Fortnightly Top Innovators
Steve Mitnick has authored five books on the economics, history, and people of the utilities industries. While in the consulting practice leadership of McKinsey & Co. and Marsh & McLennan, he advised utility leaders. He led a transmission development company and was a New York Governor’s chief energy advisor. Mitnick was an expert witness appearing before utility regulatory commissions of six states, D.C., FERC, and in Canada, and taught microeconomics, macroeconomics, and statistics at Georgetown University.
Did you know that eighty-eight is the largest number not containing the letter n in its name? Pretty cool. It’s also cool that eighty-eight is the number of nominations we received this year for Fortnightly Top Innovators.
We ended up giving awards to twenty-three teams of innovators at utilities. One of those teams was Eversource. Jing Yang, Junhui Zhao, Richard Flynn, and Trevor Tessin developed an analytical tool using advanced machine learning for early detection of leaks in high-pressure fluid filled cable insulation, a significant environmental risk. For that, the Eversource team won the Francis Upton Top Innovator Award in Analytics in Utility Service.
A team at AES Utilities – Norvin Clontz, Jeff Mast, Scott White, and Rob Whitworth – also won this award. They built an artificial intelligence/machine learning set of models to predict how weather and T&D programs too affected reliability metrics, SAIDI, SAIFI, etc.
At the other end of the extreme was the eleven-person team at PNM Resources that won the Lewis Latimer Top Innovator Award in Technology or Process Design. PNM’s Kathleen Larese, Omni Warner, Andrea Sanchez, Ryan Sais-Buchanan, Mike Moyer, Jerrold Ortega, Mitch McClellan, Victoria Rodriguez, Aaron Cabral, Jordan Ludi, and Rosie Reyes-Lopez redesigned the process for new service delivery, greatly improving customer satisfaction.
A team at PSEG also won this award. Ashwini Paranjape and Brien Heath led the effort to completely overhaul the blue sky and storm response procedures and replace field crew devices for much better situational awareness, decision making, and communications back to dispatch centers.
There were so many hugely consequential innovations engineered by the nominated teams. Two more examples were the teams at CMS Energy and at PPL Corp. that took the John Beggs Top Innovator Award in Energy Transition. CMS’ Neal Dreisig, Alycia Tolman, and Andy Stoops achieved the nation’s first regulatory approval for a utility to own, operate, and maintain renewable natural gas production assets connecting the dairy and utility industry across Michigan (in the absence of a state mandate).
PPL’s Aron Patrick, Samual Kelty, Chad Alkire, and David Beyerle established a renewable integration research facility at a legacy coal-fired plant to test new technologies and evaluate their viability for utility-scale grid integration. The facility is fully operational, and several test projects are ongoing.
I could go on and on. But just one more award for now. Teams at Ameren – Patrick Brown, Sacoyya Davis, Pat Justis, Gwen Mizell, Ken Patrick, and Marco Tipton – and at the New York Power Authority – Nick Peretta and John Markowitz – walked away with the William Hammer Top Innovator Award in Electrification.
The Ameren team created St. Louis Vehicle Electrification Rides for Seniors to increase EV adoption and reduce transportation expenses of social service agencies in low-income communities.
The NYPA team is collaborating with New York City’s transportation authority to transform the country’s largest bus fleet with zero-emission vehicles, including the installation of depot and city street charging systems.
The evidence is quite clear from the eighty-eight nominations and the awarded teams in particular. Innovation is integral to the culture of so many utilities.
