Exelon
Jeanne Jones is the CFO of Exelon.
The CFOs of Exelon, Duke Energy, and PSEG discussed resilience investments and customer affordability.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Why is resilience and investing in resilience so important to Exelon and the Exelon utilities?
Jeanne Jones: There are three reasons. It's always been important. But what's new today is more demand on the grid. Second, it's a changing generation stack from large baseload — whether nuclear, gas, coal — to more distributed energy, solar, wind, hydrogen.
The third is the weather. There are a lot of stats around the number of significant storms, which cost over a billion dollars. That's defined as a major storm. This number has tripled in the last several years.
It's because of those three, starting with incremental demand, as more people are working from home and businesses are relying on resiliency. They think, "I don't want to be out, but if I'm going to be out, get me back online as fast as possible." It's electrification, cars, the full transportation sector.
As more demand comes on by data centers, our customers are relying on the grid more and more. With the changing generation sources, the grid must be ready to accommodate that. It went from one baseload generation pushing power out, to now hundreds of sources pushing power back and forth, curtailing or pulling it in.