Utility and Regulatory Leaders at USEA's Energy Tech Connect

“I’m obviously Southern. When I go meet my maker, they’ll say, she was a really nice lady, and she had a lot of friends, and she’s a good cook. But they’re [also] going to say, she sure did talk about gas and electric coordination a lot.”

That was just one of the several notable quotes of the remarks by incoming NARUC President Tricia Pridemore, and just one of the numerous notable quotes of the remarks by the many utility and regulatory leaders who spoke at the United States Energy Association’s Energy Tech Connect conference at the historic National Press Club.

Here’s another example, this time from the remarks by EEI CEO Dan Brouillette:

“I think we need additional NEPA reform. I think [NEPA] has led to a litigation environment here in the United States that we need to address… We have to admit, as Americans, I think, that it has stifled investment. It has stifled development here in the country… We want to give people the opportunity to appeal. We want to give people the opportunity to make their case to a regulating board. It’s important. But we don’t need to do it ten times. Bring your case. Let’s make a decision. Let’s move on.”

And from the remarks by Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez:

“[We asked Google], what can you bring us today? Well, [they said], we have assets of a trillion-dollar company. And so, if we bring solutions, let’s work in ways that we’ve never really worked. In this case, it’s a four hundred and ten-megawatt wind solar facility with a hundred and seventy-megawatt wind battery facility, that Google had been working to acquire from NextEra in an effort for them to meet their sustainable goals… They approached [us] and said, hey, could you use this? Of course we can! That was a really great example of how a developer, a customer, and a utility together working so it meets all of our goals.”

And from what AEP Ohio President Marc Reitter said at the USEA conference:

“Imagine having conversations with all these data center customers and [others] and saying, well, we can’t sign any new agreements. We can sign some, in a couple of years. But it’s going to take seven to ten years to hook you up. They struggle processing that. As I did, with my own emotional ups and downs. It’s very tough, very challenging. These customers, there’s a race. There’s going to be winners and losers in this AI Cloud race. You can appreciate some of the emotion there. I thought, for sure, a lot of these customers were going to say, all right, fine, we’re going to leave central Ohio and go somewhere else. We’re going to lose this opportunity. Well, it continued. Our waitlist and our queue, which we paused, continued to grow… We quickly realized, this is going to cost millions and billions of dollars in transmission infrastructure.”

Last word here is again by incoming NARUC President Pridemore, on the topic of data centers that was, well, a center of attention at the National Press Club that day:

“We’re going to find that these data center companies and these tech companies, they’re willing to pay. They just need able and willing States and utilities to be able to partner with them… I think that our ability to maybe be a little less conservative than what utilities are used to being and Commissions are used to being and maybe a little more conservative than what tech companies are used to being and try to meet in the middle so that you can grow out over time. We don’t always have to just pop up seven thousand megawatts overnight. It’s nice when you can, but you can’t do that every six months.”

See images from the event at our Facebook gallery.

Lead image: NARUC Executive Director-Elect Tony Clark.