Seventeen meetings, workshops and forums take place from September through December. The Load Forecasting Workshop runs September 15 to 16 in Denver. And the Grid Advancement Program cohort opened with a question the room could not agree on.
Seventeen meetings, workshops and forums run from mid-September through the end of the year, and they are now on a single page with dates, host and venue. Most are open for registration; the rest are marked coming soon while we finalize details with the host.
See all fall events and register
Eight member-led panels are taking shape across the themes the membership named this year: infrastructure for rising demand, the workforce ahead, data and analytics for decision-making, and customer and stakeholder engagement. The panelists are operators from across the membership.
Two fireside chats anchor the program, one on each full day, and each pairs an outside operator with a member in the chair. On Wednesday, Bert Bean of Insight Global sits with Ben Felton of Portland General on the workforce question, from a company that staffs both hyperscaler data center builds and much of the investor-owned utility industry and watches the same skilled people move between them. On Thursday, Chad Williams of QII sits with Jim Heilbron of Southern Company for the view from the other side of load growth.
The 2026 Achievement Awards close the meeting, with winners recognized live.
Register for the Annual Meeting
Weather and wildfire resilience went first because it is the challenge members raised most often, and because the practice is moving faster than the documentation. Utilities that built wildfire programs under western conditions are now advising peers facing the same risk in places that never planned for it. Najwa Abouhassan of Exelon chairs the cohort.
Three things came out of the hour, and they are the reason the work continues:
Those go into the Flight Plan: the challenge turned into a sequenced working document participating utilities take back to their own programs.
View the challenge
The workshop is built around utility-led case studies on how members are handling forecast governance, where established methods are breaking under large-load growth, and what it takes to make the business case for transparency inside a utility. Confirmed sessions include a feeder-level forecasting approach and a work-order threshold method, both presented by member utilities.
This is the first of two. The November workshop in Chicago takes up large load. Together they anchor AEIC's load forecasting work in 2026 and feed the fourth edition of the Load Research and Analytics Manual in 2027.
The virtual workshop on December 9 closes the year. Watch for a calendar invitation; that session goes to the full membership directly.
Register for the Load Forecasting WorkshopPower Delivery members put a series of information requests to each other this summer, on questions of field practice that every utility handles a little differently and few have ever compared side by side. The response was strong, and it came quickly.
Each request came from a member utility, not from staff. Findings are consolidated and returned to the member who raised the question, de-identified, so what one company learned can travel without exposing what any one company does.
The value is not in the survey. It is in the network that answers it, and that network is the membership. Knowledge of one is the knowledge of all.
See the Power Delivery Committee
Data architecture does not recruit itself, so Hagen stopped pitching it as data architecture. He framed it as the three things an operator already owns: project execution, resiliency, and cost pressure that is not going away.
None of those move by adding people. They move by investing in data-driven insights and automation, and that begins with how a utility organizes its data. That reframing became the Utility Data Architecture Collaborative, which Hagen carries alongside the Data Framework Working Group he co-chairs.
His ask of each utility is deliberately small: send your strongest operations leader, and have them bring their data architect.
Read the Champion Leader GuideThe group meets the third Thursday, and the sessions are carried by members, not by staff. DTE, APS, NCEMC, Santee Cooper and Austin Energy have each taken a session to show the group how they actually handle a piece of the data problem, what worked, and what they would do differently.
The premise is that data readiness is the unglamorous prerequisite under nearly every modernization program the membership is running, and that it is better worked in company than alone.
Next sessions are August 20 and September 17. If you have not held the dates, the invitation is still open.
Join the working group
This month's featured episode is Utility-Owned Fiber Networks, Episode 88, with Trey Hayes of Alabama Power. It continues a run of practitioners describing what they actually built, not what they plan to.
The team is recruiting member guests for Q4. If your utility has a project that belongs on a national stage, operational, workforce, technology or transformation, reply to Margiv Amin at mamin@aeic.org and he will route from there.
Watch the latest episodeThe Member Spotlight returns Friday, August 21, from 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern. Tony Perez and Jason Dudley of Arizona Public Service walk through the work they are doing on virtual power plants and demand management.
The session gets into what it actually took to get customer engagement, data, and organizational structure pulling in the same direction, the obstacles they hit along the way, and the persistence and communication it took to move the organization. The APS Marketplace gets a look as well, as a tool for customer experience and program adoption.
This one is members only. Reply to The Current, or write to us, and we will send you the invite.
2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern, one hour, virtual.
Tony Perez and Jason Dudley, Arizona Public Service.
Open to AEIC members only. There is no public registration page; we send the invite directly.
Request the inviteThe Center for Operational Excellence is sustained by its Founding Donors: Quanta Services, Emerson, Stellar Energy and Siemens Energy. They committed at the close of 2025 and now anchor the base behind the Center's programs, including the Data Framework Working Group, the Grid Advancement Program, the Critical Issue Forums and the Grid Mod Pod.
This month the Center recognizes Emerson. Their support goes to the AI for Practitioners program, which is a targeted fit, not a general sponsorship. Their core business is control systems for generation fleets, so the questions the program takes up, what to automate, what to keep a human on, and how to tell a working system from a demonstration, are questions they answer commercially every day.
That is the kind of relationship the Center is built for, support pointed at work a company already knows well.
If your company is interested in supporting the Center for Operational Excellence, Steve Hauser will take the conversation directly.
Email Steve HauserThe Current goes to member contacts each month and is archived in the Member Portal. Back issues and the rest of the year are on The Current's page.
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