The Power of Efficient Capital
Larry Kellerman is Managing Partner of TFC Utilities. He has spent over three decades in the electric utility, power generation and independent energy industries, previously as CEO of Quantum Utility Generation, Partner at Goldman Sachs and President of the firm’s electric power business, Sr. Managing Director at El Paso Corporation, President of Citizens Power, and General Manager of Power Supply and Wholesale Marketing at Portland General Electric after starting his career at Southern California Edison.
From Pearl Street Station to the solar array deployed on your roof. The common theme and challenge that the electric power industry has faced over the years is how to deploy massive volumes of capital to efficiently supply affordable energy to society.
That remains a challenge that the electric utility industry is quite capable of addressing. And in so doing, both perpetuating the industry's business model and enhancing its ability to serve customers.
By embracing the time-tested regulated construct and adapting it to enhance the relationship with the people we serve, utilities can enter a new era of growth and rejuvenation. We can have a clean, networked, and dynamic ecosystem of energy production, delivery, management and consumption. Customers don't have to wait decades while the grid incrementally evolves to incorporate transformational technologies. Led by customer-driven choices and decisions, we in the utility industry can and should accelerate that transition.
To provide a backdrop for this forward-looking utility model, it helps to look back into the industry's history to gain important insights about how we got here.
Past As Prologue
Over a century ago, in 1912, a clean, low cost, and domestically generated fuel supplied the pumping, milling, sawing and a host of other industrial and domestic needs for much of North America. It was the wind blowing across our country's vast heartland.