Strategy & Planning

In what could be aptly called the Environmental, Social and Governance Era, utilities are being scored for their ethical performance, quite rigorously, quite comprehensively, by highly influential organizations. The issue is so big that we devoted a special issue of PUF to it.

A conversation with retired EEI executive vice president David Owens about FRI’s distinguished service award.

“A utility may be dealing with a manufactured gas plant or other facility that closed down in the early 1900s, yet the policies may not have been issued until the 1940s.”

Memorable moments from the September 29 webinar on Steve Mitnick’s book “Women Leading Utilities, the Pioneers and Path to Today and Tomorrow,” including what was said there by CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams, Seattle City Light CEO Debra Smith, and American Municipal Power CEO Jolene Thompson.

Electrification, Equity, and Cost-Effectiveness: This panel took a thorough look at electrification and its future in the clean energy movement.

Jurisdiction and State Clean Energy Goals: This panel explored jurisdictional issues.

The utilities industry holds three of its most important conferences of the year over a seven-day period.

PG&E met with firms that responded to its Request for Information, each of which presented their approaches to accomplish this unprecedented project. Herein are key excerpts of the RFI.

We celebrate this year’s AEIC Top 10 Awards for operational innovation: Commonwealth Edison for advanced distribution protection and for an arc flash simulator, Con Edison for its safety leadership system, Duke Energy for its customer delivery builder concierge, Eversource for its Give Me a Moment tools to address momentary outages, Florida Power & Light for tackling human error in switching, New York Power Authority for private LTE network applications, PPL for vegetation management risk modeling, Tampa Electric for its BlockEnergy distributed energy system, and Tennessee Valley Authority for its safety blitz process.

A culture of innovation is an imperative for the utilities industry, if only because the challenges we face, from the threat of climate change to the demand for customer centricity to the complexity of today’s grid to the aging of the legacy infrastructure, and so on and so on, require continuous learning, invention, and integration.