With Great Power

A decade ago, Zach Borton had a lightbulb moment when studying energy economics at Ohio State University: the grid was trending toward decentralization. That realization set him on a path that would eventually lead him to Colorado, where he now serves as DER services manager at Platte River Power Authority. Platte River's 2024 integrated resource plan includes an ambitious goal: 30 megawatts of vi...

Since her first power sector job with Pacific Gas & Electric, Hannah Bascom knew she wanted to focus on people and clean energy — not on what she calls “the pipes and wires part of the business.” That interest led her to Nest in early 2014, just a few months after Google had acquired it. Almost a decade later, she moved on to SPAN and then Uplight, a technology partner for energy providers. Today,...

If you’re a With Great Power fan, you know that we launched this show over two years ago to explore how people are tackling some of the biggest problems in the power sector – from grid reliability and resilience to skyrocketing electricity demand.  Over four seasons, we’ve told you stories about the people working to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and more equitable. And we’re just getting...

During her early days in Quaker schools, Alexina Jackson learned to question everything and examine how systems work. Years later, those same principles are guiding her work to help build a clean, resilient, and modern electric grid. Following an 11-year run at AES, Alexina recently launched a clean energy advisory called Seven Green Strategy, a reference to the seven greenhouse gases that cause c...

Dan Yates co-founded Opower in 2007, based on the belief that consumers want to use less energy—and that their utilities could actually help them do it. He was right. Opower took off, and Oracle bought the customer engagement platform in 2016. A year later, Dan became interested in another startup focused on residential energy: Dandelion Energy. Spun out of GoogleX, Dandelion developed a system fo...

Destenie Nock knows what it’s like to struggle with the high cost of energy. When she was in grad school, her electricity got cut off because she couldn’t afford to pay the bills.  At the time, she was pursuing her doctorate in engineering with a focus on the power sector at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  She knew many others struggled to pay their utility bills, and she wanted to find...

Keith Collins knows electricity markets. After a stint consulting for the New York Independent System Operator, he joined FERC in 2004. After that, he spent years working for the California ISO and the Southwest Power Pool.  But it wasn’t until he  joined the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) as vice president of commercial operations last summer that he started making waves. Unlike ma...

Right now, there’s not much growing in Iowa. But Nick Peterson, strategic partnerships manager for Alliant Energy, is already thinking about next summer’s yields. He’s spearheading a collaboration with Iowa State University, an Alliant customer, to evaluate a practice called agrivoltaics, which marries farming with solar energy generation. Across ten acres, the utility installed a 1.35 megawatt so...

Chéri Smith  is a descendant of the Mi'kmaq Nation, native to northeastern North America. She has worked in clean energy for most of her career, but it took a 2016 visit to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana to understand the severity and persistence of energy poverty on tribal lands. For 14% of households on tribal lands, electrification isn’t about replacing gas appliances with electri...

With their short, predictable routes and large battery size, electric school buses are well suited for vehicle-to-grid applications, especially since they’re available during periods of high electricity demand.  Last year, bus maker Zum launched a fleet of 74 electric school buses — the country’s largest — for the Oakland Unified School District in California. It worked with Pacific Gas & Electric...

When Winter Storm Uri hit Texas in 2021, it led to more than 240 deaths and hobbled the electric grid for days. At the time, Arushi Sharma Frank was working on Tesla’s U.S. energy policy team, trying to convince Texas regulators to allow it to connect a 100 megawatt battery to the grid. It was part of a larger effort to encourage distributed energy resources (DERs) as a means of improving grid res...

In 2014, Nathan Shannon was working for a community land trust in Georgia, building affordable housing. But following his interest in behavioral economics, he attended the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change conference. That event piqued his interest in how and why consumers make economic decisions related to their homes, and that led him to the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC), a nonpr...

Toby Ferenczi used to work for an energy provider that marketed 100% clean energy but also ran a demand response program. When customers started asking him why they should shift their energy use to certain times of day if their energy was totally clean, he didn’t have a good answer. During the pandemic he spent a lot of time ruminating on this disconnect and ultimately helped develop a new standar...

Sonia Aggarwal spent the early years of her career moving between nonprofits and the private sector, supporting renewable energy deployment. But after watching early climate policies fail in Washington D.C., she realized her energy modeling skills could better serve the clean energy transition.  In 2012, she co-founded Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate research organization that...

Over the past three seasons of With Great Power , we've met some of the incredible people working to make our power grid smarter, cleaner, and more resilient.  We've examined the complexity of policy and regulation. We tackled the challenges of adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence. And we've heard powerful stories of both personal and professional transformation.  We need to buil...

Marc Spieler had been at the oil and gas giant Halliburton for 13 years when he first saw inklings of the energy transition – like Shell’s investment in geothermal and Exxon Mobil’s wind and solar PPAs . Once EVs started to go mainstream in 2019, he knew the energy transition was for real. And he wanted in.  So he got a job at NVIDIA the same year the tech giant launched a new line of semiconducto...

Hudson Gilmer worked in telecom in the 90’s when the industry transformed how data moved. And it didn’t take long for him to realize that a similar transformation would happen with electric utilities – and he needed to be a part of it. So he started a dynamic line rating company, LineVision, that uses sensors and data to show what is happening on transmission lines in real time. But, like other st...

In Nigeria, tens of millions of people live without access to reliable power. Utibe Bassey grew up in Lagos, and knows what it’s like to not have electricity to perform simple daily tasks.  When she moved to the United States as a teen, she didn’t think much about electric utilities. But she did think about how managers treat employees – a thought spurred by an unfortunate instance she witnessed w...

Sarah Kapnick has always been drawn to solving complex problems, and as a kid she dreamed of being a mathematician. But a stronger desire to work on more tangible things, led her to blaze a career path that combined climate science and financial risk.  Since becoming NOAA’s chief scientist in 2022, one way that Kapnick has applied her unique skill set is by helping utilities better leverage climat...

Luis Reyes is a lifer at Kit Carson Electric, a rural energy co-operative in northern New Mexico. He grew up in a home powered by the utility and has been its CEO for 30 years. Under his leadership – and the direction of co-op members – Kit Carson has moved all of its daytime energy needs to renewables. Now, in a push to hit 100% round-the-clock renewable energy, he wants to develop a green hydrog...

Mark Waclawiak was tuned into energy issues at an early age. Both his parents worked in the industry: his mom designed electrical systems for buildings and his dad worked at the utility. So the importance of electricity was always apparent to him. When he started working for a utility in 2015, he quickly identified an opportunity to use data to improve reliability, which led to running the operati...

Kim Getgen moved to Silicon Valley from Washington D.C. in 2000, just in time for the dot com bubble burst. Despite her timing, she fell hard for the excitement and opportunity of startups and technology innovation.  Kim launched and worked at many startups, but also took roles in larger organizations where she gravitated toward “intrapreneurship.” But after suffering burnout four years ago, she s...

Ahmad Faruqui has been researching electricity pricing since the mid 1970’s, when the cost of a kilowatt-hour was flat. But in the 80’s and 90’s, he started working on dynamic pricing – pioneering the concept of time-of-use rates. The big breakthrough for time-of-use rates came during the fallout from the California energy crisis. Later, thanks to the rollout of smart meters, more power providers...

Heather Rock has always liked grappling with big, existential questions. Knowing she wanted to “serve a carbon-neutral future,” she left Chevron in 2018 to become senior director of strategy for Pacific Gas & Electric.  When she joined PG&E, it was on the brink of bankruptcy due to billions of dollars in liability after its equipment sparked wildfires. But Heather says the utility is now building...

From his early days working on regulatory policy on the Hill to his current role as president of Grid Strategies , Rob Gramlich has been focused on future-proofing the electrical grid.   Twenty years ago, utilities invested heavily in load demand forecasting. But as load growth fell precipitously in the 2000s, those departments shrank. Now, with load growth skyrocketing from increasingly-electrifi...