With Great Power

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 ...

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...