Strategy & Planning

“Renewable power is at less risk if it’s on an installation behind a fence. Our fence provides security. That is why it’s attractive to utilities.”

“Nobody wants to touch a 20-year-old server, PLC, HMI or human machine interface, an engineering workstation in operational environment, and allow some computer or automated capability to block it. Putting automated detection and response capabilities in place for critical infrastructure is, for lack of a better term, critical.”

“We’ve worked cooperatively with states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana that have strong cyber capacities within their respective public utility commissions.”

“We’ve had numerous presentations for members with EPRI and other IPCC speakers, especially on topics less familiar to members, such as carbon cycle modeling, extreme weather events, carbon budgets and global temperatures, and global and local sea level rise.”

“I said, ‘Let’s put them all into one mega-notice of proposed rulemaking and do one large integrated package.’ Out of that came Order 636, which unbundled the natural gas industry, restructured it, introduced new straight variable rate design, capacity release, and packages that made our natural gas pipeline industry more efficient than ever.”

“I expected everyone who worked in my department to understand the business. You had to learn the business. The corporate affairs function is respected when you know the business.”

“We have to get our heads around the fact that the world wants new nuclear. Our best communications advice would be that there is breakthrough technology that secures our future. It’s innovative, it’s clean, it’s abundant, it’s advantageous.”

“If you’re on the regulatory side, lean into this. If you’re on the deployment side of government capital, lean into this. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, American technology, and supporting a network globally that gets us to 100% clean.”

“I am so tired of people asking me how we’re going to solve the financing problem in nuclear. I have 300 billion in loans that nobody wants because we don’t have projects to finance. I need utilities to place orders for reactors, and I am happy to give them low-cost loans to finance that development.”

“The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was born out of the Infrastructure Act. We oversee more than 25 billion in clean energy technology. We transferred over to this new office from the Office of Nuclear Energy, two advanced reactor demonstration projects, the X-energy project and TerraPower Natrium project.”