With Great Power

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, he founded ev.energy to develop a ...

 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 were working on legislation to prot...

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 looking good.

The trend lines for nuclear...

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 do that job well, Sheri wanted to sit...

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 found its footing. Today, Scott hel...

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 high school just outside of Houston...

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 insulation is a grid-responsive asset. ...

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 emergency services for the energy se...

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 technologies could make fighting wildfires ...

A decade ago, Zach Borton had a lightbulb moment when studying energy economics at Ohio State University: the grid was trending toward decentralization. That realization set him on a path that would eventually lead him to Colorado, where he now serves as DER services manager at Platte River Power Authority.

Platte River's 2024 integrated resource plan includes an ambitious goal: 30 megawatts of virtual power plant capacity by 2030. ...

Since her first power sector job with Pacific Gas & Electric, Hannah Bascom knew she wanted to focus on people and clean energy — not on what she calls “the pipes and wires part of the business.”

That interest led her to Nest in early 2014, just a few months after Google had acquired it. Almost a decade later, she moved on to SPAN and then Uplight, a technology partner for energy providers. Today, as Uplight’s chief growth officer, ...

If you’re a With Great Power fan, you know that we launched this show over two years ago to explore how people are tackling some of the biggest problems in the power sector – from grid reliability and resilience to skyrocketing electricity demand. 

Over four seasons, we’ve told you stories about the people working to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and more equitable. And we’re just getting started. 

In our upcoming season, you...

During her early days in Quaker schools, Alexina Jackson learned to question everything and examine how systems work. Years later, those same principles are guiding her work to help build a clean, resilient, and modern electric grid.

Following an 11-year run at AES, Alexina recently launched a clean energy advisory called Seven Green Strategy, a reference to the seven greenhouse gases that cause climate change. As a lawyer and utili...

Dan Yates co-founded Opower in 2007, based on the belief that consumers want to use less energy—and that their utilities could actually help them do it. He was right. Opower took off, and Oracle bought the customer engagement platform in 2016. A year later, Dan became interested in another startup focused on residential energy: Dandelion Energy. Spun out of GoogleX, Dandelion developed a system for using geothermal energy to heat a...

Destenie Nock knows what it’s like to struggle with the high cost of energy. When she was in grad school, her electricity got cut off because she couldn’t afford to pay the bills. 

At the time, she was pursuing her doctorate in engineering with a focus on the power sector at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  She knew many others struggled to pay their utility bills, and she wanted to find solutions. So years later, after joi...

Keith Collins knows electricity markets. After a stint consulting for the New York Independent System Operator, he joined FERC in 2004. After that, he spent years working for the California ISO and the Southwest Power Pool. 

But it wasn’t until he  joined the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) as vice president of commercial operations last summer that he started making waves. Unlike many electricity markets in the U.S., ...

Right now, there’s not much growing in Iowa. But Nick Peterson, strategic partnerships manager for Alliant Energy, is already thinking about next summer’s yields. He’s spearheading a collaboration with Iowa State University, an Alliant customer, to evaluate a practice called agrivoltaics, which marries farming with solar energy generation.

Across ten acres, the utility installed a 1.35 megawatt solar installation, using both fixed a...

Chéri Smith  is a descendant of the Mi'kmaq Nation, native to northeastern North America. She has worked in clean energy for most of her career, but it took a 2016 visit to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana to understand the severity and persistence of energy poverty on tribal lands.

For 14% of households on tribal lands, electrification isn’t about replacing gas appliances with electric ones. It’s about having electricit...

With their short, predictable routes and large battery size, electric school buses are well suited for vehicle-to-grid applications, especially since they’re available during periods of high electricity demand. 

Last year, bus maker Zum launched a fleet of 74 electric school buses — the country’s largest — for the Oakland Unified School District in California. It worked with Pacific Gas & Electric to build a network of chargers and ...