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Utility company award winners were celebrated in Washington.

Celebrated in Washington, D.C., awardees were honored for breakthrough innovations at utilities that benefit the entire industry and ultimately their customers.

Conversations with more of this year’s winning teams from Ameren, Entergy with Enchanted Rock, Ontario Power Generation, and PG&E.

“Their award-winning projects are raising the bar and setting new standards for operational excellence throughout the industry. As AEIC President for the year ahead, I look forward to continuing to advance AEIC’s leadership role in the industry on these issues and to highlighting the achievements of its member companies.”

“AEIC’s Achievement Awards are presented each year to member companies who have clearly demonstrated significant contributions to advancing operational excellence in the electric utility industry.”

George Westinghouse Top Innovator in Leadership in Innovation: “Because of this framework, we’re able to pilot new technologies and bring them to scale faster and more efficiently than ever before. This will lead to cost savings and increased operational efficiencies across the company.”

Charles Steinmetz Top Innovator in Grid or Network Solutions: “We took a conventional regulating loop and applied it to a renewable facility. That was the beginning. It started out as a reactive voltage controller for renewable facilities and grew into a full-blown power plant controller with frequency response, among other things.”

Nikola Tesla Top Innovator in Artificial Intelligence: “Providing awareness to our crews where we have better digital visibility into our circuits can help them plan accordingly, especially if conditions impose a higher level of risk, such as working in underground facilities.”

Charles Steinmetz Top Innovator in Grid or Network Solutions: “We can pair our gas planning process with our electric planning process, and that’s unique to this project. This was the first time we’ve tried to coordinate both our gas and electric planning into one coordinated system.”

Lewis Latimer Top Innovator in Technology or Process Design: “The Outage Management System project has been a catalyst for change. It has brought changes in operator mindset, distribution technology integration, and operational processes.”