Association of Edison Illuminating Companies
Steve Hauser is CEO of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies.
A reliable, efficient, and secure electric grid is essential for supporting a healthy economy as well as protecting the health and safety of our citizens. The decade ahead will also require the grid to accommodate cleaner energy sources, electrify significant new transportation loads, and protect against increasingly major disruptions from weather and environmental-related events.
This complex grid infrastructure delivers electricity from where it is generated to where it is consumed, networking together more than seventeen thousand generators through more than three hundred fifty thousand miles of transmission lines (>100 kV) to distribution substations, and then through more than five million miles of distribution circuits to more than one hundred fifty million individual customers.
The operation of this grid is both delicate and sophisticated. There are hundreds of utilities and other organizations carefully planning and coordinating uninterrupted operations to ensure safe, reliable, and efficient delivery that serves all demands for electricity under almost any condition.
The exploding information economy has required the grid to accommodate millions of new digital devices including data centers, personal computers, mobile phones, and medical equipment, upping expectations for the quality of delivered electricity.