Tom Kuhn: Walt Higgins
Sierra Pacific Resources
“Tom helped me understand the art of finding an acceptable solution for everybody even when positions would seem to indicate it was patently impossible. He was very good at that.”
Law & Lawyers
An Alliance for Transportation Electrification
Utility’s Role
“Transportation is the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. We believe decarbonization is the fundamental driver toward an acceleration of EV adoption, good utility programs, private sector investment, and creative rate design.”
Francis Upton Top Innovator Award for Analytics: CMS Energy
Top Innovators
“The two pieces are for wind generation for drivetrains and solar module performance. The system of analytics we have created is a dashboard screen for an entire site. We could expand that to an entire fleet. By pre-alarming on a wind turbine, the display will indicate an anomaly through statistical analytics. Allowing for inspection and repair prior to the unit coming offline for a fault.”
A Legacy of Industry Leadership
AEIC’s 139th Annual Meeting
“As we gather for the 139th time this month in Savannah, AEIC is still very much guided by our forebearers’ vision to work collaboratively, gather information, and exchange ideas to benefit all members.”
William Hammer Top Innovator Award for Electrification: BGE
Top Innovators
“We started with idle mitigation systems because EV options are limited on medium and heavy truck chassis. With the aggressive goals we have by 2025 and 2030, we had to find another way to achieve those targets and the idle mitigation systems count toward the goals.”
William Hammer Top Innovator Award for Electrification: Puget Sound Energy
Top Innovators
“The most rewarding part has been the partnerships and leadership role PSE has taken. We wanted this Clean Buildings Law to be successful – so many of us in Energy Efficiency are here because we are trying to help save the planet – and reducing GHGs in buildings is one of the reasons.”
John Beggs Top Innovator Award for Energy Transition: Duquesne Light Company
Top Innovators
“The goal of this testing is to enable newer projects by looking at signals and controlling devices such as relays for when we want to interconnect DERs onto our grid and see how they would impact our systems.”
Mabel MacFerran Top Innovator Award for Storage: PNM Resources
Top Innovators
“We have several of our distribution feeders that are a hundred percent connected solar on the distribution feeder. Today, we don’t have any way of energy management on the distribution feeder, so the battery storage will enable us to do energy management on those distribution feeders.”
Florence Fogler Top Innovator Award for Transmission Tech: PECO
Top Innovators
“Operating in an underground environment is different. The equipment must be rated differently, must be able to function in fully submerged environments, and be reliable to do that, so this equipment was built with that idea in mind.”
Why They Wanted to Innovate? Because It is There
Fortnightly Top Innovators
When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, George Leigh Mallory famously said, “because it is there.” I thought of that inspiring line when wondering why this year’s Fortnightly Top Innovators wanted to innovate. Is it because the challenge, and the fruits of conquering it, were right there before them, beckoning them?