With Technology Innovation
Nick Akins is the CEO of American Electric Power.
The U.S. electric power industry is undergoing significant change as we face flat load growth and increasing customer expectations that electric companies do more than provide reliable, affordable electricity. Technologies, both in front of and behind the meter, provide the industry an opportunity to fulfill these expectations. Identifying the right new products and services to offer, and deploying them quickly and reliably to our customers, is a challenge.
AEP is implementing an approach to finding, validating and deploying innovative technologies to benefit our customers that accelerates the traditional product development cycle. We've created an Enterprise Innovation and Resiliency team to identify start-up companies worldwide and evaluate cutting-edge technologies that are ready today or will be within the next five years.
We also have put in place an agile operating model that uses collaborative input to evaluate and quickly select which technologies are ready for further development and deployment. We are engaging our employees, legislators and regulators to help deploy the "winners" as quickly as possible. It is exciting and rewarding to embrace curiosity in pursuit of technologies that better serve our customers.