Conversations with this year’s Extraordinarily Inspiring Innovators: Arizona Public Service’s Jim Holbrook, Miguel Bravo and Christine Helmuth, California Public Utility Commission’s Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma, Leuwam Tesfai and Forest Kaser, CenterPoint Energy’s Eric Easton and David Mercado, PPL’s Horst Lehmann and Eric Rosenberger, Southern California Gas’ Eric Coene, Matt Gregori and Ron Kent, and Xcel Energy’s Nadia El Mallakh.

A culture of innovation is an imperative for the utilities industry, if only because the challenges we face, from the threat of climate change to the demand for customer centricity to the complexity of today’s grid to the aging of the legacy infrastructure, and so on and so on, require continuous learning, invention, and integration.

An entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor, George Westinghouse competed against his contemporary, Thomas Edison, working to develop and market the use of alternating current for electric power distribution in the early 1880s. Years before that, Westinghouse was just like many of the men and women chronicled in PUF’s new book “Front Lines to Power Lines.” In fact, he was one of the first veterans in energy.

This panel looked toward the future of technology in the energy and utilities industry, bringing together three of our industries' top young minds being celebrated this year.

Leaders from regulatory, reliability, and engineering discuss the path to decarbonization and its calls for renewables and related transmission infrastructure.

Leaders at the DOE’s National Laboratories describe their latest technology projects.