With Great Power

Climate change is making extreme weather events more intense and more frequent, which strains the electric grid.  As an employee of Southern California Edison, Katie Sloan is familiar with these events. From 2019 to 2021, the state had 44 weather-related power outages. Katie knows cleaning up the grid is a vital part of slowing climate change. She also knows it’s important for improving resiliency...

There's a saying in the business world that if you're not innovating, you're dying. For Josh Gould, that applies to utilities, too. In the risk-averse utility industry, it can be hard to push for change, or do things unconventionally. Josh believes that getting people motivated around an idea is the key to success, which he learned in his time as an energy technology researcher for the government....

Everything around us can be personalized. Our homes, our cars, our online shopping experience. And that’s what consumers have come to expect. As utilities work to grow their business, they're also thinking about personalization – designing programs for specific groups of people and not just mass offerings for all customers. But serving the needs of everyone means collecting more than just a few da...

Buildings account for nearly 40% of America’s CO2 emissions, making the built environment critical for meeting net-zero goals.  Utilities are starting to use efficiency measures and electrification to cut gas consumption and increase consumption of electricity. But these efforts also change the way they make money – and many utilities are still figuring out how to make the shift. As the strategic...

Distributed energy resources, or DERs, can be a powerful tool for managing the local grid. They’re more complicated to manage than traditional electricity delivery from central power plants, but they are vital for making the grid cleaner, more dynamic, and more resilient. Brenda Chew has been researching this concept for years. Now, she's helping put it into practice as the Director of Product Man...

Finding the local value of renewables can be a complex exercise. If rates don't properly reflect the value of distributed energy and the central grid together, it can create an imbalance in economic benefits. Rooftop solar is one prominent example of a technology disrupting the utility business model – changing the way utilities make money and spread costs among consumers. Lon Huber has spent his...

The grid is no longer the biggest source of carbon emissions in America. It's transportation. Electric vehicles are a key part of decarbonizing the transportation sector – making utilities an important force in growing EV adoption. Electric cars will create a new opportunity for power providers to scale their business. But first, they need to get people to buy them. And that's where people like Ka...

This summer, a combination of extreme heat and soaring natural gas prices hit electricity customers hard along the gulf coast. And Tara Seavers had a front row seat. Tara oversees the customer experience at Entergy. And this was one of the highest-stakes customer problems imaginable. Record numbers of people were calling the utility with a dire choice: do they buy groceries or pay their utility bi...

When smart meters came on the scene, the industry talked about them in transformational ways. And while smart meters have given utilities more insights into the distribution grid through digitization, they haven't transformed grid management, or the customer experience.  That's why Carlos Nouel decided he needed a new type of meter – one that could recognize every single device in the home. With t...

When an industry that’s remained the same for almost 100 years starts to change quickly, there are a lot of questions to answer.  And every other week, Brad Langley talks with the executives, engineers, technicians, and big thinkers who are harnessing the forces reshaping the electric grid.  Episodes drop in mid-November. Subscribe everywhere you get your podcasts.