Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

Wholesale power markets across North America moved through the week ending May 15 in a generally stable shoulder-season pattern, with little evidence of broad regional reliability stress in the reviewed materials. Public daily market publications across the organized markets showed a routine operating cadence, while available real-time price reporting suggested that peak pricing was driven mainly...

If you work in the U.S. electric power industry, you are used to hearing that everything takes longer than expected. Permits take longer. Interconnection studies take longer. New generation takes longer. Transmission siting takes longer. What has changed is that a single piece of equipment can now derail an otherwise sound plan on its own: the transformer. That is why transformer shortages have sh...

If you manage a plant, field team, service operation, branch, hospital unit, warehouse, or support function that depends on experienced people, you already know the problem. The opening is approved. The budget is in place. The work is ready. The applicants are not. Or they arrive without the needed skills, leave after three months, or are poached as soon as they become useful.

North American wholesale electricity markets remained operationally stable during the week ending May 8, but institutional and infrastructure pressures continued to intensify across nearly every major organized market. Spring shoulder-season conditions generally moderated real-time pricing, with most markets avoiding sustained scarcity despite localized volatility tied to transmission congestion,...

If you spend your days running utility operations, planning outages, dealing with regulators, or trying to keep projects moving through a company already juggling too many priorities, this week offered a fresh reminder that market design is not some distant policy subject. It becomes a management subject the moment a new market goes live and begins to change how power is scheduled, how transmissio...

Succession planning is treated like a board exercise until someone leaves at the wrong time. Then leaders discover how much was riding on one person, how thin the internal bench truly was, and how little confidence anyone has in the handoff. By that point, the company is not building a pipeline. It is managing a problem. That is the wrong way to handle leadership continuity. A sound succession pro...

North American wholesale power markets spent the week in a broadly orderly spring operating posture, with few signs of acute reliability stress across the major organized markets reviewed. In the West, CAISO and the WEIM footprint continued to operate under relatively mild shoulder-season conditions, and the more important developments were institutional rather than operational: EDAM readiness wor...

For years, wildfire planning sat in a few boxes. Safety handled emergency response. Vegetation teams cleared rights-of-way. Regulatory staff handled filings. Finance dealt with recovery after the damage was done. That division no longer fits the facts. In the U.S. electric power industry, wildfire exposure now reaches capital planning, liability, insurance, credit, rate design, field operations, c...

Many change efforts do not fail in a dramatic way. They wear people out. A company launches a new reporting structure, then adjusts office expectations, then changes performance language, then installs a new tool, then resets priorities after a rough quarter. None of those moves is shocking on its own. Taken together, they can leave people feeling as though the ground never quite holds still. Work...

Across North American wholesale power markets, the dominant near-term theme this week was operational normalcy, alongside increasingly consequential medium-term planning and policy work. Western conditions remained comparatively soft, with CAISO and the broader WEIM footprint continuing to publish routine daily market and renewable reports while focusing stakeholder attention on EDAM launch readin...

The U.S. power business knows how to talk about the need for more transmission. That part is not hard. Demand is rising, generation is shifting, data center developers want service quickly, and reserve margins are tightening in more than one region. The harder part is deciding how to plan the next wave of grid projects, how to pay for them, and who should be allowed to build them. That is where th...

For years, companies have treated flatter structures as a sign of progress. Fewer layers. Faster decisions. Less bureaucracy. Lower costs. On paper, that sounds sensible. In the real world, it often creates a quieter problem. Work gets pushed onto fewer managers, the number of direct reports climbs, and the people who are supposed to coach, correct, and coordinate the system lose the time to do it...

Western markets were generally soft over the week, as mild weather, strong renewable output, and robust hydro conditions suppressed real-time pricing in California and Texas, keeping broader western balancing conditions manageable. Reuters reported negative spot power in California and Texas early in the week, while CAISO continued final implementation work for the May 1 EDAM launch and advanced W...

For a long time, utility leaders could rely on a simple story. Demand would grow slowly, capital plans would move through the usual channels, and rate cases would be tough but manageable. That is no longer the story. This past week made that plain. Utility Dive reported that investor-owned utilities plan to spend about $1.4 trillion through 2030, up roughly 21% from last year’s five-year plans. At...

Trust is often discussed as if it belongs in a values statement, a town hall, or a culture slide deck. In practice, it sits much closer to the daily mechanics of management. It shapes how quickly decisions move, how openly people speak, how much checking and rechecking a team needs, and whether employees believe what leaders say, whether the news is good or bad.

North American wholesale electricity markets moved through a spring shoulder week, with public disclosures pointing more to implementation work, scheduled meetings, settlement readiness, and refinement of transmission or interconnection processes than to broad reliability stress. In the West, California ISO continued to advance policy prioritization, interconnection-rights retention, and EDAM and...

For years, utility leaders have treated cyber risk as a standing condition of the business. It sat on board agendas, in compliance binders, and in tabletop exercises. This week, it moved closer to the control room. On April 7, federal agencies warned that Iran-affiliated actors were actively exploiting internet-facing programmable logic controllers across U.S. critical infrastructure, including th...

There is a reason accountability has become a central topic in leadership discussions. Recently, the chatter about managers has been filled with familiar issues: slow decision-making, inconsistent follow-through, unclear priorities, burnout, and teams that are busy yet not accomplishing much that truly matters. Beneath the surface of slogans, most of these problems trace back to one simple issue:...

North American wholesale electricity markets experienced a typical spring shoulder week characterized by generally moderate demand, increased renewable generation in several regions, and limited signs of widespread system stress. In the West, California ISO activity was driven more by policy and implementation efforts than by emergency operations: the ISO advanced its 2026 market-policy prioritiza...

Recent discussions across the U.S. electric power industry have consistently focused on a key issue: leaders are trying to figure out how to handle large data-center loads, who should finance the necessary grid expansions, and how to maintain reliability and customer trust throughout the process. This concern has appeared in various forms, from a Texas legislative hearing, comments from regulators...

Over the past week, online leadership discussions have focused more than anything else on one issue: what managers are supposed to do now that AI has moved from pilot projects into everyday work. This isn't based on a single headline. It's reflected in survey data, executive research, HR guidance, and company decisions. Gartner reported that 45% of managers said AI had improved their teams’ work a...

This White Paper examines the strategic transition from short-term battery solutions toward long-duration energy storage (LDES) to ensure a dependable, low-carbon power grid. While lithium-ion batteries currently dominate the market by managing brief peaks and frequency stability, they are often uneconomical for the multi-day shortfalls caused by variable weather or seasonal shifts. The paper expl...

Across North American wholesale power markets, the week of March 21–27, 2026, was characterized more by ongoing efforts in structural reform than by widespread reliability emergencies. In the West, CAISO’s week focused on changes to transmission-planning schedules, EDAM and DAME market simulations and parallel operations, and updates to daily market-watch, renewable, storage, and queue materials....

I was going over the latest report from the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) this morning, and the numbers are enough to keep any utility manager awake at night. We’re talking about more than 3,500 physical security breaches against U.S. and Canadian power grids in 2025, a rise of seven hundred incidents in just one year. If you think back to when we started in this ind...

You’ve probably seen it, or maybe you’re feeling it yourself. It’s that moment in a senior leadership meeting when you look around the room and realize that half the people there aren’t really "there." They’re nodding, checking boxes, but the fire is gone. They aren't leading; they’re just surviving the week. This isn't your typical burnout. We’ve discussed exhaustion and being overworked for year...