Strategy & Planning

“Imagine a line person who would go out during a storm facing hurricanes, tornadoes, and operate with hook sticks. Those days are coming to an end. With virtual protection, virtual substations of the future, a lot of those concerns around safety go away.”

PUF’s Selected Excerpts of Presentations by EEI’s Tom Kuhn, Brian Wolff, Emily Fisher, Phil Moeller, and Richard McMahon.

“What’s unique about Exelon is we serve urban dense areas, as well as rural America. Think about the coastal and rural areas in New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware. With ComEd, the northern part of its Illinois territory, Rockford, DeKalb.”

“For Winter Storm Uri in 2021, we were part of those historic curtailments. That highlighted we can’t continue our traditional mindset that reliability is keeping wires in the air. That was the old way of thinking. It has evolved into the fuel deliverability, availability aspects of it.”

“Our challenge is the pace at which people are being forced into a clean-energy transition with resources that don’t have the capability to carry the load. We’re seeing blackouts. For us, it’s maybe slowing things down a bit.”

“To best serve our fast-growing service area and meet evolving member expectations, we have engaged in strategic acquisitions, which is a bit unique for the co-op space. We delivered broadband. We acquired a local for-profit telephone company, United Communications.”

“We’re different because we’re not like for-profit entities. We serve usually the hardest to the most expensive places in America based on lack of population density.”

“Although power industry experience with these technologies is at an early stage in its maturity level, forward-looking utilities are building an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning knowledge and experience base through a series of use cases aimed at addressing a wide range of power system challenges.”

“The business model for our client is to not need to rely on continued outside support. It’s for them to know the ideas, own the ideas, value the ideas and make decisions, and to be clear about the execution of them when we are finished with our engagement, which is typically around eighteen weeks.”

“Around North America, almost every utility we talk to is embracing process automation and forms of artificial intelligence for the employee and customer experience, both front and back office. We are in the fourth technical revolution.”