Columbus
Nick Akins is the CEO of American Electric Power.
With the support of the Dentons Smart Cities & Communities Think Tank, PUF chose to honor Austin, Columbus, San Antonio, Spokane and suburban Birmingham as the Fortnightly Smartest Communities 2019.
PUF: Why are we here in Columbus?
Nick Akins: We wanted to bring together a group to think about technology, where it's being deployed today.
We're in a transformational time in the industry and technology is becoming more distributed, more focused on the customer. And we're here to bring the policymakers together, to tie the technology together with the policy frameworks and objectives that we have going forward.
This is a great conference to bring the right set of people together to do some critical thinking about what all this means and of course have some fun with hands-on experiences with these technologies.
PUF: I'm bumping into state legislators and Commissioners from around the country. You intentionally did that because you see that policy is a crucial player.