Strategy & Planning

“The biggest takeaway is the importance of building a stronger bridge between the engineers in the office and the crews out in the field. It’s about understanding what’s happening on site — what tools are being used, what challenges they’re facing — and making sure that insight makes its way back into our design process.”

James Duehning, Mark Van Dyne, Kent Herzog, Alex Lee, and Andrew Schulte: “We need to shift from a deterministic planning model to something more probabilistic, especially with all the uncertainty around future load and generation. The way we identify project needs today doesn’t fully reflect the realities we’re facing.”

From the sidelines of its Annual Transmission Symposium, conversations with Burns & McDonnell’s Alberto Ruiz, Chih-Hung Chen, Jess Kurpius, Zach O'Toole, JC Perkins, Matt Ingram, Matt Lind, Kyle Combes, Michaela Nickell, Brent Windsor, Brad Gardner, Paul Barker, Danny Serrano, Vinny Montemurro, James Duehning, Mark Van Dyne, Kent Herzog, Alex Lee, and Polsinelli law firm’s Andrew Schulte.

“The State Energy Offices are most easily characterized as the energy policy arm of the governor of each state. They’re diverse. Sometimes they’re stand-alone agencies or located in a Department of Commerce. We are located within the California Natural Resources Agency.”

“Evergy’s strategic tenets are affordability, reliability, and sustainability. If you ever put too much emphasis on one of those tenets at the expense of the others, you’ll get out of balance and run into trouble. Out of balance inevitably creates issues with key constituents.”

Respondents describe an industry grappling with accelerating load growth, infrastructure vulnerability, and policy uncertainty – even as they continue to work toward clean energy goals and distributed resource integration.

“As a former Commission Chair, I recognized quickly that there is a whole host of managing and operating at any Commission that falls outside the ordinary daily responsibilities of regulating.”

Conversations with Tricia Pridemore and Jehmal Hudson about the Chairs Council Conference and New Commissioner Orientation.

“All these resources coming on have a lower accredited capacity than traditional resources. You have to make sure you’re meeting that supply-demand balance in an already tight market. That’s what we’re focused on. We’re also focused on getting more transmission built.”

“Regulatory incentives focusing on improving overall system utilization create a net downward pressure on rates, just as prioritizing rate impact benefits over other benefit-cost tests helps lower rates more readily than do traditional avoided capital cost tests.”