“State-level regulators across the country do not currently have a shared understanding of what they would need to do differently to ensure that disadvantaged communities have a meaningful opportunity to be heard in decision-making processes and help shape better outcomes.”

From the Large Public Power Council’s “Power Shift” meeting on Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill, excerpts of remarks by U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez, LPPC Chair & Long Island Power Authority CEO Tom Falcone, and United States Energy Association CEO Mark Menezes.

“The majority of organizations are still in the early stages of fleet electrification and have either not yet started the process or are less than a quarter of the way through.”

“By the end of this decade, we’ll be 89% decarbonized for our Colorado consumers from a 2005 baseline. Across all four states we will be 70% clean energy consumed by the end of the decade.”

“The idea is that you can’t go and make a wholesale change of all that infrastructure, without figuring out how to run your business more effectively and efficiently. In all those areas, we’re using AI to help us drive that transformation and help us better inform where we’re going.”

“Most people don’t understand that there’s a big difference between AI and Generative AI. Generative AI is not equal to AI, necessarily. I’ve been kind of laughing at the fact that with the advent of OpenAI, there has been a lot more interest in good old AI, as I like to call it, of the traditional predictive forecasting.”

“You have to start with a small win before your utility will trust larger things with AI, but utilities aren’t going to be able to deliver clean energy in a scalable, cost-effective, reliable way without AI.”

“On markets and policy, which is what I hold near and dear to my heart, there’s a lot of work to be done. There’re just problems all over the market as we’re trying to figure out how to structure programs or policies to make demand flexibility work in the residential sector.”

“We’re putting demand-side resources on a more equal playing field. That’s an evolution that we’ve not done with such advanced modeling before.”

“It’s not about flattening the load; it’s about shaping the load to match your resources. This is weird, so it’s not resources following load, necessarily, there’s still a lot of that going on, but this is also a conversation about load following resources. That’s how this has changed.”