With Great Power

In 2005, Lisa Schwartz was stunned when a colleague at the Oregon Public Utility Commission told her utility distribution planning budgets never saw the light of day. She thought it was a missed opportunity for consumer and stakeholder feedback on planning the future of the grid.

Ever since, she has worked to increase transparency in utility planning.

“In my view, having really meaningful stakeholder engagement can improve outcomes because you can get good input and a review from stakeholders. And sometimes utilities move the needle in response.”

Lisa is a senior energy policy researcher and strategic advisor at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She's spent her career studying utility distribution systems. Now, she works with state commissions to make grid planning more transparent and forward looking.

This week, Brad talks with Lisa about distribution plan filings, the extensive outlines for how utilities plan to spend money maintaining and upgrading power infrastructure. The filings create an opportunity for non-utilities and other stakeholders to share their ideas for the future of the grid.

This podcast is produced by GridX. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

The smart meter unlocked a trove of data on how people use energy in their homes. And it created the opportunity for utilities to offer more services based on customers' individual needs and consumption habits. These demand-side services are crucial for decarbonizing the grid, enhancing reliability, and integrating more renewables.

But many utilities are still in the early stages of digitizing their operations. As director of industry marketing for energy and utilities at Salesforce, Sharon Talbott is helping power providers get more digitally sophisticated.

“Utilities still keep a lot of their data in different silos, and then a lot of their processes are done on spreadsheets and with people handing packets of paper to each other with wet signatures and things like that. So a lot of utilities want to change that,” explains Sharon.

This week, Brad talks with Sharon about how she works with electricity companies to provide more digital services and products to their customers in order to modernize their operations.

This podcast is produced by GridX. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

A third of the world's largest companies now have net-zero targets in place for carbon emissions. Google was ahead of the curve. Back in 2007, it had already achieved its goal of going carbon neutral across all of its offices and data centers around the globe.

But as demand for Google's services expanded, it knew that it had to overhaul its energy goals. At the time, Raiford Smith served as Google's global head of energy and location strategy. And part of his job was jump-starting this massive effort.

In 2021, Google launched one of the most ambitious corporate energy strategies ever. And Raiford and his team made it possible.

After a career spanning more than 30 years at utilities like Duke Energy, CPS, Entergy, and Southern company, and two years at Google, Raiford knows firsthand that change is possible at power companies.

This week, Brad talked with Raiford, now the chief innovation officer at AES, about what's needed to spur tech innovation at utilities, and the technologies that will be integral to the energy transition.

This podcast is produced by GridX. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

A wave of extreme weather this year has left Jim Kapsis questioning whether utilities are prepared for more frequent, intense weather events in the future.

There's a growing group of startups that are more than ready to provide solutions, but they've struggled to break into the space. They need help figuring out a business model that works in the unique market that is the utility industry.

Jim's response? A new company called the Ad Hoc Group, founded in 2016 with the goal of helping those newcomers succeed.

This week, Brad speaks with Jim Kapsis, CEO and founder of the Ad Hoc Group, about its extensive work helping climate tech startups navigate the highly regulated world of utilities.

This podcast is produced by GridX. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.

In early 2023, things were moving along as planned for a rate restructuring plan at Holy Cross Energy, a rural electric co-op in Colorado. The board of directors had approved the plan, which would separate the cost of energy from the cost of delivering that energy to the customer.

The change meant rooftop solar customers could continue to sell their excess electricity back to Holy Cross, just at a much lower rate that would slow their return on investment.

The pushback from solar customers and the solar industry was swift. And soon, Holy Cross CEO Bryan Hannegan got a call from the Governor, asking for a meeting with Holy Cross and solar industry representatives.

Speaking on the With Great Power podcast, Hannegan joked that it felt a bit like “being called to the principal’s office” for fighting in the hallway. But the result — an ongoing series of meetings with energy industry stakeholders from across the state — brought positive change.

In Colorado, the rift that formed over the Holy Cross rate restructuring plan will take time and community engagement to repair. But ultimately, the utility business model needs to change, Hannegan says. Rather than selling electricity, he envisions utilities becoming infrastructure operators, essentially becoming “the FedEx of electricity in the sense that wherever it comes from, wherever it needs to go, we'll get it there on time and at an affordable price and in a reliable manner,” he said.

In this first episode of season 3 of With Great Power, host Brad Langley talks with Bryan Hannegan about Holy Cross Energy’s rate restructuring plan and his vision for a new utility business model.

This podcast is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. GridX is the Enterprise Rate Platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future.