Hydro Can Power the Energy Transition or Not If We Don't Act

National Hydropower Assoc.

“There are only about 100 nuclear plants. For hydropower, there are about 2,500. A silent phenomenon is we’re struggling to get the same intensity of concern for hydropower because it doesn’t get as much attention as the nuclear plants do.”

Xcel Energy: Rapid Innovation Framework

Top Innovators

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.”

Southern Company: GridRaptor

Top Innovators

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.”

Puget Sound Energy: GIS Mapping Tool

Top Innovators

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.”

PSEG: Outage Management System Deployment

Top Innovators

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.”

PPL: The Renewable Energy Research Facility

Top Innovators

John Beggs Top Innovator in Energy Transition: “We’re proud that we have completely automated the facility. It’s running now, and we’ve developed a basic dispatch program that makes decisions for itself and programs the battery when to store power, when to dispatch power, et cetera.”

PNM Resources: New Service Delivery Workforce Redesign

Top Innovators

Lewis Latimer Top Innovator in Technology or Process Design: “We decreased timelines for customers. When we launched, we were down to thirteen days to get Simplified customers from the date we had their application to the date they were scheduled for energization.”

PG&E: Managed Charging and Vehicle-to-Everything Technology

Top Innovators

Mabel McFerran Top Innovator in Storage: “Because PG&E is in California, which is experiencing the extreme effects of climate change and wildfires, our constrained grid has pushed us to be innovative with ways to leverage electric vehicles to address some of these issues. That’s put us out front.”