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Energy Scenes: Fortnightly Top Innovators 2025

Washington, D.C.

Fortnightly Top Innovators 2025 took place at the historic Willard Hotel from October 5–7, this year powered by SEPA. Pictured here are the keynotes, speakers, and panels with utilities companies from across the United States. Be sure to plan to attend in October 2026.

Byline:

PUF

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Southern Company - Georgia Power: Plant McDonough-Atkinson 50% Hydrogen Blend Testing

Top Innovators

“Being the first to blend hydrogen at this level on an advanced-class turbine is a major innovation. The most significant outcome is that we proved it can be done and we did so while maintaining rigorous safety standards and operational reliability.”

Byline:

Latonya Johnson, Drew Uptain, Yvonne Avila

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Southern Company - Alabama Power: Concrete Thermal Energy Storage Demonstration Project

Top Innovators

“The idea is simple: rather than turning a plant down during off-peak hours, it keeps operating efficiently, and the excess heat from that unit is stored in the concrete to be utilized later when peaking power is needed on the grid.”

Byline:

Josh Barron, Scott Machovec, Rob Szmyd

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Sacramento Municipal Utility District: SMUD's 2030 Clean Energy Vision and Zero Carbon Plan

Top Innovators

“SMUD is providing a model for other public utilities to follow, showing that decarbonization can be done in a way that benefits everyone and is economically feasible with grants and partnerships.”

Byline:

Paul Lau

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Seattle City Light: Data-Driven, AI-Powered Vegetation Management Strategy

Top Innovators

“Using LiDAR and satellite imagery for vegetation management isn’t new. What’s new is combining that with all available outage history, tree coverage and microclimate data so we can align crews and dollars where they’ll have the most impact.”

Byline:

Anabel Roza

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Southern California Edison: STORM - Standard Tracking for Operations Restoration Management Tool

Top Innovators

“What was noteworthy was building a process, but also the supporting tools that I could get the field to adopt readily within a matter of days, overcoming the organizational change management hurdle normally faced in BlueSky conditions.”

Byline:

Eric Nunnally

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Southern California Edison: SPEED - System Planning Evaluation and Execution Dashboard

Top Innovators

“SPEED is orders of magnitude faster than any system available. It’s also the depth. We forecast and analyze, hour by hour, the structural and transformer levels for ten-plus years.”

Byline:

Lesia Bilitchenko, Lawrence Yonathan, Jerome Marr, Chandra Gosai, Lawrence Yonathan, John Lee, Lesia Bilitchenko

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Portland General Electric: AI-Powered Purchase Order Audit Bot

Top Innovators

“The solution we delivered is an AI-powered purchase order Audit Bot. It automates review of our procurement transactions to ensure they align with our negotiated contract rates, terms, and system process in terms of efficiency around the end-to-end life cycle.”

Byline:

Doug Lazar, Veda Dharmala, Manoj Kumar, Thana Anderson

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LUMA Energy: Customer Battery Energy Sharing

Top Innovators

“When we call an event, participants can either disconnect from the grid and use their own stored power, or they can push power back into the system. In both cases, it reduces the strain on the grid and helps to prevent outages.”

Byline:

Juan Carlos Patiño and David Cruz

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Exelon: AI at the Edge for Drone Autonomous Inspections

Top Innovators

“What took days or weeks to inspect and analyze can now be done in near real-time, dramatically improving reliability and safety for our customers and field teams. This work sets a new standard for our industry.”

Byline:

Ankush Agarwal, Blake Alexander, Andy McCauley

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