Guidehouse
Michelle Fay is a partner in the Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure segment supporting clients as they implement transformational programs. She brings more than twenty years of experience planning and delivering complex and innovative programs for utilities. Michelle’s expertise includes program and project management, organizational change management, account management, process and performance improvement, grid modernization, energy efficiency, analytics.
Dan Hahn leads the Energy Providers practice within the Guidehouse global Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure segment. He advises executives on strategies to address complex operational, financial, and organizational challenges, in areas of enterprise value creation, customer engagement, new products and services, operating model design, business process improvement, organizational change and restructuring, costs takeout, performance management, digital transformation, intelligent automation, business process management, application outsourcing, and technology implementation.
Mackinnon Lawrence is a director in Guidehouse’s global Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure practice and the leader of Guidehouse Insights. He is responsible for overall strategy and operations, including management of a global analyst team, development of the Firm’s Energy Cloud thought leadership framework, and client engagements supporting utility, oil & gas, telecom, manufacturing, IT, and consumer tech companies.
In the face of an accelerating energy transition and increasing economic uncertainty, the utility today must draw upon its public service roots now more than ever to accelerate an all-hands-on-deck decarbonization transition, while ensuring reliability and resilience and maintaining affordability across the communities they serve. Meanwhile, clean, distributed, mobile, and smart technologies are upending distribution grid stability.
Aging transmission and distribution infrastructure requires wholescale upgrades, while connecting utility-scale renewable power to expanding communities faces challenging bottlenecks. An aging utility workforce and operating model requires retooling to meet increasing threats from cyberattacks and destructive weather events. All of this must be achieved in an affordable and equitable way.
While the challenges are multifaceted, the opportunity to build public-private coalitions to deliver transformational infrastructure change offers an exciting path forward for an industry looking to keep pace with solution innovation and shifting customer demand. According to our ninth annual "State and Future of the Power Industry" pulse survey of utility stakeholders, conducted in partnership with Public Utilities Fortnightly, most industry respondents prioritize state and local governments and regulators as critical partners to navigate the energy transition.