Seventeen delegates joined the September 25 kickoff. The group meets every six weeks, starting November 6.
Electric Power Apparatus
EPAC asked, members answered
EPAC asked operators what they see on foreign-made equipment at 69 kV and above, ahead of DOE's October 9 request for information under Executive Order 14421. Seven responses came in within a day.
Ojai Valley Inn, Ojai, California.
Featured event
AEIC's 142nd Annual Meeting, October 20 to 22.
October 20 to 22 · Ojai Valley Inn
The 142nd Annual Meeting opens Tuesday, October 20, at the Ojai Valley Inn. Three days, eight member-led panels, two fireside chats, and pre-conference sessions for Board members and committee leaders.
The 2026 Achievement Awards gala closes the meeting on Thursday, October 22. Twelve projects from ten member companies will be recognized live on stage, and we will share every one of them with you the next morning.
The room block at the Ojai Valley Inn has sold out. Hotel El Roblar, Emerald Iguana Inn, Capri Hotel and Ojai Rancho Inn are all close by, and the Inn gives complimentary parking to attendees staying off property.
A member utility needed to know how peers handle on-call pay for line technicians, with a decision coming up. They sent one short question to the Power Delivery Committee. The first peer answer came back within two hours.
Another member asked how others manage arc flash practice. Same path: a short form, peers answer, and a summary with every company's name removed goes back to everyone who took part.
That is the whole idea. Bring the question you are actually facing, and the people who have already faced it answer. Since March 2025, Power Delivery members have asked 18 of these questions of each other.
Utility-only. Common terms. Person to person. Trusted.
The Power Delivery Committee met September 28 to 30 at Point Clear, hosted by Alabama Power. Eight subcommittees in one room, finding where their work crosses.
The committee also welcomed new leadership. Andrea Dennis of OG&E is the new Chair, with Keith Daniel of Georgia Transmission as 1st Vice Chair, Peter Waldrab of LG&E and KU as 2nd Vice Chair, and R. Scott Moore moving to Past Chair. Congratulations to all four. The next three meetings are already set, through spring 2028.
The Transmission System Operations Subcommittee met virtually on October 12, where Rich Vavrek of FirstEnergy led a session on Human Performance Improvement in the Control Room.
In March, member executives at the inaugural Strategy Summit in Boulder asked AEIC for a set of shared outputs. Seven months on, here is where they stand.
Collective Commitments Report: posted to the member portal in October. It records what the room committed to on eight themes and what has moved on each since Boulder, unattributed by design.
Data center working group: delivered. The Data Center Task Force launched in June, and its two reference guides reach the task force at version 3.0 this month.
Load Certainty Framework: a working draft, built on a June survey of large-load practice at 11 utilities. It goes before the Chicago Load Forecasting Workshop, November 12 to 13.
Capital Deployment Decision Matrix: a strawman. The thresholds are for a small member planning and finance group to set.
Nuclear peer forum: still open. It needs a member to champion it.
Both open asks, the planning and finance group and a nuclear champion, will be in the room at Ojai.
The Safety Benchmarking Subcommittee met October 6 and 7 in Westwood, Massachusetts, and agreed in the room to share its 2025 white paper beyond the membership.
Safety Subcommittee: Best Practices covers leadership engagement, STKY (Stuff That Kills You) hazards, training and work methods. Twenty-two pages, written by the members who run safety programs, and free for anyone to download.
The subcommittee also seated new leadership: Cliff Williams of Eversource is Chair, with Vinnie Massey of APS as 1st Vice Chair, Tim Walter of Oncor as 2nd Vice Chair, Laura Siena of Eversource as Secretary and Ron Shepherd of PPL as Past Chair.
The Denver workshop set up the methods. Chicago takes them to large load: data centers, and what they do to the forecast.
The workshop runs November 12 and 13 at Sargent & Lundy, 77 West Wacker Drive, sponsored by Sargent & Lundy and supported through AEIC's partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. Practitioners from five member utilities will walk through what they are seeing: Nathan Mathis of TVA, Jason Williams of Dominion Energy, Jeremy Prickett of Alabama Power, Ross Mohr of APS and Don Johnson of Con Edison.
The fall series closes with a virtual session on December 9, which goes to the full membership as a calendar invitation.
The series' session reports, its Reference Guide and the Large-Load Survey Summary are live documents, growing with each session. They will be posted on aeic.org after the series closes in December, and they are available now on request from Elizabeth Cook at ecook@aeic.org.
Rob Locke is Senior Vice President of Electric Distribution at Dominion Energy, where he leads the distribution organization serving millions of customers across Virginia, after nearly three decades with the company. He co-leads AEIC's Data Center Task Force.
Large load has become the question every member utility is answering at once, and Rob has helped turn that pressure into shared work: two member reference guides, one on commercial enablement before a load connects and one on operating reliability after it energizes, built from the public record and now in members' hands at version 3.0.
He is also Executive Sponsor of the Telecommunications Committee.
Data Framework Working Group: what breaks at scale
The group's Reference Guide reached version 1.0 in September, and members have now placed their own utilities on the Maturity Self Check.
Next up is Thursday, November 19, 2:30 to 4:00 PM Eastern. Large load is the stress test for everything this group has built. Weaknesses in a data foundation that were tolerable at ordinary growth show up the moment one customer asks for hundreds of megawatts. Come with the place your own foundation strained first.
Challenge 03 met October 12 and took up grid constraints and capacity bottlenecks: what a utility can do when the wires are full and the requests keep coming.
This month's featured episode is Episode 94, with Mike Johnson of Santee Cooper.
He joined the Grid Mod Pod on vegetation management beyond the trim cycle: contractor partnership, safety, environmental standards and storm readiness, and why the work starts with the community months before a crew shows up.
The Center for Operational Excellence is sustained by its Founding Donors: Quanta Services, Emerson, Stellar Energy Global Infrastructure and Siemens Energy. They committed at the close of 2025, and their three-year commitments underwrite the coordination, staffing and convening 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 Siemens Energy, fourth in the series after Quanta in July, Emerson in August and Stellar Energy Global Infrastructure in September.
Siemens Energy builds the equipment the grid runs on, from generation to the transmission and substation technology that moves power to the distribution system. Backing a center where operators work through their hardest problems together keeps the company close to the people who live with that equipment every day.
