Back in April, the Energy Central Community Management Team once again put out our annual call for nominations for utility professionals who should be considered Champions of Innovation. This is the time of the year where we hear from our community about who is leading the industry into new heights and embracing the critical spirit of innovation, and we're excited to announce the results, our 2023 Innovation Champions.
As usual, the Energy Central Community responded in force and nominated dozens of qualified leaders, and we turned to a panel of committed members of our community to serve as the judges of these submissions. Guided by choosing who they found to be on the most cutting edge of innovation and who has concrete results showing the payoff for their hard work, this committee ultimately guided us in naming Five Champions and Four Honorable Mentions as our 2023 Innovation Champions in the Electric Power Industry.
Each of the five selected Champions participated in an exclusive interview to share their story and lessons learned in their efforts that could benefit the community. In no particular order, our Champions are as follows:
- Walter Haase, General Manager at Navajo Tribal Utility Authority for his work over 15+ years to get the organization to "understand the Big Picture as the foundation for NUTA" and shepherding in programs like mutual aid with APPA, a training partnership with LADWP, developing renewable generation facilities, and expanding electrification via the Light Up Navajo project. Link to interview
- Elizabeth Cook, Director of Advanced Grid Systems and Grid Modernization at Duquesne Light Company for "the development of the Smart Electric Energy District (SEED) concept, implementation of Dynamic Line Ratings (DLR), Transportation Electrification programs, and industry collaboration to conceptualize a Smart Grid Chip (SGC)". Link to interview
- Justine Schneider, Senior Strategist at DTE Energy for "a range of initiatives tailored to improving the payment experience for DTE’s 2.3 million customers, particularly those that are cash-paying or underbanked, including the project of migrating DTE’s payments from an existing kiosk network to a new kiosk network." Link to interview
- Shannon Miller, Founder at Mainspring Energy for her success in having "co-developed a fundamentally new class of clean power generation" with the Mainspring Linear Generators to serve as clean, modular, and local power generation. Link to interview
- Dillon Allen, Senior Manager of Nuclear Projects and Advanced Nuclear Development at Entergy for his leadership in "developing and deploying advanced nuclear reactors within the utility's service territory." Link to interview
Take some time to read through the conversations with these community leaders and learn about their creative and eye-opening innovations for the power sector. And as always, we invite you to jump into the comments to share your congratulations, comment on what your utility is doing that's similar, and or ask your burning questions for the Innovation Champions to come back and answer!
While narrowing down to the five Champions of Innovation was indeed challenging, we also had so many other worthy nominees that we wanted to call out a couple more for the great work they're doing, recognizing them as Honorable Mentions:
- Justin Chamberlain, Manager of Demand Response and Energy Efficiency at CPS Energy, for "leading the way in the innovative battle towards energy savings" via behavioral demand response programs.
- Abhitjit Bhatwadekar, Head of Data & Analytics at PPL Corporation, for "exceptional leadership in transforming the organization's data platform to support the growth of the company while integrating newly acquired utilities"
- Joyce LePage, IT Manager of Enterprise Data & Analytics at DTE Energy, for her "innovative approach to data platform design and implementation that has resulted in a number of significant benefits to DTE Energy, including enhanced outage communications and improvements in electric service reliability, carbon footprint reduction, safety, and customer satisfaction."
- Jessica Mammel, Director of Product Innovation at Consumers Energy, for "managing over 25 energy efficiency and demand response pilot programs., 3 of which recently graduated to become permanent offerings within the utility portfolio."
Finally, we want to do a shout out to a couple of our Energy Central Members who participated as part of the review committee in selecting the finalists: Thanks to Steve Turner, Katherine Johnson, Kim Getgen, and Russ Hissom for graciously sharing your time and insights in this process-- we could not have done it without you!
Audra C Drazga
VP of The Power Industry Network
Congratulations to all who have been recognized. Energy Central is extremely eager to see your transformative ideas continue to shape the future of the sector. And thank you to everyone who was involved in this process—from the winners and other nominees to those who did the nominating to the Review Committee to each and every member of the Energy Central Community who continues to foster the necessary mindset toward new thinking and sharing lessons learned across the industry with your peers!