With Great Power

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 climate data and predictions in resiliency and operational expenditures.

In this episode of With Great Power, Sarah tells Brad how NOAA is supporting the Electric Power Research Institute, how she has seen utilities’ response to climate threats evolve, and why the power sector needs to monitor another possible threat: space weather.

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.

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 hydrogen project for long-duration storage – at a Superfund site, of all places. 

In this episode of With Great Power, Luis tells Brad how this Superfund site project originated, and how it fits into the bigger vision for transitioning a community of 30,000 members away from fossil-based energy.

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.

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 operational performance team. The team moved data out of Access and Excel into SQL databases, which now serve as the foundation for AI applications. 

This week, Mark talks with Brad about how Avangrid replaced legacy data management systems with SQL databases to support AI projects.

On June 13th, Latitude Media and GridX will host a Frontier Forum to examine the importance of good rate design – and the consequences of getting it wrong. Register at latitudemedia.com/events. See you there!

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.

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 started thinking about ways to encourage innovation among intrapreneurs in risk-averse sectors like utilities.

In 2021 she founded InnovationForce to guide innovators, and their teams, through a repeatable, rigorous, and democratic process for vetting and testing new technologies. Kim’s goals are to promote workplace psychological safety for intrapreneurs and to help utilities keep new decarbonization technologies out of pilot purgatory. 

On June 13th, Latitude Media and GridX will host a Frontier Forum to examine the importance of good rate design – and the consequences of getting it wrong. Register at latitudemedia.com/events. See you there!

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.

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 started experimenting with dynamic rates.

Now, new technology is making time-of-use rate design more transparent. This week, Ahmad talks with Brad about why dynamic pricing is gaining momentum among electric utilities – and what makes for good rate design. 

On June 13th, Latitude Media and GridX will host a Frontier Forum to examine the imperative of good rate design – and the consequences of getting it wrong. Register at the link in the show notes, or go to latitudemdia.com/events. See you there!

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.

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 a safer grid that is more resilient to climate change. In her current role she’s also scaling innovations to improve the customer experience and lower costs.

This week, Heather talks with Brad about how PG&E is using batteries to resolve a service bottleneck in northern California. She also weighs in on being an agent for change in a large organization. “Because of the size and the scope and the scale, if you can make change internally, you can really steer a ship in a different way,” she says. 

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.

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-electrified manufacturing, burgeoning data centers, and electrified homes, planners are struggling to keep up. The grid simply isn’t ready for what’s coming. 

This week, Rob talks with Brad about how to mitigate the risks of this impending load demand, including how recent federal funding could help improve grid planning. They also dig into some  systemic fixes that could improve the grid’s health in the long term. 

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.

In 2016, Dr. Kyri Baker was a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on a new home energy management system. Called Foresee, the system reduced energy usage through machine learning algorithms that tracked consumption patterns and grid conditions. 

Today, Kyri is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she continues her research on machine learning applications for the power grid. Her work has expanded beyond home energy management to the transmission and distribution grids, and she is pioneering new techniques for power flow optimization. 

This week, Kyri talks with Brad about how utilities can use neural networks to reduce outage times with data they already have available. She also describes the machine learning algorithms she’s training to make power flow predictions more accurate. 

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.

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.

Over the past two seasons of With Great Power, you've heard stories from all kinds of people working at the front lines of change on the power grid. 

We've covered the rise of electric vehicles, explored the dawn of long-duration storage, unpacked the utility digital transformation, and asked: how can power companies learn from other industries about change?

In March, we’re coming back for another season on the tech, business, and market forces that are changing the grid. Season three will feature stories from some of the nation’s biggest utilities and most nimble cooperatives; we’ll hear from analysts and researchers following tech trends, like artificial intelligence and virtual power plants; and we'll dive into the massive federal efforts to make the grid more agile and resilient.

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast app to get fresh episodes when the new season drops.