Top Innovators 2023
Tim Heidel is the CEO of VEIR. Matt Houde is Co-founder of Quaise Energy. Allen Otto is Managing Director Power, Energy & Renewables at Guggenheim Securities. Justin Tomljanovic is VP Corporate Development at Xcel Energy. Mark Webb is Chief Innovation Officer at Dominion Energy. Lisa Wood is VP Customer Solutions at EEI and Executive Director (Retired) of the Institute for Electric Innovation.
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, Innovation in Tough Tech, featured VEIR CEO Tim Heidel, Quaise Energy Co-founder Matt Houde, Guggenheim Securities Managing Director Power, Energy & Renewables Allen Otto, Xcel Energy VP Corporate Development Justin Tomljanovic, Dominion Energy Chief Innovation Officer Mark Webb, and EEI VP Cust. Solutions and Institute for Electric Innovation Exec. Dir. Lisa Wood (Retired).
Lisa Wood: We're all looking at electricity usage increasing significantly over the decade. About ten-ish or so years ago, we started to see major growth from wind, from solar, and now we're seeing new growth in storage. But those technologies are not enough to move the clean energy transition forward.
We need two more things. First, we need clean energy technologies that provide firm capacity. We're going to talk today about small modular reactors, and also large-scale geothermal.
Second, we need transmission technologies that ensure we can deliver clean energy to customers. That's what we're going to cover in this panel. Transmission, SMRs, and large-scale geothermal.