With Great Power

When Winter Storm Uri hit Texas in 2021, it led to more than 240 deaths and hobbled the electric grid for days. At the time, Arushi Sharma Frank was working on Tesla’s U.S. energy policy team, trying to convince Texas regulators to allow it to connect a 100 megawatt battery to the grid. It was part of a larger effort to encourage distributed energy resources (DERs) as a means of improving grid resiliency. After Uri, regulators gree...

In 2014, Nathan Shannon was working for a community land trust in Georgia, building affordable housing. But following his interest in behavioral economics, he attended the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change conference. That event piqued his interest in how and why consumers make economic decisions related to their homes, and that led him to the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC), a nonprofit that surveys energy consumers ...

Toby Ferenczi used to work for an energy provider that marketed 100% clean energy but also ran a demand response program. When customers started asking him why they should shift their energy use to certain times of day if their energy was totally clean, he didn’t have a good answer.

During the pandemic he spent a lot of time ruminating on this disconnect and ultimately helped develop a new standard for tracking the renewable energy ...

Sonia Aggarwal spent the early years of her career moving between nonprofits and the private sector, supporting renewable energy deployment. But after watching early climate policies fail in Washington D.C., she realized her energy modeling skills could better serve the clean energy transition. 

In 2012, she co-founded Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate research organization that works with policymakers on policy de...

Over the past three seasons of With Great Power, we've met some of the incredible people working to make our power grid smarter, cleaner, and more resilient. 

We've examined the complexity of policy and regulation. We tackled the challenges of adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence. And we've heard powerful stories of both personal and professional transformation. 

We need to build the grid of the future today – but i...

Marc Spieler had been at the oil and gas giant Halliburton for 13 years when he first saw inklings of the energy transition – like Shell’s investment in geothermal and Exxon Mobil’s wind and solar PPAs. Once EVs started to go mainstream in 2019, he knew the energy transition was for real. And he wanted in. 

So he got a job at NVIDIA the same year the tech giant launched a new line of semiconductor chips specifically designed for pro...

Hudson Gilmer worked in telecom in the 90’s when the industry transformed how data moved. And it didn’t take long for him to realize that a similar transformation would happen with electric utilities – and he needed to be a part of it.

So he started a dynamic line rating company, LineVision, that uses sensors and data to show what is happening on transmission lines in real time. But, like other start-ups in the power sector, LineVis...

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 while working at a fast food chain. E...

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...

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...

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 move...

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 encour...

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 r...

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 ...

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 cen...

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. ...

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 the...

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 ma...

There are more than 250 million cars on U.S. roads today. Only about 1% of them are electric. But with seven million more EVs projected to hit the road by 2030, that percentage is changing.

The problem? Access to all those EVs isn't equal. The majority of EV owners in the country are high-income and white. But to cut transportation emissions in the U.S., we need to make EV ownership and charging a staple in all communities.

That's wh...