Top Innovators 2023
Mark Berry is SVP R&D at Southern Company. Rod Fontecilla is Chief Innovation Officer at Guidehouse. Roger Kranenburg is VP Strategy & Policy at Eversource. Gary Hoogeveen is the CEO of Rocky Mountain Power. Latisha Hill is Chief Customer Officer at Avista. John Mannetti is Director Strategic Energy Initiatives at Puget Sound Energy.
Innovators and superstars of the energy and utilities industry attended the Fortnightly Top Innovators 2023 conference at the historic Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. to learn, trade ideas, and network. This session, Culture of Innovation, featured Southern Company SVP R&D Mark Berry, Guidehouse Chief Innovation Officer Rod Fontecilla, Eversource VP Strategy & Policy Roger Kranenburg, Rocky Mountain Power CEO Gary Hoogeveen, Avista Chief Customer Officer Latisha Hill, and Puget Sound Energy Director Strategic Energy Initiatives John Mannetti.
Rod Fontecilla: There's a lot of growth, you're building renewables, and there is a debate about modernizing existing infrastructure versus completely building brand new. What are your thoughts and how do you bring innovation into that?
Mark Berry: We shouldn't be having that conversation as an "or" conversation, but an "and." Existing natural gas infrastructure, especially infrastructure that's going into homes that provides heating, is important infrastructure.
Many refer to gas as a bridge fuel to the future, that bridge is like the bridge to Key West. We need to figure out how we leverage that infrastructure where we're going to have RNG, maybe synthetic methane, or even mixing hydrogen in terms of leveraging that infrastructure.