With Great Power

Brian Kurtz doesn’t shy away from a tough climb. He’s always loved the mountains, and in college he spent an entire semester “abroad” in the Western Rockies, learning about ecology while also trudging up and down mountains.  That experience taught him a framework called expedition behavior — a methodical approach to planning and executing a mission. Years later, Brian and his team at PSEG Long Isl...

Ellen Zuckerman followed her nose, literally, into her first career as an energy auditor in New York City. She had an uncanny ability to sniff out dangerous gas leaks in apartment buildings.  That led to energy efficiency work in states across the country – everything from helping utilities, regulators, and businesses advance efficiency projects to helping ratepayers lower their bills through weat...

After emigrating from Cuba to the U.S. at age ten, Georges Gonzalez struggled to find his voice and his passion. It took joining the Civil Air Patrol and, later, the Air Force to boost his confidence and instill a work ethic he’d carry with him for years. He began his post-military career as a delivery driver for Coca-Cola, where he quickly moved up the ranks. But after working for the company for...

Fifteen years ago, Scott Engstrom thought utilities were boring, bureaucratic organizations where people went for job security. But after co-founding GridX in 2010 during the smart meter era, he discovered an industry full of dedicated people tackling complex challenges. GridX went the next five years without a paying customer. Then, in 2015, California mandated time-of-use rates, and the start-up...

Audrey Zibelman’s first job as a trial lawyer in a male-dominated firm in Minneapolis wasn’t a good fit. So she moved to the state’s attorney general office, a place known for being more supportive of working mothers like her. But she never would have guessed that the shift would lead her into the power sector. But it did. After a dynamic career as a utility executive, regulator, and founder, Audr...

In 2007, Apple released its first iPhone. That same year, Seth Frader-Thompson co-founded EnergyHub, planning to leverage smartphones to help consumers save energy.   But over time, the startup realized there was actually a bigger opportunity: helping  utilities centralize and control the growing list of distributed energy resources, like smart thermostats and rooftop solar, that their customers w...

In 2019, when Julia Hoos moved to Houston for a role with Boston Consulting Group, she had no interest in the energy industry. For one thing, it was — and largely remains — a boy’s club. For another, energy just didn’t excite her. But as she started learning about the energy transition, Julia became curious. Before long, she was crunching numbers for an oil and gas client looking to understand how...

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Varun Sivaram didn’t look to Elon Musk or Sergey Brin to learn about success stories. He looked to his dad, a material scientist who immigrated from India.  But Varun’s own dreams of pursuing a career in technology took a circuitous path. His physics lab at Oxford discovered a promising new solar material, but when he emerged from graduate school in 2012, it was no ti...

From his early days as a paper boy and eagle scout to his time as a naval officer decades later, Casey Kirkpatrick has always believed in service. Today, after more than 25 years with the energy giant National Grid, he’s still serving.   Casey directs National Grid’s strategic engineering team, where he focuses on an emerging threat that most of its east coast ratepayers don’t think much about: wi...

Most kids don’t think much about how buildings are powered or how much energy they waste. But growing up in an old, inefficient apartment building in New York, Ben Brown did.  From an early age he knew he wanted to work on climate solutions and energy efficiency. That interest led him to Google, where he worked on Nest Renew, which allowed Nest thermostat users to adjust their energy usage to time...

Nikki Bruno learned early in her career that debates over climate change – and how to respond – are seldom black and white. Progress comes from honest discourse and collaboration. At Eversource, where she leads the utility's thermal solutions and operational services, Nikki manages a geothermal project that has brought together environmental activists, the utility’s gas infrastructure team, ratepa...

Heather O’Neill’s career in energy started in a pretty unusual place: working for a Republican billionaire. But in 2004 she joined the Robertson Foundation as a program officer just as it was exploring clean energy investments.  In 2012, Heather joined Advanced Energy United — an industry association that promotes grid-scale and distributed energy innovations — to focus on state-level and regional...

At age 10, Neil Chatterjee found common ground with his immigrant father through politics. Watching then-Vice President George H. W. Bush spar with Michael Dukakis during a presidential debate on TV,  Neil and his dad connected in a way they hadn’t before.   Years later, after serving as Senator Mitch McConnell’s energy advisor and appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, he found th...

The power sector is at an inflection point.  Skyrocketing load growth and rising energy prices are converging with an aging electric grid, inadequate power supply, and regulatory hurdles. It’s a perfect storm that’s forcing utilities to take a serious look at their business models.  But new innovations focused on meeting energy demand and confronting the affordability crisis are tackling these cha...

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...

Chris Black had always planned on being an architect. But during his freshman year in college, he pivoted to computer science. On the surface, it looked like a strange change of course. But Chris saw parallels in the importance of form and function in both fields.  Computer science eventually led Chris to the energy sector, where he brought his passion for making great digital products to the worl...

During a visit to Silicon Valley in 2015, Nick Woolley realized that the many Teslas he saw whizzing past him were not just new cars, they could also be distributed energy resources. He was working for National Grid in his native England at the time, but he couldn’t shake the idea that EVs could provide demand flexibility to the grid in a way that could benefit drivers and utilities alike. In 2018...

 In 2015, Laura Sherman and her colleagues from Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet’s office rode horses into a special part of the Rocky Mountains called the Thompson Divide. Laura had landed in Sen. Bennet’s office after grad school as part of a policy fellowship with the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. At the time she was a legislative assistant to Sen. Bennet. She and her colleagues...

Mike Kramer has always liked puzzles. But in 2017 he faced one harder than any sudoku. This one involved the livelihoods of hundreds of American families.  As director of business operations and the chief financial officer for Exelon Corporation’s eastern region, Mike Kramer was accountable for the financial health of seven nuclear generation facilities across four states. And things were not look...

In the early 2000s, when she was doing legal work in her native Texas, Sheri Givens held state government roles that put her in the thick of energy policy-making. And in 2009, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed Sheri the chief executive of Public Counsel of the Texas Office of Public Utility Counsel. That made her, in effect, the consumer advocate for all 20 million Texas utility ratepayers. To d...

Fifteen years ago, Scott Engstrom thought utilities were boring, bureaucratic organizations where people went for job security. But after co-founding GridX in 2010 during the smart meter era, he discovered an industry full of dedicated people tackling complex challenges. GridX went the next five years without a paying customer. Then, in 2015, California mandated time-of-use rates, and the start-up...

In December 2001, Carrie Simpson sat at her desk on the trading floor of Enron confused, disenchanted, and unsure of what would happen next. A recent college graduate and brand-new power trading analyst at the company, she could barely wrap her head around the news that the power trading giant had just filed for bankruptcy.  So she left the world of electricity and became a teacher at her hometown...

A Jurassic Park clip at an audio-visual store in Indianapolis got Seth Little thinking about smart homes as a teenager in the 1990s. That moment led him to a career in energy efficiency. Today, he's the director of market development and partnerships at CLEAResult, one of North America's largest energy efficiency implementation firms. Seth has a provocative take on the energy transition: attic ins...

Adam Helman has spent his entire career in emergency management. But after working for the New York State Department of Health during the COVID pandemic, he wanted something new.  So in 2023, Adam moved from responding to a public health emergency to responding to the climate emergency, in addition to other hazards utilities have dealt with for decades. Just two years into his role as director of...

In 1994, Joaquin Ramirez took a job with a wildland fire-fighting crew in his native Spain. That year, Spain saw some of the most destructive fires in its history, and Joaquin quickly realized he just wasn’t cut out to be a wildland firefighter. He left the crew, but he kept thinking about the outdated maps his fellow firefighters had relied on, and wondering how better sensing and mapping technol...