Strategy & Planning

At the Veterans in Energy’s Leadership Forum, Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, Georgia Power CEO Chris Womack, MidAmerican Energy CEO Kelcey Brown on resilience, innovation, decarbonization, and the opportunities for veterans.

At CERAWeek, PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, Portland General Electric CEO Maria Pope, Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro, Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez, AVANGRID CEO Dennis Arriola, AEP CEO Nick Akins, PJM CEO Manu Asthana, Exelon COO Calvin Butler, Maryland PSC Chair Jason Stanek, NYSERDA’s Georges Sassine, ABB’s Brandon Spencer, AES’s Chris Shelton on electrification, offshore wind, transmission development, nuclear’s role, etc.

“Economic development is a huge factor in fiber deployment. Our cooperative is serving one Microsoft data center and are in the process of serving three more. You don’t attract those kinds of loads without a sound, highly reliable fiber network.”

“We are seeing lead times of up to a year for critical materials such as transformers, meter sockets, wire, and some hardware, with some lead times on other non-critical material reaching 70 weeks. This requires our salespeople to engage with customers in planning ahead and ordering early.”

“Direct Pay could be transformational for electric cooperatives and give them the opportunity to make significant investments in these emerging technologies.”

Russia’s brutal aggression has reversed German attitudes and policy perhaps. Germans are increasingly realizing that they must balance the transformation to net zero with the other imperatives of energy systems, those being reliability, affordability, and national security.

Association of Edison Illuminating Companies’ Leadership has reached out to encourage utilities to sign up to use the Mutual Assistance Resource Coordination software tool. There are eight utilities ready to utilize MARC once it’s rolled out to production this year.

“How can investments in resiliency improve a utility’s ESG score, and potentially, how could undergrounding current overhead T&D lines improve ESG?”

“I don’t talk about transportation electrification. I talk about electrification of mobility. Because it’s not just cars. It’s airplanes, it’s scooters. In Norway, you have ships being electrified.”

“We’ve cut over $900 million of costs out of our business over the last eight years to be able to go that long without a rate conversation. We had to come forward.”