric industry companies - Duke Energy and ATC - Grigsby and Satterfield head up DATC, a new and unique industry player intent on building, owning and operating new electric transmission facilities across North America.