California’s Massive Grid Build Ahead

One of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country is preparing for an 80% increase in electricity demand by 2045. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Steve Powell who is the president and CEO of Southern California Edison.

With a customer base of 15 million people across a 50,000 square mile service area, Southern California Edison is changing the way it prepares for the increased demand.

“Our engineers that are frankly used to dealing with relatively small changes on the grid and small amounts of load growth and really focus on just making sure that the infrastructure stays reliable are now having to think very differently about how we plan for customer load growth and load growth is showing up really quickly,” said Powell.

Meeting the demand for carbon free electricity means more generation from wind and solar and other sources like nuclear and geothermal. It also means more transmission to get electricity to customers.

“You look at the California Independent System Operator's 20-year outlook and they're talking about 50 plus billion dollars of new transmission that needs to get built. We're going to need to build transmission miles at four times the pace that we've seen historically.”

Powell admits 20 years is a short timeframe, and the industry needs to move faster. 

“About 20% of the energy that customers use is electricity. By the time you get to 2045, I would expect 50 to 60% of it to be electricity based. So, customers are going to be two to three times more dependent on electricity than they are today. That means our level of service has to be better. Reliability is going to have to be better.”

Steven Powell is president and chief executive officer of Southern California Edison. Powell has held a variety of positions of progressing responsibility since joining the company in 2000, including executive vice president, Operations and senior vice president of Strategy, Planning, and Operational Performance.  

He has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management. He has also held leadership positions in resource planning and strategy, gas and power procurement, and SCE’s plug-in electric vehicle readiness efforts.