Fortnightly Under Forty 2019

They're everywhere now. They're in our meetings. They're on our teams. They're at our conferences. 

Not only that, there's more of them every day. Once a rarity, now some lead the discussion. Or lead the division.

They are razor sharp. And inexplicably prescient about where we're heading, especially in all things tech and data.

Their differences with our generation can seem stark. These aren't three-piece suits. But we are getting used to their ways. And they to ours I suppose.

You know who I mean. The next generation of up-and-comers in the utilities industry. The young people that we're integrating into our organizations, to whom we'll soon hand over the keys to the grid and regulatory systems.

By Albert Einstein's Birthday, March 11, pi-day, we asked you to nominate stars at your utility, commission or company who, while not yet forty years of age, are deserving of being celebrated and having the recognition of the Fortnightly Under Forty this spring. (Einstein was just twenty-six when he discovered the photoelectric effect laying the foundation for solar power generation.) You responded in earnest. We finalized a list of seventy-six distinguished Under Forties that are celebrated herein.

Of the seventy-six Under Forties, forty-four are women and thirty-two are men. Notably, that's fifty-eight percent women. Not what we would have expected if we had done a Fortnightly Under Forty twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or perhaps just five years ago.

The Under Forties are from forty-six different organizations. Twenty-five of those organizations are utilities: twenty different investor-owned utilities, three different publicly-owned utilities, and two different cooperative utilities. There were also Under Forties from six different state utility commissions, six different associations, eight different professional firms, and one federal government agency. 

There are five Under Forties from Ameren and the Electric Power Research Institute. And there are four Under Forties from Eversource, Hawaiian Electric Industries and Southern California Edison.

All seventy-six are worthy of our admiration. All seventy-six are impressive. Check out, for example, the accomplishments already in their short careers of Buckeye Power's Bethany Schunn, Exelon's Jaclyn Cantler, Florida's Commissioner Andrew Fay, Hawaiian Electric's Marc Asano, and NYPA's Patricia Lombardi. 

Twelve of the seventy-six have been featured in Public Utilities Fortnightly in the last two-plus years. Natasha Vidangos, Alliance to Save Energy was a contributing author in the April 2018 PUF. Ryan Hledik, The Brattle Group was a contributing author in the November 1, 2018 PUF. Sanem Sergici, The Brattle Group was a contributing author in the February 2017 PUF. 

Eric Mastroianni, Consolidated Edison was a part of the Fortnightly Top Innovators article in the November 11, 2018 PUF. The aforementioned Andrew Fay, Florida Public Service Commission was interviewed in the September 2018 PUF. Marc Asano, Hawaiian Electric was a part of the Fortnightly Top Innovators article in the November 11, 2018 PUF. 

Lon Huber, Navigant was a contributing author in the September 2018 PUF. Keith Dennis, NRECA has appeared in PUF several times as an author. Sherina Maye Edwards, Quarles & Brady was interviewed in the July 2017 PUF.

Erika Myers, SEPA was a contributing author in the December 2018 PUF. Andre Ramirez, Southern California Edison was a contributing author in the November 1, 2018 PUF. And Briana Kobor, Vote Solar was a contributing author in the March 2017 and December 2018 PUF.

They are presented in alphabetical order of their organization, and then within organization, by their name.

Natasha Vidangos, Alliance to Save Energy, Vice President, Research and Analysis, led major strategic initiatives on utility rate design and the energy-water nexus, and spearheaded the 50x50 Transportation Commission to reduce energy use in the transportation sector by fifty percent by 2050 while meeting future mobility needs.

Mayuri (May) Farlinger, Alliant Energy, Director, Revenue Management, led a fast-track project team that advanced the development of a community solar program for Iowa utility customers, and helped eliminate human intervention in a process with savings of over a million dollars.

TJ Green, Ameren, Engineer, Transmission and Distribution Design, is leading the way in the Ameren Illinois company-wide transition from 2D substation drawings to smart and dynamic 3D models that help both the substation designer and the end-user visualize design and space requirements, as well as improve drawing efficiency and accuracy. He heads a cross-functional team researching and developing the processes for the evolution to 3D modelling.

Bethany Luebbers, Ameren, Supervising Engineer, Electric Project Management, is responsible for program and project coordination of Ameren Illinois' Electric Modernization Action Plan, including submitting the annual investment program to the Illinois Commerce Commission. She also helps lead teams on the Plan's risk management, change control, procurement, staffing and engineering.

Julie Tiemann, Ameren, Senior Manager, Missouri Strategic Initiatives, and her team were instrumental in shaping Ameren Missouri's Smart Energy Plan, working with corporate and business line leaders to develop the strategy, master project list, and supporting documentation for implementation of the plan. She worked closely with the Customer Operations, Generation and Callaway groups to develop operations and maintenance metrics to improve customer affordability.

Luke Wollin, Ameren, Director, Transmission Design Engineering, Ameren Transmission, and his team of over a hundred engineers and draftsmen designed the utility's first static synchronous compensator projects, which address the need for dynamic voltage support at four project locations and developed its first gas-insulated 345kV to 138kV substation project, providing direct customer benefits over traditional air-insulated substation facilities.

Kyle Young, Ameren, Engineering Support Specialist, Transmission and Distribution Design Support, drew the attention of Ameren Illinois senior leadership when he took the initiative with the SharePoint 365 team site build and file migration project. He taught himself the necessary tools to migrate files.

Vern Malensky, Avista, Manager, Electrical Engineering Project Delivery, is involved in an extensive modernization project, the installation of advanced meter infrastructure to make the utility more sustainable and more responsive to outages and improve the customer experience. He fostered collaboration across the utility and among all levels of management.

Amanda Ho, Arizona Public Service, Director, State Regulatory Affairs, works closely with the Arizona Corporation Commission, other utilities, consumer advocacy groups and various stakeholders to craft an energy policy that can effectively meet Arizona's growing clean energy needs, and she spearheaded a regulatory initiative to create a new rate structure to meet the needs of a growing sector of the technology industry, spurring significant economic development in suburbs west of Phoenix.

Anna Stewart, Arizona Public Service, Manager, Community Affairs, leads key community campaigns and spearheads vital stakeholder relationships throughout Arizona, and in 2018, was selected as a recipient of the APS Chairman's Award, and in the Supply My Class campaign, helped teachers purchase supplies for the school year by providing five hundred dollar certificates to a thousand teachers throughout Arizona.

Ryan Hledik, The Brattle Group, Principal, recently led the assessment of the potential for cost-effective storage deployment in Nevada which was cited in the PUC's December 2018 decision to establish a statewide storage procurement target. He also led the assessment of the potential for demand response in Xcel Energy's Minnesota territory, and his original work on the benefits of smart water heating covered in the Washington Post laid the foundation for a new wave of utility pilots to explore the use of water heaters as virtual batteries.

Sanem Sergici, The Brattle Group, Principal, has led numerous studies that were instrumental in regulatory approvals of advanced metering investments and smart rate offerings. She led the analyses of BGE's smart energy pricing program, Ontario's default time-of-use pricing program over three years and is currently working with Maryland utilities with their time-of-use pilot focusing on low and medium-income customers.

Bethany Schunn, Buckeye Power, Plant Manager, Cardinal Power Plant, became the first woman to hold the job in fifty years of operation when the cooperative, owned by twenty-four distribution co-ops and their consumer members, assumed operations last year. She was first the transition manager, overseeing the transition of the plant from AEP which required a culture change and the support of the three hundred-plus plant employees.

Matt Olson, Burns & McDonnell, Projects Director, Network Integration and Automation Group, had the foresight to know multi-protocol label switching was the next big thing in the telecommunications industry, so he landed the firm's first MPLS project, bringing new capabilities and positioning the firm as a leader. Now, he is working to lead change with private long-term evolution, LTE, networks, and in an initiative for the transmission and distribution group to more extensively use GIS, and is also a driving force behind the firm's Integration and Automation Lab.

Erin Raben, CenterPoint Energy/Vectren, Director, Strategic Sourcing, identified that both of the merging companies were at an early stage on the maturity model for procurement transformation and accelerated transformation efforts by developing a resource strategy that will not only deliver on the merger synergy goals but also train the new organization's staff in the concept of category management and allow them to operationalize the concept post-merger.

Debra Lykes, Cleveland Public Power, Senior Transmission Operator, is one of the few women to make it to this professional stature, and to make matters even more challenging, she is the youngest to achieve this level of success.

Austin Taylor, Cleveland Public Power, Reliability Coordinator, has been the Maintenance Electrician responsible for maintaining the city-owned substations. With this hard work and dedication he recently received a promotion, to his present position where he is responsible for ensuring that the bulk electric system is in compliance with NERC and PJM regulations and standards.

Sri Maddipati, CMS Energy, Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations, became the youngest vice president in the company's history. He completed over three billion dollars in financing (improving the Company's overall credit ratings), served as a key witness in regulatory proceedings, and consistent with the People, Planet, Profit triple bottom line, entered a sustainability-linked loan, the first U.S. company to do so.

Lauren Youngdahl Snyder, CMS Energy, Vice President, Customer Experience, Consumers Energy, defined a ten-year customer experience strategy to further integrate offerings around energy efficiency and renewable options for customers. She is frequently on the road to maintain face-to-face time with employees throughout the state of Michigan.

Eric Mastroianni, Consolidated Edison, Digital Department Manager, has been developing the strategy and roadmap for the utility's revamped digital environment, putting the customer at the center of the project - with customer choice and control the governing principles for the Digital Customer Experience project. He is responsible for continuing to deliver the program, including setting and achieving the overall program vision, coordinating internal requirements and resources, and driving overall program success.

Helen Ogbara Reeves, Dentons, Counsel, Venture Technology and Emerging Growth Companies, serves on the firm's Smart Cities and Communities Think Tank where she focuses on privacy, finance and governance to help emerging business and communities take advantage of rapid technological changes and the resulting new integration of physical, digital and social infrastructures.

Naza Shelley, Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia, just thirty-two, has twice represented the Commission before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in defending the District's landmark electricity under-grounding public private partnership, known as DC PLUG, affirmed by the court. She is currently managing the Commission's grid modernization case (the Modernizing the Energy Delivery System for Increased Sustainability initiative). With a hundred and eighty participants, in six stakeholder working groups, and over thirty meetings, MEDSIS is likely the greatest active public participation the Commission has ever had in a case.

Eric Grey, Edison Electric Institute, Managing Director, Government Relations was instrumental in successfully advocating for the utility industries' top priorities during the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, such as preserving the vitally important interest expense deduction, which U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan had proposed ending, and normalization. And then navigating through legislative technical corrections and regulatory implementation at the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service.

Kristine Telford, Edison Electric Institute, Senior Director, External Affairs, is a public affairs professional who has grown the utility industry's capacity for listening to and speaking with the broad range of stakeholders through We Stand for Energy, with its quarter of a million participants, on key issues such as electric vehicles charging and rate structure, and engaging expert advocates for state-level dialogues.

Alison Williams, Edison Electric Institute, Senior Director, State Energy and Regulatory Policy, put a tracking system in place to drive the industry's analysis and participation in proceedings on smart energy infrastructure and rate design and reform, and she has supported such processes in several jurisdictions such as MEDSIS (Modernizing the Energy Delivery System for Increased Sustainability) in the District of Columbia and PC44 (Transforming Maryland's Electric Grid) in Maryland.

Sara Beaini, Electric Power Research Institute, Technical Leader, with expertise in heat transfer and the relationship between water use and energy efficiency has supported industry leading research into next generation HVAC systems and approaches to reducing water use. She assesses advanced technologies and then actually applies them in the field, bridging the gap between the development of sustainable energy technologies and commercialization.

Lea Boche, Electric Power Research Institute, Technical Leader, is leading a concerted effort to explore applications of new and emerging artificial intelligence technologies in the electric power industry including with a new AI lab, the nexus of collaboration across the organization.

Ajit Renjit, Electric Power Research Institute, Technical Leader, heads work on developing tools to help utilities advance and implement the concept of Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems. He helped develop and publish open source tools that support the implementation of the IEEE 2030.5 communications protocol for integrating distributed resources and he leads the efforts to develop an open platform for simulating and testing DERMS and distributed resources interactions, OpenDERMS.

Matt Rylander, Electric Power Research Institute, Technical Leader, has worked with utilities throughout the world to develop advanced approaches to evaluate the capability of the distribution system to accommodate and integrate distributed resources hosting capacity. He incorporated those techniques into the Distribution Resource Integration and Value Estimation software tool and helps manage the DRIVE Interest Group to help utilities apply this tool.

Morgan Scott, Electric Power Research Institute, Technical Leader and Project Manager, helped launch EPRI's Energy Sustainability Interest Group to provide a platform for electric power companies to share best practices, define research needs, and network with industry peers, which quickly grew to more than forty participating electric utilities. She then had the vision and foresight to see the need for exploring sustainability with not just electric power companies but also customers, investors, employees, and other industry stakeholders who have rising expectations regarding sustainability commitments and performance.

Erica Zimmerer, Entergy, Director of Grid Modernization, is shaping the utility's new Operations of the Future initiative across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas. She is defining and delivering a modern set of operations and information technology capabilities that are expected to deliver two hundred and sixty million dollars in benefits over the next five years through modern grid operations, new asset reliability, integrated work planning, and field execution effectiveness.

Kevin Hampton, Evergy, Senior Manager, Supply Chain Analytics and Initiatives, led the KCP&L-Westar merger procurement team and is responsible for coordinating and managing over thirty employees and consultants in a matrix organizational structure to develop savings targets, execute sourcing strategies, assess practices, identify improvement opportunities and build strategic business plans.

Megan Bernardini, Eversource, Senior Communications Specialist, is responsible for managing an integrated communications strategy on customer service and supports the Customer Group organization and its executive team, providing strategic internal and external communications, championing company-wide customer experience initiatives and assisting employees across three states to deliver service excellence.

Roshan Bhakta, Eversource, Supervisor, Energy Efficiency, designed, developed and launched the Massachusetts Demand Demonstration project, while simultaneously developing a pathway for an Eversource-wide, three-state demand program for both residential and commercial customers.

Sandra Gagnon, Eversource, Senior Project Manager, Siting and Construction Services, and her team are responsible for mitigating risk to Eversource's transmission project plans by effectively managing interactions with community leaders, residents, business owners and other interested stakeholders in Eversource's New Hampshire service territory.

Kaitlyn Woods, Eversource, Media Relations Specialist, has embraced her role as storyteller for Eversource and has a keen eye for great stories to tell on utility developments and shares them across a wide variety of channels.

Coressa Brown, Exelon, Supervisor, Overhead Distribution - Forestville, at Pepco Holdings, plans, directs and coordinates craft personnel engaged in the construction, operation and maintenance of company substation equipment. She supervises resources in a manner that ensures the safe, efficient, economical, and expeditious completion of work with high regard for cost, quality and customer satisfaction to accomplish desired results, and promotes safety principles and assists in the training and development of the craft workforce. 

Jaclyn Cantler, Exelon, Director, Transmission and Substation Engineering, at Pepco Holdings, led a major reorganization of her team to align her team's organization structure with other Exelon companies. She selected a new leadership team and sixty-plus employees were assigned new positions, and her team is currently designing an exciting new project in the Washington, D.C. area, an eight hundred million dollar multi-year project, Capital Grid, to improve reliability and resiliency.

Feltrin Davis, Exelon, Manager, Advanced Analytics, is responsible for managing all analytics-driven customer projects across the Exelon fleet of utilities and has worked on major Utility of the Future initiatives spanning multiple organizations, including strategy, regulatory, customer experience, digital strategy, energy efficiency, and demand response. He is embedding analytics within Wi-Fi thermostat, smart home, energy market place, and behavioral load shifting programs, and managing the group's Business Intelligence and Data Analytics project, Exelon's propensity modelling, and its 360-degree customer view capabilities.

Andrew Giles Fay, Florida Public Service Commission, Commissioner, is one of the youngest ever to serve on the Florida's utility regulatory body, and has a resume filled with experience and accolades that belie his age, thirty-five. In 2016, Commissioner Fay was named Government Attorney of the Year by the Florida Government Bar Association for his work assisting victims of the attack on the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, while serving as Special Counsel and Director of Legislative Affairs, Cabinet Affairs and Public Policy for the Office of the Attorney General.

Ruth Calderon, Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, Environmental Policy and Manager and Regulatory-Legislative Specialist, engaged in a collaborative process with the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, to draft a resource management plan that would both enhance conservation of lesser prairie chicken habitat without unduly burdening co-ops and was able to persuade co-op members to comply voluntarily with the plan. She was also involved in the process that determined where the Volkswagen grant funding for clean transportation projects would be spent in Texas, effectively advocating for consideration of rural co-op service territories.

Laura Humphrey, ICF, Senior Manager, C&I and Residential, is an expert management consultant specializing in market transformation in energy efficiency, building performance and sustainability. She managed large-scale projects for Con Edison's Residential Energy Efficiency and Demand Response Portfolio and New York Mayor's Office of Sustainability's Clean Heat program.

Justin Mackovyak, ICF, Senior Manager, directs the firm's Mid-Atlantic DSM programs, is supporting a number of utility-based DSM program designs including smart thermostats, demand response, and smart homes. His hands-on background in building science combined with a naturally inquisitive attitude toward data analytics has helped successfully evolve a number of leading-edge program designs for various utility clients.

Jill Rusnak, Michigan Public Service Commission, Manager, Research, created policies and procedures for a new section to serve and assist the Commissioners with their decisionmaking, while the last six months have been among the busiest in recent memory - three major investor-owned utility electric and gas rates cases, Michigan's first integrated resource planning proceeding in over a decade, Federal Tax Cut and Job Act cases and more.

Alex Antal, Missouri Public Service Commission, Policy Advisor to Commissioner Scott Rupp, has shown a considerable understanding of utility law, evident when he voluntarily filed a brief and presented oral arguments in favor of a utility-scale solar farm in front of the Missouri Western District Court of Appeals defending a Commission ruling.

Nick Raad, National Grid, Director of Data Management and Controls, provided a data standardization vision across gas operations that also measured for quality, recognizing the program had key challenges - the ability to quantify the value of organizational information, level of embracing emergent and disruptive technologies such as cloud-based and artificial intelligence, and operational model to automate data services.

Marc Asano, Hawaiian Electric Industries, Director, Transmission and Distribution Planning and Interconnection Services, at Hawaiian Electric, and his team are developing a non-wires customer voltage management and optimization strategy to address voltage fluctuations caused by sudden changes in solar generation. He also spearheaded extensive research and collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that led to Hawai'i being the first state to rely on private rooftop solar to manage voltage through autonomous advanced inverter functionality and was co-author of a study in collaboration with NREL that recommended a non-wires alternative for customers that have secondary high-voltage issues to safely interconnect their PV systems.

Riley Ceria, Hawaiian Electric Industries, Senior Supervising Engineer, Distribution Planning, at Hawai'i Electric Light, who supervises the six-person team that handles distribution planning for all of Hawai'i Island, focuses on protection, reliability and resilience. But when you throw in an active volcano into the mix, things get even more challenging. Since the first fissure opened in Leilani Estates on May 3, 2018, the eruption damaged or destroyed more than nine hundred utility poles and other electrical equipment on Hawai'i Island. About nine hundred and thirty-five customers lost power and more than seven hundred homes were destroyed. As a unit leader for Hawai'i Electric Light's incident management team that was activated for the eruption, his unit quickly developed protection schemes as well as re-circuiting and transmission plans to maintain power for as many customers as possible, for as long as possible. 

Donna Mun, Hawaiian Electric Industries, Director, Digital Communications, at Hawaiian Electric, spearheaded major web and social media projects, giving customers access to information in a more readable, mobile-friendly and usable fashion, and launching the Customer Interconnection Tool, developing a My Energy Use portal for the smart grid pilot, and helping develop the customer preference center. She also helped develop and launch the mobile app within six months providing an O`ahu outage map and customers the ability to report outages.

Kurt Tsue, Hawaiian Electric Industries, Manager, Community Relations, at Hawaiian Electric, is currently leading the team's resilience initiative in Ko'olaupoko (an area on O'ahu from Kualoa to Makapu'u). Thanks to his team's efforts, the utility has been a catalyst, bringing local leaders together to find ways to help the Ko'olaupoko community improve its ability to survive and recover from a major storm event.

Keith Dennis, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives and Consumer-Member Engagement, orchestrated NRECA's response to the U.S. Department of Energy rulemaking in 2015 mandating all residential electric water heaters over fifty-five gallons in capacity would have to be heat-pump water heaters. He led the effort to develop a legislative solution to the federal government's regulatory initiatives resulting in the new grid-enabled water heater product category as part of the Energy-Efficiency Act of 2015 and authored several articles on the opportunity and potential of Beneficial Electrification.

Lon Huber, Navigant, Director, helped nearly a dozen states introduce innovative and modernized approaches to energy policy and rate design. He has focused on advances in rate design, RPS modernization, energy storage, DER compensation and ownership and community solar, and created the innovative Clean Peak Standard concept, an alternative RPS framework to drive clean energy procurement to times aligned with system needs.

Rajiv Diwan, New York Power Authority, Manager of Strategy Planning and Delivery, leads development and marketing strategies for the two hundred and fifty million dollar EVolve NY program to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. He's building a new consumer-focused business line to deploy a comprehensive network of two hundred fast-chargers by 2020, to help eliminate range anxiety, enable drivers to charge vehicles in as little as twenty minutes and increase customer awareness about the benefits of EVs. 

Patricia Lombardi, New York Power Authority, Vice President, Project Management, who leads a team of more than fifty people, is the first woman in this position. Her staff is spread throughout NYPA facilities, including the White Plains headquarters, Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project and Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped Storage Project, and she is responsible for executing the major capital and non-recurring operations and maintenance projects and programs across the facilities.

Jon Shafer, NorthWestern Energy, Automation Engineer, helps customers develop and implement renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, and has been involved in development of a distribution SCADA, microgrids, distribution generation such as four community solar projects and three energy storage projects as well as evaluation of many new technologies including FLISR (fault location, isolation and service restoration), Volt Var optimization, LED street lighting and advanced meter infrastructure implementation. He was involved in the advanced meter project from its inception helping to prepare the business case and justification.

Caroline Moore, Oregon Public Utility Commission, Chief Utility Analyst, has taken on the task of implementing the Legislature's direction to create community solar in Oregon. She managed broad program design, rule-making, and selection of a third-party administrator for the program, and is now the staff lead for the Commission's upcoming investigation into distribution system planning.

Etta Lockey, PacifiCorp, Vice President, Regulation, oversees state regulatory issues for the Pacific Power division, which includes California, Oregon, and Washington. She worked on Oregon's groundbreaking Coal to Clean energy legislation in 2016, SB 1547, PacifiCorp's Energy Vision 2020 project for wind repowering, and development of PacifiCorp's new inter-jurisdictional cost allocation protocol.

Matthew Wurst, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, Executive Policy Manager, advises Chair Gladys Brown. He counsels on regulatory proceedings and legislative developments related to the electricity, natural gas, and water industries within Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic, and on the federal level.

Karim Farhat, PG&E Expert Product Manager, Vehicle Grid Integration, is focused on revolutionizing how transportation electrification is valued by utilities, for greater adoption of smart managed charging and vehicle-to-grid. He leads the policy coordination with California state agencies - CEC, CPUC, CARB, CAISO - and the utility's ChargeForward smart charging pilot in partnership with BMW North America.

Maeve Tibbetts, Pierce Atwood, Associate, has taken on major roles in development of regulatory compliance programs and ISO/RTO stakeholder representation. Her practice also includes traditional utility and project finance matters - the latter on behalf of generation developers, as well as natural gas and oil pipeline shipper representation and FERC enforcement issues.

Jenny Koehler, PwC, U.S. Energy, Utilities and Mining Advisory Practice Leader, was integral in helping the Power and Utilities Practice more than double in size, scope and impact to companies throughout the industry. The practice she now heads earns hundreds of millions in revenues, with a growth rate in excess of ten percent over the last five years.

Sherina Maye Edwards, Quarles & Brady, Partner, Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Practice, serves on the board of directors of SouthWest Water and INTREN and previously served five years as a member of the Illinois Commerce Commission, where she was the youngest appointed in state history.

Erika Meyers, Smart Electric Power Alliance, Research Director, has successfully expanded the scope of research through the release of many influential clean energy reports. She is now taking on her next major challenge as the principal of SEPA's new transportation electrification pathway.

Jill Anderson, Southern California Edison, Vice President, Customer Programs and Services, significantly expanded customers' access to renewable energy. She also heads the eMobility team to bring seven million electric vehicles onto California's roads, spearheaded efforts to incorporate robotics and artificial intelligence so customers can get quick answers about their bill and led efforts with Amazon and Google so smart speaker devices can provide utility customers voice-activated answers to energy questions.

Erin Pulgar, Southern California Edison, Senior Rate Advisor, Regulatory Affairs, managed a proceeding resulting in the favorable restructuring of time-of-use periods for the first time in more than thirty years. She secured a favorable decision, which then continued through to customer rate design in the 2018 general rate case phase two proceeding, culminating in eight uncontested settlement agreements forged over six months with more than a dozen intervenors representing all customer groups.

Andre Ramirez, Southern California Edison, Senior Rate Advisor, Regulatory Affairs, has been a leader in the state's effort to reform residential electric rates, along with colleagues from Pacific Gas and Electric and San Diego Gas and Electric, and advocate for a modern rate architecture, to help utilities become critical change agents to achieve progressive policy goals. He has often successfully defended residential rate filings before the California Public Utilities Commission.

Rye Spady, Southern California Edison, Senior Project Manager, Transmission and Distribution, helped transform the utility's initial wildfire mitigation vision and roadmap into a tangible plan. She was involved as well in the extensive grid safety and resiliency filing that was completed from scratch in roughly ten weeks. 

Molly Aeck, Southern Company, New Ventures Director, set up a platform so the utility can take an active role in the industry's innovation equity fund Energy Impact Partners by assisting in strategy development and fund investing priorities. She then worked to create cross-functional teams across the utility to analyze potential technology investments and make recommendations to the fund on which emerging companies represent the greatest potential opportunity.

Michelle Reimers, Turlock Irrigation District, Assistant General Manager, External Affairs, transformed a two-person public information and government affairs office into a full-scale department that is recognized and respected by local, state and federal legislators and regulators and utility counterparts.

Eric Hsieh, U.S. Department of Energy, Director, Grid Systems and Components, is responsible for accelerating innovation of grid storage technologies, and previously made important contributions to the federal government's Quadrennial Energy Review.

Briana Kobor, Vote Solar, Intermountain West Regulatory Director, works to protect the rights of electricity customers who choose to install solar energy at home. Her formal testimony provided an important perspective in thirteen dockets concerning distributed generation, rate design, and cost-of-service.

Julie Maupin, WEC Energy Group, Engineering Manager, at Peoples Gas, ensures the efficient and cost-effective retirement of older cast-iron mains. Many old low-pressure services do not have curb valves for isolation, and enter buildings through basement walls, so she recalled technology originally developed by the Gas Technology Institute to provide a solution and then worked closely with a manufacturer to adapt it to allow natural gas to be stopped-off from within a customer's basement.

Kyle Chester, WEC Energy Group, Account Manager, at Minnesota Energy Resources, works with the largest-use customers to ensure they have the information they need to make good energy choices and support their businesses, and maintains strong relationships for the utility with municipalities and communities.

Amanda Rome, Xcel Energy, Managing Attorney, Federal and State Regulatory, is responsible for all of the utility's federal and state regulatory jurisdictions. Her contributions include settling Xcel Energy's first multi-year rate plan in Minnesota, reaching an ambitious coal retirement plan in Colorado, and successfully overcoming a challenge on transmission line right-of-first-refusal ownership in federal district court.

Brooke Trammell, Xcel Energy, Regional Vice President, Rates and Regulatory Affairs, Colorado, manages the utility's overall regulatory framework, including regulatory operations and strategy, proceedings, and the administration of regulatory rules, procedures and compliance. She was a key player in the company's Steel for Fuel initiatives in the Southwest, which resulted in regulatory approval in both Texas and New Mexico for the Hale and Sagamore wind projects.