Podcasts about American Electric Power

Roberto Moro, de robertomoro.com, analiza las acciones de Repsol, Duke Energy, Logista, Enagás, American Electric Power o Acciona

Columbus appears to be on track to keep an important promise: The Columbus Promise. The innovative education partnership launched in 2021 with the goal of sending more Columbus City School graduates to college, boosting their own life trajectories and helping Central Ohio supercharge its workforce. The Columbus Promise lets any graduate of Columbus City Schools attend Columbus State Community College at no cost for six semesters and provides a $500 stipend each semester plus academic support.  Now the Promise is no longer just a pilot. The program's key partners – the City of Columbus, Columbus City Schools, I Know I Can, and Columbus State – and an array of private backers – have all recently recommitted to launching a new phase of the program, with more than half of a new $25 million goal already raised.  With a panel of leaders, we unpack the Columbus Promise, explore its origins and impact, and get an inside look at what happens next. Featuring Dr. Angela Chapman, Superintendent/CEO, Columbus City Schools Janelle Coleman, Vice President, Community Engagement & Corporate Philanthropy and President, AEP Foundation Shannon Hardin, President, Columbus City Council  Dr. Desiree Polk-Bland, Senior Vice President for Student Success, Columbus State Community College The moderator is Colleen Marshall, News Anchor, NBC4, and host of "NBC4's The Spectrum." This presenting sponsor of this forum was The Columbus Foundation. This forum was also sponsored by Cardinal Health and American Electric Power. The presenting sponsor of the CMC livestream was The Center for Human Kindness at the Columbus Foundation. CMC's livestream partner was The Columbus Dispatch. This forum was also supported by The Ellis. This forum was recorded before a live audience at The Ellis in Columbus' historic Italian Village on April 9, 2025.

Today we had the honor of hosting Pablo Vegas, President and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Pablo was appointed as CEO by Governor Abbott in October 2022, after previously serving as Executive Vice President of NiSource and Group President of NiSource Utilities. His previous management roles included senior positions with both American Electric Power and IBM. Pablo also serves on the Global Advisory Board for the Harvard Business School and is a member of the Texas Advanced Nuclear Working Group. ERCOT manages the flow of electricity to over 27 million Texas customers and oversees one of the most unique power grids in the US. We were thrilled to hear Pablo's unique insights on the latest power developments in Texas and across the US. In our conversation, we explore ERCOT's collaboration with international and domestic grid operators to share best practices for managing intermittent resources and ensuring resource adequacy, ERCOT's unique operational advantages, and Texas's projected electricity demand growth by 2030, which equates to adding Germany's current electricity demand. We discuss the reliability risks associated with renewable energy integration, insights into the current state of battery storage capacity, and the need for Texas market design changes to better incentivize the building of more dispatchable power plants. Pablo shares details about the Texas Energy Fund's $5 billion allocation aimed at incentivizing up to 10 gigawatts of dispatchable power, economic hurdles for coal plants as well as combined-cycle gas plants under EPA regulations requiring carbon capture by the end of 2031, opportunities for nuclear energy development, and the lack of clear market pricing signals in ERCOT compared to capacity market spikes in PJM and MISO. We touch on how the new administration might approach power policy, how current federal regulations hinder power sector growth despite incentives for broader economic expansion, and more. We ended by asking Pablo for his predictions for what Texas's generation mix might look like in five years and for the future of ERCOT's connectivity with other grids. We covered a great deal of territory and can't thank Pablo enough for his insights into all these critical topics. Mike Bradley kicked off the show by highlighting that markets remain in “digestion” mode as they continue to react to Trump's Cabinet picks. Over the weekend, Trump nominated Scott Bessent for Secretary of Treasury and markets responded favorably (bond yields dropped) on Monday as many investors believe he'll be more balanced on the tariff front. However, Trump surprised markets a day later by vowing that he'll levy additional tariffs on China (10%) and new import tariffs (25%) on all Canadian & Mexican goods. On the crude oil market front, WTI traded sideways/slightly down over the past week (~$69/bbl) due to a potential ceasefire deal in the Middle East. He noted that the December 1st OPEC meeting will now be virtual. OPEC's leadership will likely look to extend current production curtailments for another three months to get them through the seasonally weak Q1 period. On the natural gas front, U.S. natural gas price in recent weeks has spiked from ~$3.00/MMBtu to ~$3.40/MMBtu due to a colder 6-10-day weather outlook. The real gas story is in Europe where natural gas price in recent weeks has spiked to ~$15/MMBtu due to an early spell of cold weather, lower LNG shipments and extremely low wind generation. On the broader equity market front, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq were up just over 1.5% over the last week as they continue to digest Trump Cabinet picks and what policy priorities might be enacted on early in his Presidency. On the energy equity front, the Energy sector was one of the few S&P sectors down last week (~1.5%). He also noted a handful of Energy & Materials sector deals this past week and ended by discussing that the COP29 Conference in Baku c

In today's news: State Representative Joey Andrews is looking into what he can do to help Bridgman Public Schools after a settlement was reached this week between American Electric Power and Lake Township that will result in a reduction in the amount of taxes AEP will have to pay for the Cook nuclear power plant.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit this week to the United States hasn't impressed Congressman Bill Huizenga.  The Berrien County Road Department is planning an informational session for next month to unveil its construction plans for Red Arrow Highway in 2025. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: State Representative Joey Andrews is looking into what he can do to help Bridgman Public Schools after a settlement was reached this week between American Electric Power and Lake Township that will result in a reduction in the amount of taxes AEP will have to pay for the Cook nuclear power plant.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit this week to the United States hasn't impressed Congressman Bill Huizenga.  The Berrien County Road Department is planning an informational session for next month to unveil its construction plans for Red Arrow Highway in 2025. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: State Representative Joey Andrews is looking into what he can do to help Bridgman Public Schools after a settlement was reached this week between American Electric Power and Lake Township that will result in a reduction in the amount of taxes AEP will have to pay for the Cook nuclear power plant.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit this week to the United States hasn't impressed Congressman Bill Huizenga.  The Berrien County Road Department is planning an informational session for next month to unveil its construction plans for Red Arrow Highway in 2025. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: State Representative Joey Andrews is looking into what he can do to help Bridgman Public Schools after a settlement was reached this week between American Electric Power and Lake Township that will result in a reduction in the amount of taxes AEP will have to pay for the Cook nuclear power plant.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit this week to the United States hasn't impressed Congressman Bill Huizenga.  The Berrien County Road Department is planning an informational session for next month to unveil its construction plans for Red Arrow Highway in 2025. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: The settlement reached between Lake Township and American Electric Power in their state tax tribunal dispute over the value of the Cook nuclear power plant will have an effect on the budgets of several local governments in Berrien County, but it could have been worse.  Berrien County Register of Deeds Laura Freehling has been named the Register of the Year by the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds.  The United Way of Southwest Michigan is preparing for its next Whirlpool Appliance Sale, and the event this time will be in a better venue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: The settlement reached between Lake Township and American Electric Power in their state tax tribunal dispute over the value of the Cook nuclear power plant will have an effect on the budgets of several local governments in Berrien County, but it could have been worse.  Berrien County Register of Deeds Laura Freehling has been named the Register of the Year by the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds.  The United Way of Southwest Michigan is preparing for its next Whirlpool Appliance Sale, and the event this time will be in a better venue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: The settlement reached between Lake Township and American Electric Power in their state tax tribunal dispute over the value of the Cook nuclear power plant will have an effect on the budgets of several local governments in Berrien County, but it could have been worse.  Berrien County Register of Deeds Laura Freehling has been named the Register of the Year by the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds.  The United Way of Southwest Michigan is preparing for its next Whirlpool Appliance Sale, and the event this time will be in a better venue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's news: The settlement reached between Lake Township and American Electric Power in their state tax tribunal dispute over the value of the Cook nuclear power plant will have an effect on the budgets of several local governments in Berrien County, but it could have been worse.  Berrien County Register of Deeds Laura Freehling has been named the Register of the Year by the Michigan Association of Registers of Deeds.  The United Way of Southwest Michigan is preparing for its next Whirlpool Appliance Sale, and the event this time will be in a better venue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Solving science denial is a priority for you as well? Alan McGowan, selected as 2019's Top Science and Technical Expert by the International Association of Top Professionals, also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who's Who that same year. Now a Lecturer at The New School, he served first as chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Program (now called the Interdisciplinary Science Program) then as chair of the Environmental Studies Program. After graduating Yale University with an engineering degree, and a two-year stint at American Electric Power, a public utility, Mr. McGowan left to pursue graduate work in physics, then taught science and mathematics at private schools for ten years, winning the Teacher Recognition Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1968. Following that, after serving for five years as Scientific Administrator of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, an interdisciplinary environmental research, and training program at Washington University in St. Louis, he became president of the Scientists' Institute for Public Information (SIPI), which under his leadership became a major bridge between the scientific and journalist communities. In episode 471 of the Fraternity Foodie Podcast, we find out why Alan decided to go to Yale, what we can do to solve science denial, initiatives that we can take to reduce climate change, why nuclear power is part of our energy transition, why we are hearing so much scientific racism in this political election, what is the connection between mental health and social media usage, whether we should control and/or regulate Artificial Intelligence, and why college students should know who Franz Boas is. Enjoy!

In der heutigen Folge von „Alles auf Aktien“ sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Laurin Meyer und Holger Zschäpitz über einen überraschenden Chip-Schocker, Luxusprobleme bei LVMH und doppelt jubelnde Fußballfans. Außerdem geht es um ASML, AMD, Nvidia, United Airlines, Boeing, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Delta, Alaska Air, First Solar, SolarEdge Technologies, Borussia Dortmund, Tesla, Goldman Sachs, GE Vernova, American Electric Power, Constellation Energy, Xcel Energy, Atkore, Comfort Systems USA, Emcor Group, Primoris Services, Meta, Microsoft, American Water Works, Xylem, Tesla, Coinbase, Roku, Block, UiPath, CRISPR Therapeutics, Roblox, Zoom, Robinhood, Unity Software, iShares Global Water ETF (WKN: A0MM0S), ARK Innovation ETF (WKN: A408AW), ARK Genomic Revolution ETF (WKN: A408AY), ARK Artificial Intelligence & Robotics ETF (WKN: A408AX), ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics (WKN: A14RW2), ARK Next Generation Internet (WKN: A14Y8J), iShares Diversified Commodity Swap (WKN: A2DK6R), iShares Bloomberg Enhanced Roll Yield Commodity Swap (WKN: A2JQ2G) und L&G Multi Strategy Enhanced Commodities ETF (WKN: A409RZ). Wir freuen uns an Feedback über aaa@welt.de. Ab sofort gibt es noch mehr "Alles auf Aktien" bei WELTplus und Apple Podcasts – inklusive aller Artikel der Hosts und AAA-Newsletter.[ Hier bei WELT.](https://www.welt.de/podcasts/alles-auf-aktien/plus247399208/Boersen-Podcast-AAA-Bonus-Folgen-Jede-Woche-noch-mehr-Antworten-auf-Eure-Boersen-Fragen.html.) Disclaimer: Die im Podcast besprochenen Aktien und Fonds stellen keine spezifischen Kauf- oder Anlage-Empfehlungen dar. Die Moderatoren und der Verlag haften nicht für etwaige Verluste, die aufgrund der Umsetzung der Gedanken oder Ideen entstehen. Hörtipps: Für alle, die noch mehr wissen wollen: Holger Zschäpitz können Sie jede Woche im Finanz- und Wirtschaftspodcast "Deffner&Zschäpitz" hören. Außerdem bei WELT: Im werktäglichen Podcast „Das bringt der Tag“ geben wir Ihnen im Gespräch mit WELT-Experten die wichtigsten Hintergrundinformationen zu einem politischen Top-Thema des Tages. +++ Werbung +++ Du möchtest mehr über unsere Werbepartner erfahren? [**Hier findest du alle Infos & Rabatte!**](https://linktr.ee/alles_auf_aktien) Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutz: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

SelectUSA Summit, 23-26 June 2024, Washington, DChttps://www.selectusasummit.us/--Emily Smith, ejsmith1@aep.comhttps://www.aep.com/..Feel free to contact us with any questionsBill Kenney, bill@meetroi.comMEET, http://meetroi.com/

About the Lecture Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson will discuss the interconnection between the American Civil Rights movement and international human rights yesterday and today. Jackson grew up in segregated Dallas, Texas. In 1965, he marched for Civil Rights on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. The relationship between foreign affairs and the American Civil Rights story was highlighted in an address by Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1963 and remains true today. “As the matters stand, however, racial discrimination here at home has important effects on our foreign relations. This is not because such discrimination is unique to the United States. Discrimination on account of race, color, religion, national or tribal origin may be found in many countries. But the United States is widely regarded as the home of democracy and the leader of the struggle for freedom, for human rights and human dignity.” -Secretary of State Dean Rusk before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, 1963 (The Department of State Bulletin, Volume 49: “Fulfilling Our Basic Commitments as a Nation, Statement by Secretary Rusk”) About the Speaker Secretary Alphonso Jackson, former Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, has decades of experience in housing and community development. His expertise includes the development of affordable and market-rate housing, handling complex urban development issues, and housing finance. Jackson was appointed by President George W. Bush as the 13th Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate in March 2004. Before being appointed Secretary, Jackson served as the Deputy Secretary of HUD, managing the daily operations of the $36 billion agency. After his government service, Jackson served as Vice Chairman of Mortgage Services with JP Morgan Chase, followed by Senior Advisor to the CEO at First Data Corporation(now Fiserv Corporation). Early in his professional career, he was president and COO of American Electric Power-Texas, a $13 billion utility company and subsidiary of American Electric Power. From 1988-1996, he was president and CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Dallas, ranked among the best-managed large-city housing agencies during his tenure. As a college student, Jackson volunteered as a student protester in Alabama on Bloody Sunday in March 1965, a civil rights protest from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Jackson serves on the United States Institute for Peace International Advisory Board and Ford's Theater Society Board of Trustees. He also recently served on the United States Department of State Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board(Chair). He is a member of The Alfalfa Club and Horatio Alger Association(Board of Directors). He has been awarded numerous civic awards and eleven honorary degrees from colleges and universities, including his alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Jackson holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Master's in Education Administration from Truman State University. He also has a Juris Doctor from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, MO.

Inside Economics considers the economy's performance and prospects through the prism of the electric utility industry with the Chief Economist of American Electric Power, Dan White.  It was great to catch up with Dan, a former colleague, and get his insight on how American households and businesses are doing. He also ponders the transition to green energy. Follow Mark Zandi @MarkZandi, Cris deRitis @MiddleWayEcon, and Marisa DiNatale on LinkedIn for additional insight.

After graduation from West Virginia University Institute of Technology in 1995 and working at American Electric Power from 1996-2011, Mike Hooper made the shift to Northern Indiana Public Service Company, Inc. (NIPSCO), where he now serves as its president. Between 2011-2022, he served in a few positions at NIPSCO before working his way up to become president in 2020.Although he started his career in mechanical engineering and carried that expertise with him to each position at both American Electric Power and NIPSCO, he also pursued leadership training at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. Hooper graduated from the Strategic Leadership program, and he is also a licensed Project Management Professional.With his history in leadership, GreatNews.Life Founder Chris Mahlmann invited Hooper to sit down and discuss leadership and the past, present, and future plans for NIPSCO as part of the GreatNews.Life Leadership Life Series.

Various options are at play in the EPA's planned greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants. In this episode, Lissa Lynch of NRDC discusses the implications.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsA couple of weeks ago, the policy analysts at the Rhodium Group put out a new report showing that the Biden administration's legislative achievements are not quite enough to get it to its Paris climate goals. But those goals could be reached if the legislation is supplemented with smart executive action.Some of the most important upcoming executive actions are EPA's greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants. The Supreme Court famously struck down Obama's Clean Power Plan — his attempt to address existing power plants — judging it impermissibly expansive. So now EPA has to figure out what to ask of individual plants.The agency's decisions will help shape the future of the US power sector and determine whether the Biden administration gets on track for its climate goals. To talk through those decisions in more detail, I contacted Lissa Lynch, who runs the Federal Legal Group at the NRDC's Climate & Clean Energy Program. We discussed the options before the EPA, the viability of carbon capture and hydrogen as systems of pollution reduction, and whether Biden will have time to complete all the regulatory work that remains.Alright. With no further ado, Lissa Lynch from NRDC. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Lissa LynchThank you for having me.David RobertsThis is a subject that I used to spend a lot of time thinking about back in the day, and it's sort of receded for a while, and now it's back. So it's very exciting for a nerd like me. So I want to just quickly walk through some history with this and then sort of hand it off to you so you can tell us where things stand now, because I don't want to assume that listeners have been obsessively following this now nearly two decade long saga. So let me just run through some history really briefly. So listeners will recall in 2007, there's a big Supreme Court case, Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 is eligible to be listed as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act if EPA determines it is a threat to human health.And then shortly thereafter, Obama's EPA officially determined that it is a threat to human health via the endangerment finding. So this is one thing I'm not sure everybody understands, and I just want to get it on the table up front. So for context, the combination of those two things, Mass vs. EPA, plus the endangerment finding, means that EPA is lawfully obliged to regulate greenhouse gases. This is not a choice. This is not something it can do or not do, depending on how it feels or who's president. They have to do it. So then that triggers the obligation, three separate obligations.You have to regulate mobile sources, which Obama did with his new fuel economy regulations, which are still in place, as far as I know. Then you have to regulate new stationary sources of greenhouse gases, which Obama did. And as far as I know, we can come back to this in a second, but as far as I know, those new power plant regulations that Obama passed are still in effect. And then thirdly, you have to regulate existing stationary sources of greenhouse gases, which mainly means power plants. And so Obama's effort to regulate existing power plants is called the Clean Power Plan.People may remember the fuss and ado about the Clean Power Plan as it was under development. Lawsuits were immediately launched. Of course, the Supreme Court took the extremely unusual step of putting the law on hold, basically not letting it go into implementation until it had heard this case. And then it heard the case, rejected the Clean Power Plan on the basis of the newly dreamed up, rectally, extracted Major Questions Doctrine. So that's where we stand now is we've got the mobile regs in place, although Biden is updating those too. I think we've got the new power plant regs in place, although Biden is also updating those.But as for existing power plant regulations, there are basically none. It's been a legal mire and so Biden's got to do those too. So let's talk about what Supreme Court said about the Clean Power Plan in their ruling and how that constrains the sort of solution space that we're looking at now.Lissa LynchSo in West Virginia vs. EPA, that was the Supreme Court decision from last summer. The Supreme Court held that this section of the Clean Air Act that we're talking about here, section 111, does not clearly provide authority for the approach that EPA took in the Clean Power Plan. And what they did there we sort of refer to as generation shifting. In the Clean Power Plan, EPA looked at the power sector as a whole and they concluded that the best system for reducing fossil-fuel-fired power plant emissions was a combination of measures including shifting generation away from dirtier fossil power toward cleaner power.So essentially retiring dirtier power plants and replacing them with renewables.David RobertsRight. So the unit of analysis here was a state's whole power fleet, not the power plant individual, but the whole power fleet.Lissa LynchRight. And the reasoning for that in the Clean Power Plan context was supported by the companies themselves, the power companies themselves and the states who said, yes, this is the way that we are dealing with decarbonizing our fleets. We are looking out across our whole fleets, retiring the dirtiest sources and replacing them with cleaner generation. That's how the existing RGGI program in California cap-and-trade programs work. That's how many of the power companies that have emission reduction or clean energy targets are doing that.David RobertsAnd let's just say Republicans have been saying for decades that regulations are too restrictive and they're not flexible enough and states and power companies need flexibility. And this was perfectly flexible. This is absolutely as flexible as you could make a system. It just said to the state, do whatever you want to do to lower the average emissions of your power plant fleet. And then conservatives got what they wanted and hated it for other reasons.Lissa LynchOne of the things that's important about what is left on the table after this decision is there is still a considerable amount of flexibility on the compliance side. So what the Supreme Court was really dealing with was the method EPA uses for setting the level of the standard, basically setting the target that industry has to meet. So the Supreme Court explicitly took that generation shifting approach off the table for purposes of setting the level of the standard itself. And so after this decision, EPA can still set standards, in John Roberts words, "Based on the application of measures that would reduce pollution by causing the regulated source to operate more cleanly."David RobertsRight? So the idea here is EPA, by interpreting the Clean Air Act in such a way as to apply to the power plant fleet overall, and sort of telling states how they have to shape their overall power plant fleets. EPA was assuming too much authority, basically. Like doing something major, despite too major for the words in the Clean Air Act, which I don't want to dwell on this too long, but let's just pause here to acknowledge that. No one then in the ruling, now in the subsequent ruling, since then in all scholarship knows what the hell "major" means or when it is that an agency has crossed the line from proper regulatory interpretation into "Oops, too major."It really just kind of sounds like and seems that major means anything bigger than John Roberts is comfortable with.Lissa LynchRight? I mean, this is one of the really concerning things about the Major Questions Doctrine, just generally is that it is murky and it does have this sort of paralyzing effect on ...David RobertsYes, intentionally.Lissa LynchExactly. It is explicitly anti-regulatory and explicitly sort of intended to stop agencies in their tracks and make them question, oh, is this too major?David RobertsAnd there's no answer. Right. So naturally you're going to be cautious because there's no definition of major. It's just whatever irritates John Roberts when he wakes up one day. So this was the opening salvo, I think, in a longer Supreme Court effort basically to brow-beat agencies into being timid. So anyway, point being EPA can't use the overall power fleet as a sort of benchmark through which to set this standard. So what does that leave? What's the sort of range of motion that we think we still can act in here when we're talking about these new standards?Lissa LynchSo now that we have this Supreme Court decision in place. EPA's got some guidelines, and they can base the next round of standards on, as Justice Roberts put it, measures that make the plants operate more cleanly. So what they're looking for now is a rule that looks more like what traditional pollution regulations of the past looked like based on scrubbers, bag houses, the stuff that you can physically attach onto the plant or do at the plant itself to reduce that plant's emissions. When it comes to reducing CO2 emissions, the options are limited.David RobertsWell, let me pause there. Before we get into that, I just want to say one thing that I learned from your writing that I had not known, and I don't know that it's widely known. So there's been talk ever since Mass vs. EPA that bugged conservatives, and they would love to undo that, right? Because they would just love to moot this whole thing by undoing that ruling and saying that CO2 is outside the context of the Clean Air Act and have been muttering about doing that. So the Inflation Reduction Act statutorily locks into place that ruling.Right. It says explicitly CO2 qualifies under the Clean Air Act, and it instructs EPA to develop new standards. So there's no ambiguity about that. And it says EPA needs to set standards that are going to reduce emissions relative to baseline, where the new baseline is taking the Inflation Reduction Act itself and all its subsidies into account. So it's telling EPA calculate what all these subsidies are going to do, what the new sort of business as usual trajectory of emissions would be, and then develop regulations that reduce it further. I didn't know any of that.Lissa LynchYeah, no, this is huge. And I mean, obviously the Inflation Reduction Act is enormous. It is going to accelerate the clean energy progress that we've seen in the last decade or so by many fold. It is a huge, huge deal. And one of the provisions in this quite large law essentially reaffirms EPA's not only statutory authority, but its obligation to go ahead and set CO2 emission standards for fossil-fuel-fired power plants. And so that's a clear statement from Congress last year.David RobertsClear enough even for John Roberts.Lissa LynchRight. So we have always thought that that authority and obligation under the statute was quite clear, but now it's crystal clear, and they need to move.David RobertsAnd I think it's also important to absorb this new baseline idea, because the IRA itself and all the historical progress since the last round of these regs, the new expected baseline for power plant emissions is much lower now than it was when Oobama's EPA was calculating these things. Which commensurately means you're going to need tighter standards if you want to reduce further than that new baseline.Lissa LynchYeah. And it is kind of wild to look back on ten years ago. So it was ten years ago, 2013, that President Obama announced in his big climate change speech that he was directing his EPA to go ahead and set carbon pollution reduction standards under Section 111 for fossil-fuel-fired power plants. The first time that was being done. So much has changed in ten years in the power sector. And I think anyone listening to this podcast knows we are smack in the midst of a clean energy transition in the power industry. Industry itself says so.The Edison Electric Institute says we are, quote, "In the middle of a profound long term transformation in how energy is generated, transmitted and used." Lazard, the investment firm, estimates that wind costs have fallen by 46%, solar has fallen by 77% over the past decade. So we're just in a totally different world now than we were ten years ago. And so we passed the Clean Power Plan's 2030 emission reduction targets in 2019 without the Clean Power Plan ever having gone into effect.David RobertsWhich in retrospect makes all the Republican arguments about how this is an economy killing regulation and it's too strong and it's unrealistic and there's no way we can move that fast look utterly ludicrous, which we all said at the time, but we had to pretend that it was a real live argument. So they're saying it's too stringent, it's going to destroy the economy. And here we rocketed past it in 2019 without any regs.Lissa LynchRight? And that is part and parcel with each time. There are new ambitious pollution standards set ...David RobertsEvery time.Lissa LynchUnder the Clean Air Act, industry claims the sky is going to fall. This happened with the acid rain program back in the American Electric Power predicted that it was going to destroy the economy of the Midwest. Like the lights are going to go out, the sky is going to fall.Every time and we never learn. We never learn from those previous examples. It's crazy, right?And so the actual costs of complying with the acid rain program and reducing sulfur dioxide ended up being, I think, around a 10th of what industry had estimated. Sulfur scrubbers are now widely used. The program has been a great success. It is this great example of how we can set pollution standards and then innovate to meet them cost effectively and quicker than anyone expects. We do it over and over again.David RobertsOver and over again.Lissa LynchAnd we can do it in this context.David RobertsRight? One more thing. Before we get to what's available for the new standards, we should mention I should mention that when the clean power plant got shut down, the legal obligation to pass regulations on existing power plants then passed to the Trump administration, which did that sort of passed a ... what was it called? The clean America ...Lissa LynchThe Affordable, Clean Energy Plan.David RobertsYes, Affordable Clean Energy, the ACE Plan, which several analyses showed would on net have raised emissions in the power plant sector. So those got shut down in court, too. They were just completely a joke. Ludicrous so that's all the history. So here we are Biden's EPA has got to regulate existing power plants and new power plants. And it can't take this so called outside the fence line holistic approach that the clean power plant took. So it's got to set standards based on what you can do at the individual power plant level inside the fence line, as they say.So what are the options? Actually, I'm talking way too much, but let me get one more thing out of the way and then I'll let you talk. But one of the things that faced the reason I just want people to understand this too, the reason Obama took this approach, the reason Obama's EPA took this outside the fence line holistic approach, is that if you're just restricting yourself to the individual power plant, you're stuck with either marginal improvements, right? You get the boiler to work more efficiently, you tighten up efficiency, and you can sort of marginally 3% to 5%, reduce emissions.Or on the other side, there's carbon capture and sequestration, which especially ten years ago when Obama's EPA was contemplating it, was not very well tested, not very well proven, super expensive. So you either had sort of like a fly swatter or a nuke when it comes to the individual power plant, which is why they went with the holistic approach. So now the holistic approach is off the table. We're back to the fly swatter or nuke problem. So just tell us sort of like, what are the available options here?Lissa LynchYeah, so you kind of covered the two ends of the range, right? On one end, the very low ambition end, you can make minor improvements to the operating efficiency of the plant, the way the plant operates. That was the basis for the standards that the Trump administration issued. And as you noted, improving the efficiency of the plant makes it run better and it can be called upon to run more and therefore can end up increasing its overall emissions. That sort of rebound effect. That's a possibility. You can still reduce emissions through operating efficiency improvements. And I think there's more options that could achieve greater reductions than the ones that the Trump administration included in their rule.But still, we're talking the very low-end, single percentage reductions in the middle, there's this option of cofiring with a lower carbon fuel. So if you're talking about coal plants, you can co-fire that coal plant partially with gas. In a gas plant, you could co-fire partially with hydrogen and you're going to bring the emissions rate of the plant down somewhat. In some of our analysis, we've estimated that a 40% cofiring coal with gas. So cofiring a coal plant with 40% gas gets you about a 20% emission reduction. So it's not nothing, but it also involves additional fossil infrastructure to get gas to a coal plant or additional infrastructure to get hydrogen to a gas plant.And on top of several other issues with hydrogen that we can talk about a little later.David RobertsWell, a legal question, I guess all of this in some respect is arbitrary, but where is the line between forcing fuel-switching, which I think Supreme Court said was out of bounds, and too far, versus a rule that requires cofiring, which is like kind of like halfway to fuel switching? Is there a legal distinction there between those two?Lissa LynchThere's absolutely precedent for requiring cleaner fuels or fuel processes. What the Supreme Court mentioned, at least in dicta, was we don't want to see standards that would force a plant to stop existing. And so essentially, if EPA were to base the standard on total conversion from coal to gas, which some coal plants have undertaken with cheap gas prices, that I think, based on our reading of the decision anyway, would probably be too far. So full conversion probably off the table along with generation shifting. But partial cofiring is actually one of the technologies that the Obama administration considered for their Clean Power Plan, as was carbon capture.And as you noted, the approach that they took in the Clean Power Plan, they selected because it was the most cost effective. So they ruled out carbon capture and cofiring, not because they weren't adequately demonstrated or available, they were just more expensive than the approach that EPA ended up going with.David RobertsBut now we're forced back basically to that more expensive approach.Lissa LynchRight, as I mentioned before, but want to keep reiterating, this is all about setting the level of the standard, finding it's a math problem. EPA looks at the options, and so the options as we see them are efficiency improvements, getting very little cofiring, getting somewhere in the middle, or carbon capture and storage, getting the most amount of emission reductions. They look out at that and they select the best system. Then they apply it to the plant and essentially do a math problem and come out with a number, a numerical limit for the amount of CO2 emission reductions that the plants need to achieve.Then they hand the baton off to the states for existing sources and to the companies for new sources. So this is not a requirement to install that specific technology. It's a way to derive the level of the standard and then pass that off to the states and the companies to comply with.David RobertsRight. EPA sets the standard and then says to states and companies, do what you want.Lissa LynchRight, as long as you can meet this number. Be creative, innovate.David RobertsThe central question is what upon what technology is the number going to be based on exactly? This low-end, this something in the middle, and this high-end, which is carbon capture and sequestration. So here I want to talk about what the sort of arguments are around this. It says in the text of the Clean Air Act that EPA should set the standard based on the best available system. That has to be adequately demonstrated so I just want to dig in a little bit on the technical legal language here. Like what exactly or what have courts interpreted that language to mean exactly?What is required to be adequately demonstrated? A single demonstration plant somewhere? like some good charts and graphs in a lab? Or do you have to be commercial, or does price and, you know, financial viability come into that? Like, what is EPA thinking about when it thinks about what is adequately demonstrated or best?Lissa LynchYes. Okay, so I'm a Clean Air Act lawyer. This is my favorite part. I love the Clean Air Act, and I love to talk about the language of the statute because that's actually what we're really fighting over here. EPA is tasked with establishing the standard of performance, and so that definition is in the statute. They have to determine the degree of emission limitation that can be achieved through the application of the best system of emission reduction that is adequately demonstrated considering cost, energy factors and essentially other factors. And so there's this really defined set of criteria that EPA needs to go through as they're determining what's the best system of emission reduction.So we've been talking about adequately demonstrated that it can't be a made up technology, but it also doesn't have to be widely used by everyone. Already, the Clean Air Act is technology forcing it's forward looking.David RobertsRight.Lissa LynchIt requires the regulated source to reduce its emissions commensurate with the best control systems that are available, not the ones that are already sort of out there in use, that plants are choosing to use of their own accord. So again, in a lot of ways, this is analogous to so SO2 scrubbers which were not in widely used, they were not widely produced in the 90s, and there were all these doom and gloom predictions of how much it's going to cost.We're not going to be able to do this. So right now, there's no limit at all on CO2 emissions from power plants. There's been no reason to innovate on carbon capture for power plants, and there is not a ton of projects out there in the world, but there are plenty to serve as an adequate demonstration for purposes of the Clean Air Act. There's essentially three parts here of carbon capture. There's capture, there's transport, and there's storage. And each part of that process is well established and has been in use for decades, especially the capture part. We've been capturing carbon for decades.And so there's plenty of demonstration in both pilot projects and at commercial scale to be applied in the power sector. It doesn't have to be something that's already widely out there.David RobertsSo it's sort of a holistic consideration. And EPA is sort of attempting to apply something like wisdom here. There's a balance of considerations. And I assume, and tell me if I'm wrong, that the usual suspects are arguing to EPA that that would be too strict, that a standard based on CCS would be too strict. And presumably the way they're making that argument is by saying CCS is not the best or adequately demonstrated. So what is their argument? Have you read, like, their briefs, or do they have a specific argument here?Lissa LynchThey do, and they're familiar. It's the same set of arguments that we've seen over and over. It's too costly, we can't do it yet. We're getting there. Just let us do this at our own pace. One of the concerning things is the argument that we need gas now, and we're okay with standards that are based on something we might do in the future. So set the standards only at a level that were ready for CCS, that were ready for hydrogen sometime in the future.David RobertsCCS ready.Lissa LynchCCS ready. Hydrogen ready.David RobertsI love that phrase.Lissa LynchIt's just kicking the can down the road.David RobertsLike your own David Hawkins once said, it's like saying, my driveway is Ferrari ready.Lissa LynchExactly. And I think what's at the heart of this industry estimates that CCS can achieve 90% capture and emissions data from the projects that have been built back that up. That is not to say that EPA needs to go ahead and require a 90% emission reduction from every single coal and gas plant in the country. Right. We think it makes the most sense for EPA to draw some distinctions based on the role that the plants perform on the grid. Right. So there's a big difference between ...David RobertsOh, really?Lissa LynchYes, there's a big difference between plants that are used for baseload power that are running constantly all the time, and those that are used intermittently for reliability as backup power during times of high demand.There does not need to be the exact identical standards on those two types of plants. So plants that are running full time are emitting the most, and they should be required to reduce their emissions to the greatest degree. So we think it makes sense to have a 90% capture based standard for plants that are going to serve as baseload, that are going to run all the time. And it's the most cost effective for those types of plants to install CCS, especially when you consider the tax credit. Plants that are operating intermittently as backup are already emitting less pollution simply by running less.And those plants can face a less stringent standard, stay on the grid as backup, and serve that really important reliability function without being required to install CCS, they can meet a lesser standard.David RobertsIs there a distinction between those two kinds of plants that is clean enough and clear enough to set legal limits around them because there are some fuzzy edge cases? And then, number two, are we sure that EPA like that's within EPA? Sort of. That's not major for EPA to be thinking to be sort of specifying which standards applied based on function based on operations.Lissa LynchYes. So this is the kind of detailed analytical and technical decision making that is well within the expert agency's wheelhouse. This is exactly the type of thing that the experts at the agency are normally tasked by the statute to do. They're the ones who run the numbers and figure out what's most appropriate for the specific type of plant that they're regulating. And in fact, the existing standards for new sources do include these sorts of subcategorization based on the use type of the plant. So this is not something complex and mysterious. This is based on true and visible distinctions between types of plants based on the way that they're used.And I think it really is yet another layer of the sort of flexibility that EPA can and should build into this program. Again, none of this is a particular mandate. And so the states and the companies then have that additional choice. Well, they can run a plant full steam and install controls, or they can run intermittently, keep that plant online and face a lesser limit, or they can retire it and make their own choices about what to replace it with. This is providing more and more levels of choices to the regulated industry to comply in the way that makes sense for them.David RobertsYeah. And something you mentioned in passing, I want to just highlight and put a pin in here, which is that a big argument here on your side is CCS is now being showered with subsidies. Like there are huge subsidies coming down from the Inflation Reduction Act for captured hydrogen, enough to make them economic in some cases or certainly a lot closer. So these are synergistic. I'm saying like the Biden administration's legislation is bolstering the case for these tighter standards because CCS is not just on its own now. Now it's explicitly being helped and shaped and stood up by government grants.Lissa LynchThat's right. And at the same time, the Inflation Reduction Act also contains a ton of money for renewables. And so that level of investment across these types of technologies really changes the overall cost of the regulations. And that's one of the things that EPA has to consider, is the overall cost of compliance to the system. And so again, when these standards are in place and states and companies are looking out across their fleet and saying, oh, what should we do? All of those incentives are going to come into that consideration for them. And it makes renewables really cheap to replace your older dirtier generation with.David RobertsI got one more question about the standard setting before I want to get into the politics a little bit, but some energy heads out there may be familiar with a company called NET Power, which has come up with a new, I guess it's a couple of years old now. They've built one demonstration plan, a new technology that without getting into the technological details, it's really fascinating. I might do a whole pod on it, but basically it burns natural gas. Emits no particulate pollution at all and captures 100% of the CO2 emissions as a purified stream of CO2.So you have in NET Power a natural gas power plant with zero particulate emissions and 100% carbon capture. They've built one, it's running and working. So has there been any talk about using that as a standard? Because that would be 100% carbon reduction. Has NET Power's tech come up in these discussions?Lissa LynchYeah, for sure. I mean, it's very cool, right? It was included, the EPA put out a white paper last year asking for input, sort of preregulatory input on the technologies that are available to reduce emissions, specifically from gas plants. And they took comment on the NET Power approach, which I cannot remember the name of. Allam something.David RobertsAllam Cycle, I think is right. I was trying to think of that.Lissa LynchAnd it is really cool and innovative and I hope that that is a direction that we're going to see any remaining fossil generation go in. And I think we may see that in the proposal. Again, all of what I'm talking about here is we have not seen a proposal from EPA. This is sort of NRDC's perspective on what is possible, justifiable achievable and legally defensible in court. And this is what we've been advocating for before the agency, and then we'll have to see what they come up with. We're expecting a proposal relatively soon, probably within a month or so.David RobertsWhat's really interesting to me about this, just from a political perspective, is it's a sort of weird inversion here of the typical roles. So you've got the power sector, which has been touting CCS for years, to sort of like defend the ongoing existence of fossil power plants. They sort of wave their hands at CCS and say, no, we can go clean too. So they've got Joe Manchin out up there saying, I want to go clean, but I want to do it with fossil. I literally think they've convinced him that they can eliminate their carbon emissions. And traditionally you've had sort of greens and climate people saying that's big and overly complicated and overly expensive and stupid and nobody's ever really going to do it and it's just going to make more sense to switch to clean generation.And so now we've got this odd political inversion where the power companies are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, CCS is not really ready. We didn't mean "ready ready," we meant just over the horizon is what we meant. That's where they like it. They like CCS just over the horizon. And all of a sudden this is like calling their bluff. Like, oh, you've been talking about this for decades. Well, how about you use it? And then on the green side, on the climate side, you have a similar inversion where now greens and green groups like yours are arguing like CCS.Oh, it's great. Yeah, it's right there, it's ready to go, absolutely ready to serve. As the basis for a standard. It's just odd and funny and I just wonder if you have any comment on the politics of trying to herd the cats in the climate community around this message of like CCS is ready and viable, which I don't think comes naturally to a lot of factions, let's say, within the climate community.Lissa LynchWell, that's well phrased. We're walking a fine line. I think our vision for the power sector and the power industry is one of net zero. And in order to get to net zero, that means a heck of a lot of renewables and a heck of a lot less fossil.David RobertsRight.Lissa LynchFor the purposes of setting pollution limits, we need a technological basis and by far and away CCS is the most effective of the options that we've got.David RobertsThat the Supreme Court left us.Lissa LynchExactly. And I think it is very important to have limits on the CO2 emissions from power plants. I think that is sort of the baseline, most important thing from our point of view.David RobertsRight, well, lots of, I mean, reports, we should just say lots of reports have been done saying the legislative progress is great, but it's not enough to reach Biden's stated goal. And to reach Biden's stated goal, you need a whole of administration approach, including these standards.Lissa LynchExactly. And just to put some actual numbers on that, if we want to meet our international and domestic greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for 2030, we need to get our power sector emissions down by 80% from the 2005 sort of peak emissions. We're already about a third of a reduction, 33% -ish reduction since 2005. Our analysis and RDCs of the Inflation Reduction Act puts us now on track to cut our power sector emissions by about 65% by 2030. So that is massive and also not enough.David RobertsRight.Lissa LynchAnd our estimate there is somewhere in the middle there's a really wide range of modeling of the Inflation Reduction Act and a lot of work is going to need to be done in order to get those emission reductions that we're sort of showing in that modeling. It's not a foregone conclusion.David RobertsYeah, one of the wildest things going on right now is just the incredible range of projections about what the IRA will do. Right. Like the sort of government came up with, oh, that it's going to spend $370 on these tax credits and then Credit Suisse is like, actually it's more like a trillion. And then I think there was another one last week, it was like actually it's more like a trillion five. So the range of amounts of money that could come out of this bill are just huge. It's so opaque.Lissa LynchIt is. And a lot still remains to be written in all the guidance for these tax credits. But that sort of uncertainty aside, I think the Inflation Reduction Act is going to accelerate a bunch of clean energy and it's going to get us a bunch of emission reductions in the power sector. And at least based on our analysis, that's not quite enough. And we absolutely are going to need limits on the CO2 emissions in addition to investments in clean energy.David RobertsSo maybe the way to summarize is just to say endorsing CCS as the basis of a performance standard is different than endorsing CCS, full stop.Lissa LynchYeah, well put. And I think what we see in the modeling reflects what I've been saying about the decision making that comes once EPA sets the standard. So when we model standards that are based on CCS and we've included the Inflation Reduction Act in the baseline, we overall get to around between 70% and 77% CO2 emission reduction by 2030. And what we're seeing in the actual generation results, there is some CCS deployment and also a ton of clean energy.David RobertsThis is my next question, actually, and you're here answering it before I even ask it, but I just wanted to ask, as a matter of curiosity, has someone modeled what would happen if EPA sets the standards where you are endorsing and what does the modeling say about the decisions power companies are going to make? Like how many fossil fuel plants will shut down versus installing CCS? I don't know if there's like an easy answer to that.Lissa LynchWell, so we have done lots of modeling and we've been doing it for quite a while because even before this Supreme Court decision last summer, we were anticipating that EPA was going to be constrained and in this sort of inside the fence line way. And so we've really been looking for ways to get the most ambition and the most emission reductions out of these sort of source specific basis for the standards. That range that I gave you is based on CCS and partial CCS runs. So 70% to 77% overall emission reductions depending how much you crank the dial on the ambition.But still with some of those sort of flexibilities that I talked about in terms of the type of use of the plant and what we see in those runs is renewables and energy storage capacity tripling from now to 2030 and quadrupling by 2035. And I think that is in large part based on these new Inflation Reduction Act tax credits being just so much more cost effective. And we still do see some retrofits with carbon capture and storage and some new builds of gas with carbon capture, but not a massive amount. And so there is some uptake of the technology and there's also some reinvestment in clean energy and that kind of tracks with what you would expect, right?And that kind of goes back to that was essentially what EPA was counting on and basing their standards off of in the Clean Power Plan and that's why they did it that way. I think we can do it this way. And that carbon capture and storage based best system of emission reduction can be shown to be available to the plants that could use it. And not all plants are going to make that choice. It's going to be up to the states and the companies to look at their options and choose whether they want to keep that plant online, and that should work.David RobertsSo NRDC is recommending a CCS based standard for both existing-source regs and new-source regs. Is there any difference between those two that's worth sort of pulling out here?Lissa LynchYeah, so I think industry estimates that CCS can achieve 90% capture. And so given that that technology exists, we think it should be used to set the standard for at least the plants that are operating at full bore, both new and existing. When you're building a new plant, you have much greater options in terms of where you're sighting it, how you're building it. You should be required to use the latest and greatest technology on a brand new plant. So that's pretty straightforward for existing plants because they're all over the place. We rely on them already for power.There needs to be more flexibility, there needs to be more of a phase-in sort of glide path to compliance and some flexibility for how you're going to comply and some exemptions for those plants that are going to commit to retire. You don't want to make them retrofit right before they're expected to retire, you want to just let them plan to retire at the natural end-of-life of the plant. And so giving that flexibility on the existing source side is going to be really important and has long been part of the way that the section 111 standard setting has worked to differentiate between new and existing plants.David RobertsSo, CCS based standard in both cases, but maybe more flexibility and implementation for the existing plants.Lissa LynchExactly.David RobertsIf EPA does use CCS or hydrogen, something like that, as the basis for its performance standard, does it have any say at all in the details of sort of how CCS or hydrogen are used or measured? Because Volts listeners just got an hour and a half earful of discussion of the clean Hydrogen Tax Credits last week, and the details are many, and they make a big gifference in how clean hydrogen is used, how it's measured sort of how its carbon intensity is assessed, how much end users are allowed to claim reductions from using it, et cetera, et cetera. Does EPA get into any of that? Or is this purely just, we're using this tech as a way to set the numerical standard, but the details of how a power plant might implement this is somebody else's problem.Lissa LynchSo they absolutely have some authority over how it gets used to comply with this standard. So for purposes of standard setting, they're looking kind of broadly at what the technology is capable of achieving, how it's been used in the past, how it could apply to power plants that exist now in terms of compliance, though, they've got the authority over CO2 essentially in this rulemaking. And so if a plant is going to demonstrate compliance using carbon capture and storage or hydrogen, they can absolutely include the types of rigorous monitoring and verification requirements they would need to see in order for a plant to be demonstrating compliance using one of these technologies.David RobertsRight? So they can get into saying, here's what does and doesn't qualify as full CCS like measured every so often, or this kind of geographical storage. They can't get into that?Lissa LynchI absolutely think so. I think they have authority to say you need to have rigorous monitoring and verification from the point of capture to the point of sequestration. And that needs to be part of your demonstration of compliance for using carbon capture. For hydrogen ... It's a little trickier.David RobertsI'm very aware at the moment.Lissa LynchTo the extent that there is going to be a pathway for hydrogen to be used for compliance, it's got to take into account where that hydrogen comes from, how it's made in order to avoid net emissions increases. And I think they absolutely have that authority. Given that the purpose of this is for the best system of emission reduction, they've got to ensure that it is truly reducing emissions.David RobertsMaybe they can just borrow whatever treasury comes up with for the hydrogen.Lissa LynchAssuming it's good.David RobertsYes, true. If EPA doesn't go with CCS, doesn't go with the high end here, what do you think it will do? Will it fall back to something medium, something in the fuel blending sort of range? And just more broadly, do we have any sense at all of what EPA is thinking or which direction it's going or what to expect?Lissa LynchI think in terms of publicly facing tea leaves, what we've got to look at really is that white paper from last year where they had laid out the options and said, hey, give us some comments on what you think of these options for reducing CO2 emissions from combustion turbines. From everything that we have seen from this administration, we are hoping that they're going to be ambitious. They know that this is a critical moment. They know that this is an important wedge of emissions, that the power sector is still a really significant percentage of our emissions, roughly a quarter, and that we need standards on those CO2 emissions and they need to be strong.And it's not going to be worth all this work, honestly, if they don't make them strong. And so that has been our message to the administration, is, look, if you're going to go through the trouble of doing this all over again, let's make it worth it.David RobertsIs Manchin he's like the monster under my bed at this point. Is there some way Manchin could burst out of the closet and screw this up somehow? Or is he ...Lissa LynchI hesitate to even speculate.David RobertsCan I just not think about him in this respect, or does he have some way that he could theoretically muck this up, or is this something that's finally just sort of beyond his reach?Lissa LynchI think for now, the ball is in EPA's court to come out with a proposal and to take public comments and to consider them. And so for right now, this is an EPA project. Once it's finalized, it will presumably be subject to a Congressional Review Act resolution, and it will depend on who is in charge as to what happens there. And so that's when Congress gets to have its veto opportunity over regulations, which is unfortunate, but it is the world we're living in.David RobertsAnd does that just require a majority or a supermajority?Lissa LynchI believe it's just a majority, but it can be blocked by the President.David RobertsRight. And by the time there's a new president, it'll be too late. We're coming in under the deadline that the Congressional Review Act, if it's going to happen at all, would happen under Biden and thus would be vetoed. So that's not really ...Lissa LynchAnd so that takes place at the final rule. So we're only at the proposal stage. We've got a long way to go.David RobertsIs it going to get done under the Congressional Review Act just to just explain to listeners? Congressional Review Act says basically Congress can undo or veto a regulation basically within a certain window of it being finalized which is 60 ...Lissa Lynch60 working days, which does not equal the calendar days.David RobertsRight. So what you want to do is get your regulations on the books more than 60 working days prior to the next presidential election.Lissa LynchExactly.David RobertsJust so you're sure your guys in charge, if it happens.Lissa LynchThe date that we are looking at is next April, roughly a year from now, for all of these regulations. Right. Like it's not just ...David RobertsThere's a lot these are not the only ones. There's a lot of there's a big backlog.Lissa LynchIt is. And we are seeing the use of the Congressional Review Act right now as we speak in this Congress with attempts to invalidate the rules that the administration has recently finalized. It is a terrible tool. It is not a good thing.David RobertsIt's a Newt Gingrich special, isn't it? Am I right about the history? Of course, like so many malignant things in our government treat.Lissa LynchBut it is the world we're living in, and I think the administration is aware of the timeline that's facing them next year.David RobertsInteresting. So you think a proposed rule is going to show up in the next month or two?Lissa LynchYeah, we're expecting a proposed rule maybe by the end of April. And then when ... you know what happens, that gets published in the Federal Register. There's an opportunity for public comment. There's public hearings. And so there will be sort of a flurry of activity as everybody gets their comments in, and then the agency has to review those comments and address them in the final rule. That's part of the sort of Administrative Law 101. And then they have to issue the final rule and demonstrate yeah, we heard all your comments, and this is why we made the decisions that we made.David RobertsAnd that's when the lawsuits kick off.Lissa LynchAnd that's when the lawsuits start. Exactly. We do it all over again. It's the circle of life.David RobertsYes. And what do you think of the chances that this Supreme Court ends up hearing a case on this again? Do you think the conservatives can mount a legal case plausible enough to get it back into the Supreme Court?Lissa LynchI would never speculate about what this Supreme Court will do, because who knows, right? Our job is to make this thing as airtight as possible. And Chief Justice Roberts gave us some guidelines and a roadmap in the West Virginia decision. He told us what he's looking for, and it's this sort of traditional looking approach to pollution control. And so that's what we're operating under. And we are urging EPA to follow those guidelines and do the most that they can within those constraints, and we'll be there to defend it with them if it comes down to that.David RobertsAll right, awesome. Lissa Lynch of NRDC, thank you for coming and forecasting and explaining all this with us. Maybe we'll talk again in that distant future day when these things are actually on the books and the lawsuits have started. We'll talk again.Lissa LynchThank you so much for having me.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. 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Podcast: (CS)²AI Podcast Show: Control System Cyber SecurityEpisode: 75: Project Management and How It Can Fuel a Cybersecurity CareerPub date: 2023-03-28Today, Derek interviews Jonathan Tubb, the Director of Industrial Cybersecurity at Siemens Energy in Ohio. Jonathan is an experienced Senior Lead with a demonstrated history of working in the power generation industry. He is skilled in Power Plants, Electric Power, Power Systems, Integration, and Research. He has strong project management skills and a Computer Science and Engineering degree from The Ohio State University.Jonathan is a well-rounded and interesting individual! He is also a great contributor to the cybersecurity community and a true blue engineer, software engineer, tinkerer, bird and animal lover, Ohio State Buckeye, and art enthusiast. He joins Derek to discuss his background, education, and career trajectory, along with nuggets of advice for anyone considering a career in the cybersecurity space.Show highlights:Growing up, Jonathan spent much of his time focusing on science and technology.How volunteering at the Museum of Science and Industry fed Jonathan's curiosity and impacted his approach to technology.How cybersecurity informed where Jonathan began his career.Jonathan discusses his internship with American Electric Power.What are the benefits of doing an internship?Why must we utilize other people's knowledge to help solve problems?Jonathan discusses his transition to Siemens Energy.Jonathan gets into what he has focused on for the last few years at Siemens Energy.What makes a good cybersecurity practitioner?Jonathan dives into the industrial cybersecurity apprenticeship concept Siemens Energy has put together but not yet implemented.Mentioned in this episode:Join CS2AIJoin the largest organization for cybersecurity professionals. Membership has its benefits! We keep you up to date on the latest cybersecurity news and education. Preroll MembershipOur Sponsors:We'd like to thank our sponsors for their faithful support of this podcast. Without their support we would not be able to bring you this valuable content. We'd appreciate it if you would support these companies because they support us! Network Perception Waterfall Security Tripwire KPMG CyberThe podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Derek Harp, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Today, Derek interviews Jonathan Tubb, the Director of Industrial Cybersecurity at Siemens Energy in Ohio. Jonathan is an experienced Senior Lead with a demonstrated history of working in the power generation industry. He is skilled in Power Plants, Electric Power, Power Systems, Integration, and Research. He has strong project management skills and a Computer Science and Engineering degree from The Ohio State University.Jonathan is a well-rounded and interesting individual! He is also a great contributor to the cybersecurity community and a true blue engineer, software engineer, tinkerer, bird and animal lover, Ohio State Buckeye, and art enthusiast. He joins Derek to discuss his background, education, and career trajectory, along with nuggets of advice for anyone considering a career in the cybersecurity space.Show highlights:Growing up, Jonathan spent much of his time focusing on science and technology.How volunteering at the Museum of Science and Industry fed Jonathan's curiosity and impacted his approach to technology.How cybersecurity informed where Jonathan began his career.Jonathan discusses his internship with American Electric Power.What are the benefits of doing an internship?Why must we utilize other people's knowledge to help solve problems?Jonathan discusses his transition to Siemens Energy.Jonathan gets into what he has focused on for the last few years at Siemens Energy.What makes a good cybersecurity practitioner?Jonathan dives into the industrial cybersecurity apprenticeship concept Siemens Energy has put together but not yet implemented.

Emily Smith, ejsmith1@aep.comAmerican Electric Power, https://www.aep.com/economic-development/economic-development-contacts..SelectUSA Summit, 1-4 May 2023, Washington, DChttps://www.selectusasummit.us/--Feel free to contact us with any questionsBill Kenney, bill@meetroi.comMEET, http://meetroi.com/

All three major market averages ended the day in the red, with the Nasdaq posting the largest lost of -1.69%, and Jim Cramer is diving deeper into this week's market action. First, Jim learns more about what's behind Trane Technologies explosive quarter of growth with CEO Dave Regnery. Then Cramer discusses the growth of renewable energy in the U.S. with Julie Sloat the new CEO of American Electric Power. Plus, an exclusive interview with Ed Pitoniak CEO of VICI Properties on the impact of Federal Reserve rate hikes on the REITs.  Mad Money Disclaimer

Chad Hughes hosts Thomas Schaffer, Senior Manager for Transmission Right-of-Way at American Electric Power, on the show to discuss the work AEP is doing and how they engage with customers in meaningful ways. They delve into Thomas' career history and what the future has in store for the industry.  Thomas came into acquisition through working a summer job at the courthouse in Columbus, Ohio. He started learning about title ownership at the courthouse and that led into easement which ultimately landed him acquisition work. He has been at American Electric Power for sixteen years now in a role surrounding electric transmission facilities that stretch over 40,000 miles. Chad and Thomas talk about not only how AEP has changed and grown in the last sixteen years, but how renewable energy has affected the industry at large. Thomas addresses how the initial approach to landowners is considered and the importance of maintaining that relationship component. He expects changes in the future that will affect regulations pertaining to customers, and considers how social media can affect industry messaging overall. “Number one, looking for affordable electricity is important. We hear that a lot. The other part, too, is clean and reliable electricity. So when you unpack a lot of that, the renewable side comes into play. And so from our position, when we talk about renewables and bringing them onto the grid, there is a lot of demand and trying to find ways to build partnerships with those renewable developers I think is probably the most significant in the aspect of them getting on the grid.” - Thomas SchafferAbout Thomas Schaffer:Thomas Schaffer is a senior manager at American Electric Power (AEP), and is responsible for managing the right-of-way group in securing the land rights necessary for the construction, operation and maintenance of AEP's electric transmissions facilities. AEP has the largest transmission system in the U.S with over 40,000 line miles across 13-states, and currently has a right-of-way staff of over 60 full-time employees and contractors, as well as 13 service providers supporting right-of-way acquisition projects.---Chad Hughes | CEO, Entrepreneurial Leader, Author: website |linkedinThomas Schaffer | Senior Manager, Transmission Right-of-Way AEP: website | website 2 | linkedin

In our fourth episode, Mark Lee talks to Sandy Nessing, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at American Electric Power, about managing the shift to low carbon energy in the US whilst meeting competing stakeholder demands. Their conversation covers:Ensuring a just transition in communities where AEP decommissions coal plants.Preparing for increasing ESG disclosure requirements.Engaging with investors on corporate climate strategy.Mark also speaks with Margie Flynn, Senior Partner at ERM, about how companies can manage rapidly increasing stakeholder expectations around sustainability. 

Chad Hughes welcomes Richard McNally of O R Colan to the podcast to discuss his career in the right of way space. They discuss human resourcing complexities and resource scarcity in the industry, drawing on Richard's extensive experiences and insight.Richard is Vice President of ORC's Utility Division which he says gives him the opportunity to use his history as a go-getter and to trust and delegate to the strong leadership team beneath him. He highlights how ORC puts a strong focus on their values - initiative, respect, knowledge, integrity, and social responsibility - and how they work to keep their fundamentals central through employees and clients alike.Chad and Richard discuss the human quotient in right of way, how the industry lacks for human capital and basic resources, and why education to the public and clients alike is so vital to industry growth. Richard speaks to the training platform developed for employees to assist in placement; he sees a great deal of opportunities in the industry and an increase on the renewable side of the job that would make the profession appealing. The advice Richard shares is sound and invaluable to anyone considering a career in access and right of way. “So when we're evaluating an employee, we're really looking at behaviors, asking behavioral based questions, trying to drive behaviors that we want to see. As far as skills, on the soft skills side, we're really looking at the communication piece, the listening piece, the conflict resolution piece, adaptability and really detail oriented. Those are the real strong soft skills that I look for in a future employee.” - Richie McNallyAbout Richie McNally:Richard McNally, graduate of The College of Wooster, joined ORC in 2014, as the Vice President of Utility & Infrastructure Land Services. Prior to coming to ORC, Richie was the Supervisor of Transmission – Right of Way with American Electric Power. Now as the Executive VP of Utility & Infrastructure, he is a member of the ORC Leadership Team and manages the utility division nationwide. He is responsible for overseeing the company operations and supports strategic planning, proposals, business development strategies and client management. Richie is a member of the International Right of Way Association and Vistage.---Chad Hughes | CEO, Entrepreneurial Leader, Author: website |linkedinRichard McNally | Executive Vice President of Utility at O R Colan: website | linkedin

In der heutigen Folge „Alles auf Aktien“ sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Nando Sommerfeldt und Holger Zschäpitz über den Denkzettel des Markt-Philosophen Taleb, Alarm bei Adobe und Übernahmefantasie bei Vantage Tower. Außerdem geht es um Apple, Palantir, Ether, Siemens Energy, HelloFresh, Rize Environmental Impact 100 ETF (WKN: A3CN9S), First Trust EIP Carbon Impact ETF (WKN: A2PQT5), First Solar, Canadian Solar, SMA Solar, Johnson Control, Nibe, Xylem, California Water, Kurita Water, Samsung SDI, Chenniere Energy, American Electric Power, NextEra Energy, Brookfield Renewable Partners, Encavis, Edison, Orsted, Draftkings und Flutter Entertainent. Wir freuen uns an Feedback über aaa@welt.de. Disclaimer: Die im Podcast besprochenen Aktien und Fonds stellen keine spezifischen Kauf- oder Anlage-Empfehlungen dar. Die Moderatoren und der Verlag haften nicht für etwaige Verluste, die aufgrund der Umsetzung der Gedanken oder Ideen entstehen. Für alle, die noch mehr wissen wollen: Holger Zschäpitz können Sie jede Woche im Finanz- und Wirtschaftspodcast "Deffner&Zschäpitz" hören. Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutz: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

Recent electric outages have put Ohio's power grid in the news, but more challenges await Ohio's power industry as new factories come to our state, more drivers opt for electric cars, and climate change raises global temperatures. This forum unpacks Ohio's electric future from the perspective of American Electric Power, Ohio's largest energy utility.  This forum is sponsored by Accenture, Steptoe & Johnson, and The Columbus Partnership. The panelists are: Nick Akins, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AEP Marc Reitter, President and Chief Operating Officer, AEP Ohio  The host is Andy Chow, News Editor, State House News Bureau This forum was recorded live at The Boat House in Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday, August 17, 2022. 

Joe DeMare rants about yet another show that glorified environmental destruction, "Truck Night In America" Green Hell episode. Then he interviews Lisa Maatz about Ohio Governor DeWine accepting a $13,000 "campaign contribution" from American Electric Power. Rebecca Wood tells us the difference between bogs and swamps. Ecological News includes the fact that Wind and Solar produced more power than nukes in the first 4 months of 2022!

Tirthak Saha, the co-founder of Trolysis, a clean energy firm in the United States, is with us today. He is currently a strategy consultant for global businesses, supporting them in developing GTM strategies and data-driven MVPs. He has also appeared on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list, in GQ India and has worked with NASA, Pennsylvania Space Grant, and American Electric Power. In this episode, Tirthak and I talked about a variety of subjects, including social media, fake intellectualism, content strategy, love, and much more. These talks will force you to rethink these topics from different perspectives. I hope you enjoy the episode; if so, please click "share" buttons. Tirthak's Social Handles: IG: https://www.instagram.com/tirthak.saha LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tirthak-saha Follow Me on social: Instagram: www.instagram.com/ayushwadhwa Twitter: www.twitter.com/ayushkwadhwa

All three major indices continued to tumble, with the Dow falling more than 600 points and S&P dropping below 4,000 to the lowest level in a year, and Jim Cramer is guiding investors through the market's move lower. Next, American Electric Power CEO Nick Akins talks about the future of the grid and the outlook for the energy sector. Then, could Papa John's help investors make some dough? Papa John's CEO Rob Lynch joins Cramer after earnings to break down the numbers. Plus, XPO Logistics CEO Brad Jacobs.

En este podcast hablaremos de los eventos más relevantes relacionados a los mercados financieros de Estados Unidos en la semana laboral que terminó el viernes 4 de marzo de 2022 En la idea de la semana hablaremos de American Electric Power (AEP) (03:05) Y en la sección educativa hablaremos sobre Bonos (04:54)

Joe DeMare talks about his upcoming meeting with State Rep Haraz Ghanbari and then makes an announcement about a shockingly unenvironmental thing he's planning to do in March. Next, he interviews Lisa Maatz from Ohio Citizen Action about SB117 and HB351 twin bills that would finally end the coal plant subsidies put in place by the infamous HB6. CORRECTION: In the original broadcast, Joe stated that Representative Bill Seitz started drooling when American Electric Power offered to "work with" the committee to pass HB6. This recording has been corrected. It was actually Dick Stein, author of the current HB434--a bill to turn Ohio into a radioactive waste dump, that was doing the drooling. Next Rebecca Wood tells us about the Maroon peoples in honor of black history month. In ecological news, Biden appoints a wolf killer to head the Fish and Wildlife department, Ukraine nuke plants, and more! 

Emily Smith, ejsmith1@aep.comhttps://www.aep.com/--SelectUSA Summit, June 26-29, 2022, https://www.selectusasummit.us/--Bill Kenney, bill@meetroi.comMEET, http://meetroi.com/

The National Electric Highway Coalition (NEHC) is a collaboration among electric companies that are committed to providing electric vehicle (EV) fast charging stations that will allow the public to drive EVs with confidence along major U.S. travel corridors by the end of 2023. The NEHC is the largest such alliance of electric companies that have organized around the common goal of deploying EV fast charging infrastructure to support the growing number of EVs and to help ensure that the transition to EVs is seamless for drivers. In this episode, Kellen Schefter, EEI's director of electric transportation, joins Matt Forck, vice president of federal legislative affairs, Ameren, and Phil Dion, vice president and chief customer officer, American Electric Power, to discuss how the NEHC will work to achieve its goal of filling infrastructure gaps along major U.S. transportation corridors, the need to support the growth of EVs across the country, and more. Forck and Dion are two of the industry leaders who helped to spearhead the development and merger of the initial regional coalitions. Learn more about the NEHC at: http://www.electrichighwaycoalition.org/

With the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq closing up to end the week, Jim Cramer's giving you his Game Plan for the week ahead as Mad Money gets ready for a trip to San Francisco. Then, Duolingo CEO Dr. Luis von Ahn joins Cramer for the first time and explains how millions use the company's app and platforms to learn new languages. Then, American Electric Power CEO Nick Akins shares plans for his company's shift to renewable energy. Plus, Cramer breaks down this week's breakups - General Electric and J&J.

US futures are indicating a slightly lower open as of 05:00 ET. European equity markets are lower, following weakness in Asia. Earnings continue to garner most of the attention, with the focus on corporate updates offsetting concerns over supply chain problems and elevated price pressures. Companies mentioned: Microsoft, Google, American Electric Power, Algonquin Power & Utilities, Brookfield, Scientific Games

What role can grids play in delivering net zero? Hosted by Anthony Ianno, Global Co-Head of Power, Utilities and Infrastructure he is joined by Nicolas Akins, CEO American Electric Power, David Hutchen CEO, Fortis and John Pettigrew, CEO, National Grid as hey discuss the opportunities for grid operators to benefit from the decarbonization trend and changing consumption patterns, existing and emerging challenges for grids and the importance of indirect greenhouse gas emissions.

The electric power industry has a long history of serving communities around the world, innovating business practices as technology evolves, and sharing lessons learned with the international community. What have electric companies learned from recent extreme weather events? How can we increase access to affordable and reliable electricity around the world? And what are some potential barriers to the net zero goals being set by countries and companies as we approach COP26? Nick Akins, Chairman, President, and CEO of American Electric Power, joins this episode of the Electric Perspectives Global Circuit, recorded in September 2021. The Global Circuit is brought to you by EEI International Programs as part of EEI's Electric Perspectives podcast. For more information about EEI International Programs, visit www.eei.org/international

This week is National Drive Electric Week, and we are highlighting the substantial investments America's electric companies are making in customer programs and charging infrastructure to accelerate electric transportation and the adoption of electric vehicles.  On this episode of Electric Perspectives, EEI's Director of Electric Transportation Kellen Schefter is joined by Kate Staples, Manager of Electrification at Dominion Energy; Dan Francis, Director of Customer Solutions and Policy at American Electric Power; and Matt Forck, Vice President of Community, Economic Development, and Energy Solutions at Ameren, to discuss how electric vehicles are driving the clean energy transformation while providing benefits to customers and the environment.

This week we are joined by Emily J Smith,  Global Business Attraction Manager for American Electric Power.  We chat with Emily to understand the key differences working in economic development for a state vs. a utility. We explore the benefits and obstacles of pitching over 10 regions compared to just one and take a deep dive to understand how one even begins to tackle developing the content and value propositions for such a large territory.

On the "Getting to Happy" episode host Rachel ‘Rae' Crowder had a conversation with Ashley Grayson, PHR about her journey from postpartum depression to pure joy and happiness. Ashley is a Professional in Human Resources, a mother, wife and native of Columbus, Ohio. She received her bachelor's Degree in Human Resources from The Ohio State University. Ashley serves as Talent Acquisition Specialist with American Electric Power. In her role she is responsible for managing the recruitment strategies and employment opportunities of associates. She also manages the company's associate culture and engagement programs. In addition to her professional work, she is passionate about service to the community. Ashley served on the Executive Leadership Board of Columbus Urban League Young Professionals as Membership Chair. She is a dedicated member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. where she has served in various leadership positions. In relation to Ashley's side hustles, she is the Founder of Allure Events LLC, Just Friends 614, and new Owner of The Antique Suite event venue. Through her various platforms, she has been able to create empowering and uplifting experiences, execute visions, and make lasting impressions on the hearts and minds of all people. Let's Connect: IG: @blackhealthlit, mzashley_allure Twitter: @blackhealthlit Website(s): www.blackhealthlit.org --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/blackhealthlit/support

Leaders have gone into overdrive taking care of business, and their teams - in this episode Sahar Paz speaks with Toni Cunningham about what leaders need during this time, and how to use their emotional intelligence for their own well-being. Toni Cunningham is the Managing Director with Per Scholas, in this conversation with Sahar, you will hear these words of wisdom:  Why purpose-driven leaders succeed.  Being vulnerable as a leader.  Balancing guilt and well-being.  Responsibilities that come with greatness.  You win, or you learn, adopting a powerful perspective.   ABOUT SAHAR PAZ:  Sahar Paz didn't grow up playing house, she played office. At the age of 13, she launched a baby and pet sitting company generating more cash flow than all the lemonade stands in the neighborhood! A natural leader with an active left-and-right brain, Sahar was 25 years old in New York City with a lucrative career in Finance and bored out of her mind. Inspired to share what she learned in business, she pivoted and dedicated herself to feeding the entrepreneurial voice of teenagers by founding Free Your Star Foundation. The nonprofit partnered with low-income high schools in Brooklyn with credit-earning programs written by Sahar herself. Championing the voice of others to help them understand their emotional intelligence and their personal drivers has always been Sahar's mission. Her book, Find Your Voice part-memoir, part cognitive behaviour guide, epitomizes that pursuit. Published in 2014, her message gained attention within forward-thinking organizations such as HBO, Facebook, Whole Foods, and the Texas Medical Center, where Sahar was invited to deliver keynote presentations. After five years on the road, Sahar became the CEO of Own Your Voice Strategy Firm, a personal branding agency that focuses on placing professionals on stages to speak. Today, she resides in Houston and has given up pet sitting to play with her dog Rico instead.  You can find Sahar on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram @SaharPaz.    ABOUT TONI CUNNINGHAM Toni Cunningham is an accomplished leader, motivator, workforce development professional and reboot strategist. As a Managing Director with Per Scholas, Toni provides the vision, operational, and executive leadership for the Columbus team. A seasoned marketing and communications expert Toni's career includes roles with the Columbus Urban League, American Electric Power, Founder and Principal at Image Anu, LLC. In addition to growing funding, investments, and stakeholders, Toni is a highly sought after conference speaker, presenter and workshop facilitator for organizations like Dress For Success, Women Economic Leadership Development, National Urban League, and Women In Tech. A resident of Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Cunningham's community and board involvement runs deep. Most recently: Mayor's Recovery and Resiliency Committee, New Directions Career Center   Board of Directors, Ohio Workforce Coalition Leadership Committee, Black Tech Columbus Co- Founder, Franklin County Tax Incentive Review Commission and, American Association of Blacks in   Energy. Committed to excellence and continuous learning, Toni earned her Master of Science in Marketing and Communication with Franklin University and Bachelor of Science from Ohio Dominican University. She's also a 2019 American Express Leadership Academy Fellow. Authentic and relatable, Toni is adamant about helping others accomplish their career goals. Her journey reflects what happens when, as she puts it, we find “work in roles that match our souls”. The many awards bestowed upon Toni substantiates her leadership, impact, and results. Including the naming of Per Scholas as one of Columbus Foundation's Top 5 Nonprofits to Watch in 2018, Women for Economic Leadership and Development 2020 Honoree, BizTech Columbus Business First 2019 Executive of the Year, and Smart Business Magazine in 2018 Smart50; an honor which “recognizes the top executives of the 50 smartest companies in the Central Ohio region for their ability to effectively build and lead successful organizations.” Toni is a leader who believes in helping people to achieve at their highest levels. She truly believes in living out her purpose, which is “helping people get to next” in both their personal and professional lives.

One of the most important factors of monetization is creating a great product that people would want to buy. However, the process of creating and developing a new product can be very daunting. In fact, more than 30,000 new products are launched each year and 95% of them fail (Source: Harvard Business School). Moreover, only 40% of developed products make it to market and of that 40%, only 60% will have any success at all. (Source: Marketing Research Association). That's why I have Bob Healey with me today. Bob is the founder and CEO of GrillBlazer, which makes a line of products called GrillGuns. Bob has worked as a consultant, helping different organizations with their products, processes, and business development.  Bob is an engineer who loves to find the root cause of any problem and come up with creative solutions. Today, Bob and I discuss how he started GrillBlazer, and Bob explains his process and secrets concerning product creation and product development. Looking at the Big Picture Bob believes that the reason he is who he is today, an engineer and a businessman, is his ability to see the finish line faster than anybody else, even when he doesn't know what he wants to do. It's like when he used to flip houses when he was younger. He would see the potential of a house well before he remodeled it to match the picture he had in his head.  Bob doesn't think it matters whether or not we're working on something we've done before. Even if it's something we're doing for the first time, we should be able to see what the end looks like. Do We Have What it Takes? Bob says that a lot of people have crazy and great ideas, but most of them don't understand what it takes to make those ideas come true. His advice is that whenever we want to accomplish something, we need to know if we have the necessary resources to make it happen.   “Success is not for those who want it, nor those who need it, but for those who are utterly determined to seize it一whatever it takes.” (Source: Darren Hardy, New York Times best-selling author) As an engineer, Bob used to design a lot of products for other companies. Part of what he did was to improve the performance of these companies' processes or products. He had worked for American Electric Power as a contractor. For 6 years, Bob worked for AEP managing contracts and negotiations until the company, looking to cut down costs, decided to let go of all their contractors. Bob found himself stuck between two options: either work for AEP full-time or find something else to do. Since he didn't want to work for the company anymore, he decided to leave.  After Bob told his wife he was no longer working for AEP, they spent a few days making a list of the things he wanted to do. Bob started by prioritizing what he believed was important. He also gave himself the freedom to add to his list whenever he came up with something new. He needed to find out whether or not its priority took precedence over what he was currently working on. Knowing When NOT to Proceed For a whole year, Bob worked on two products prior to GrillBlazer. He had finished the development of both products when he was trying to figure out what was required to be successful in launching these products as businesses. One of the two products was in a very mature multi-billion dollar industry. Bob took time to understand how he would enter that market, what it would cost him, whether or not this business would bring him personal stratification, and what the end result would look like.  After Bob had thought about all these factors, he realized that this wasn't where he wanted to end up. Bob believes that it takes discipline to stop working on what doesn't bring us closer to where we want to be. Having enough discipline, Bob decided not to proceed with launching the product. How GrillGlazer Started Bob and his family enjoyed having barbecues. It didn't matter what time of the year it was, they would just have people over and charcoal grill a meal. It was during one of those barbecues, in December 2017, that Bob realized not a lot of people liked to charcoal grill when the snow was blowing. It was too much effort to try to light the grill.  Bob realized that his way of lighting the grill was much easier and it worked all year round. While he was standing out in the cold, taking steaks off the grill, he found his next project.  He started discussing his idea with his family. He knew what he wanted to do and what the end product should be, but he just didn't know how to do it yet. Although his way of lighting a charcoal grill was efficient, it was complicated and unattractive. So, one of his sons-in-law suggested he make the product look like a gun because people would think it was cool.  It turned out to be great advice. Bob recalls one of his earlier conversations with an attorney, who he was considering as his legal counsel and who was really excited about Bob's product. Bob asked him if the product had a different design, would he have still bought it? The answer was no. Bob realized that the gun shape made his product look cool, and it was one of the primary reasons why people bought it. Understand What the Market Wants Bobs says that it's essential to figure out and understand what the market wants. Had he not considered what people wanted before he developed his product, he would have ended up with a product that no one wanted to buy. He would have spent all his energy and time trying to convince people that they needed to buy his product. Instead, he just designed a product that people found cool and inclined to buy.  “Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” - Seth Godin How to Come up with a Highly Profitable Product When I asked Bob to share with us his top strategies to develop a profitable product, he said starting a business from scratch is a complex process. We have to take into consideration all of the aspects of how to design something people will want and then create, manufacture and finance it. Bob advises that we start by asking ourselves: “How are we going to make it happen?” It's not enough to think that just because we have a great idea, someone else will want to do the work for us.  When Bob was in the process of creating GrillBlazer, he knew because of his experience whenever he would face an obstacle, he would find the resources needed to overcome it. Bob believes we must fully understand the tremendous amount of work involved in this process. Because if we're not willing to go the distance, we're not going to make it. Bob also stresses how important it is to ask ourselves if we have what it takes to make our products happen, without having to rely on someone else to do it for us.  Creating Credibility  Bob mentions how important it is to create credibility so that people can trust us. He tells us how he was able to raise $560,000 by running a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. Although some people doubted if his product was going to sell, by going on to sell $2M worth of products in just the first year of launching, Bob proved how successful his product was.  Key Takeaways Thank you so much Bob for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode: The most successful people have the ability to look at the big picture. They see what the end looks like.  It's not enough to have a great idea. It's equally important to understand if we have what it takes to get this idea to the finish line. It takes as much discipline to know when to stop just as it takes to proceed.  If we don't reach beyond our skillset and find people who will augment what we know, we'll be stuck where we are. Before we put time and effort into developing a product, we must ask ourselves if we have what it takes for our product to be successful.  Connect with Bob Healey If you enjoyed this interview and want to connect with Bob, you can find him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/bob-healey-8bbb00b or visit GrillBlazer website https://grillblazer.com.  Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer? Did you like today's episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content: Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.  Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter. Share Your Story  What strategies have you used to build and launch a profitable product? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/74-how-to-build-a-highly-profitable-product/ 

Nick Akins is the chairman, president and chief executive officer of American Electric Power. In the first episode of the AEP Employee Podcast, we talk with Nick about his experience leading a Fortune 500 company during an unprecedented time, his thoughts on the future of the company and what would surprise people about his staff meetings. 

Wanna split £100? You get £50 free AND save money on 100% green electricity by moving to Octopus Energy. Plus I get £50 to support this podcast but ONLY if you do it by using my unique referral code. I moved to Octopus recently and had been putting it off for ages,  but I kicked myself for not doing it sooner, as it’s literally a 5 minute job to give them your details.   Click here: https://share.octopus.energy/free-puma-452   On today’s podcast: VW Group Chief Says Company Must Develop Its Own In-House Software Diess Says Nein To Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars & Trucks Peugeot Aims For 100% Electrification By 2023 Audi E-Tron Electric SUV Joins The Monthly Subscription Squad In The UK From £1,299 Electric Highway Coalition To Add EV Fast Chargers Alpha Wolf EV Pickup   Show #1019   Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world, welcome to EV News Daily for Friday 12th March. It’s Martyn Lee here and I go through every EV story so you don't have to.   Thank you to MYEV.com for helping make this show, they’ve built the first marketplace specifically for Electric Vehicles. It’s a totally free marketplace that simplifies the buying and selling process, and help you learn about EVs along the way too.   VW GROUP CHIEF SAYS COMPANY MUST DEVELOP ITS OWN IN-HOUSE SOFTWARE "As you may be aware, Volkswagen – as well as other legacy automakers – has been struggling with software issues related to its new I.D. family of electric cars. VW Group boss Herbert Diess is clearly aware that something needs to change, and quickly, especially if it is going to compete with Tesla going forward." says InsideEVs: "During a recent meeting with his team, Diess said VW must develop its own in-house software to solve problems and move forward. Third-party software solutions, while potentially a decent temporary band-aid, simply won't cut it, according to Diess. As Volkswagen moves forward with a long list of future EVs, it can't have a repeat of what happened with ID.3 and ID.4 related to delays, mostly attributed to software concerns. If this continues to plague the automaker, people will quickly grow tired of taking delivery of "unfinished" products."   https://insideevs.com/news/493991/vw-chief-in-house-software/   DIESS SAYS NEIN TO HYDROGEN FUEL CELL CARS & TRUCKS "Lots of people think using hydrogen to power cars and trucks is a good idea. After all, the only waste products of fuel cells are water vapor and heat. What could be more climate friendly than that? That’s the theory, anyway. But Herbert Diess, chairman of the board for the Volkswagen Group, says the reality is very different. “You won’t see any hydrogen usage in cars. Not even in 10 years, because the physics behind it are so unreasonable.” according to the ever-billiant Clean TEchnica: "Some industry executives think hydrogen could be a zero-emissions fuel for heavy trucks that need to travel more than 300 km. Battery-powered trucks are fine and dandy up to that point, but they say beyond that, the weight of the batteries needed takes away from the amount of cargo a truck can carry. Once again, Diess disagrees. Volkswagen, which owns truck makers SCANIA and MAN, stopped all development work on fuel cells for trucks last month."   https://cleantechnica.com/2021/03/11/diess-says-nein-to-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-trucks/   PEUGEOT AIMS FOR 100% ELECTRIFICATION BY 2023 "Peugeot plans to have a range that is 100% electrified by 2023, in an announcement that exceeds previous planning. A “100 per cent electrified fleet” means that Peugeot will no longer offer pure petrol or diesel as new cars from 2023. However, the French company has not specified what level of electrification it is aiming for – a 48-volt mild-hybrid is considered electrified, but cannot cover significant distances purely electrically and drives like a pure combustion engine for the customer. Based on the PSA platforms CMP and EMP2, Peugeot already offers battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids today." says Next Green Car: "In 2018, the PSA Group announced it would offer offshoots with electric or hybrid drives for all 40 models of its brands by 2025 and that it wanted to achieve an electrification rate of 80 per cent by 2023. At least for the Peugeot brand, the electrification quota is now set to reach 100 per cent by 2023."   https://www.nextgreencar.com/news/9109/peugeot-aims-for-100-electrification-by-2023/   AUDI E-TRON ELECTRIC SUV JOINS THE MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION SQUAD IN THE UK FROM £1,299 "Brits on the lookout for an electric vehicle without the hassle of full ownership can get the Audi E-Tron for a monthly fee of £1,299 (equal to $1,813)." says CarScoops: "Launched in partnership between Audi and subscription provider Onto, who just purchased 300 units of the E-Tron Black Edition, the program includes driving for up to 1,000 miles (1,609 km) per month, insurance, servicing, breakdown cover and up to 1,000 miles worth of free charging at the BP Pulse and Shell Recharge networks. Available in the 55 quattro variant with a 235-mile (378-km) WLTP-certified range, the E-Tron Black Edition uses two electric motors that generate a combined 402 HP. The 95 kWh battery supports DC fast charging of up to 150 kW, taking around half an hour to be recharged to 80 percent."   https://www.carscoops.com/2021/03/audi-e-tron-electric-suv-joins-the-monthly-subscription-squad-in-the-uk-from-1299/   ELECTRIC HIGHWAY COALITION TO ADD EV FAST CHARGERS "Six major utilities have a plan to ensure that electric vehicle drivers have access to a seamless network of charging stations connecting major highway systems from the Atlantic Coast, through the Midwest and South, and into the Gulf and Central Plains regions." re[prts Renewable Energy Magazine: "The Electric Highway Coalition – made up of American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Entergy Corp., Southern Co., and the Tennessee Valley Authority – announced a plan to provide EV drivers seamless travel across major regions of the country through a network of DC fast chargers for EVs. "   https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/electric_hybrid_vehicles/electric-highway-coalition-to-add-ev-fast-20210303   ALPHA WOLF EV PICKUP "Startup EV-maker Alpha has added the Wolf EV pickup to its nascent lineup of electric vehicles, which already includes the vaguely retro Ace EV coupe and the off-road-ified Jax EV CUV coupe." writes Autoblog; "The Alpha Wolf electric pickup is available in single-motor and dual-motor configurations, the former with front-wheel drive and the latter with all-wheel drive. There's no word on payload, but maximum towing capacity is a claimed 3,000 pounds. Range is estimated at 250 miles or 275 miles, depending on configuration. he Wolf is much smaller than today's "compact" pickups — two feet shorter than the smallest Tacoma Access Cab, for example. The Alpha Wolf's size, and its styling, are suggestive of Japanese compact pickups from the '80s/'90s. Alpha Wolf pricing ranges from $36,000 to $46,000. The company is taking reservations now but has previously said it won't start delivering vehicles until 2023. "     You can listen to all 1018 previous episodes of this this for free, where you get your podcasts from, plus the blog https://www.evnewsdaily.com/ – remember to subscribe, which means you don’t have to think about downloading the show each day, plus you get it first and free and automatically.   It would mean a lot if you could take 2mins to leave a quick review on whichever platform you download the podcast.   And  if you have an Amazon Echo, download our Alexa Skill, search for EV News Daily and add it as a flash briefing.   Come and say hi on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter just search EV News Daily, have a wonderful day, I’ll catch you tomorrow and remember…there’s no such thing as a self-charging hybrid.     PHIL ROBERTS / ELECTRIC FUTURE (PREMIUM PARTNER) BRAD CROSBY (PREMIUM PARTNER) PORSCHE OF THE VILLAGE CINCINNATI (PREMIUM PARTNER) AUDI CINCINNATI EAST (PREMIUM PARTNER) VOLVO CARS CINCINNATI EAST (PREMIUM PARTNER) NATIONALCARCHARGING.COM and ALOHACHARGE.COM  (PREMIUM PARTNER) DEREK REILLY FROM THE EV REVIEW IRELAND YOUTUBE CHANNEL (PREMIUM PARTNER) RICHARD AT RSEV.CO.UK – FOR BUYING AND SELLING EVS IN THE UK (PREMIUM PARTNER)   DAVID AND LISA ALLEN (PARTNER) GARETH HAMER (PARTNER) eMOBILITY NORWAY HTTPS://WWW.EMOBILITYNORWAY.COM/  (PARTNER) BOB BOOTHBY FROM MILLBROOK COTTAGES – 5* GOLD SELF CATERING COTTAGES (PARTNER) DARIN MCLESKEY FROM DENOVO REAL ESTATE (PARTNER) JUKKA KUKONEN FROM WWW.SHIFT2ELECTRIC.COM RAJEEV NARAYAN (PARTNER) IAIN SEAR (PARTNER)   ADRIAN BOND (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALAN SHEDD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALEX BANAHENE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALEXANDER FRANK @ https://www.youtube.com/c/alexsuniverse42 ANDERS HOVE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ANDREA JEFFERSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ANDREW GREEN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ANDY NANCARROW AND LILIAN KASS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ASEER KHALID (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BÅRD FJUKSTAD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BLUNDERBUSS JONES (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BRIAN THOMPSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRUCE BOHANNAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHARLES HALL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHRIS HOPKINS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHRISTOPHER BARTH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) COLIN HENNESSY AND CAMBSEV (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CRAIG ROGERS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAMIEN DAVIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID FINCH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID MOORE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID PARTINGTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID PRESCOTT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DON MCALLISTER / SCREENCASTSONLINE.COM (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ED CORTREEN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ERIC HANSEN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ERU KYEYUNE-NYOMBI (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) FREDRIK ROVIK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) GENE RUBIN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) HEDLEY WRIGHT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) HEINRICH LIESNER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN GRIFFITHS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN (WATTIE) WATKINS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JACK OAKLEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JAMES STORR (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JAVIER CARMELO DÍAZ PÉREZ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JIM MORRIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JOHN SCHROEDER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JON AKA BEARDY MCBEARDFACE FROM KENT EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JON MANCHAK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JUAN GONZALEZ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KEVIN MEYERSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LAURENCE D ALLEN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LEE BROWN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LUKE CULLEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARCEL WARD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARTY YOUNG  (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MIA OPPELSTRUP (PARTNER) MIKE WINTER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NATHAN GORE-BROWN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NATHANIEL FREEDMAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NEIL E ROBERTS FROM SUSSEX EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) OHAD ASTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PAUL STEPHENSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETE GLASS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETE GORTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETER & DEE ROBERTS FROM OXON EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PHIL MOUCHET (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PHILIP TRAUTMAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RAYMOND ROWLEDGE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RENE KEEMIK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RENÉ SCHNEIDER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROB HERMANS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROB FROM THE RSTHINKS EV CHANNEL ON YOUTUBE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROBERT GRACE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RUPERT MITCHELL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) SEIKI PAYNE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STEPHEN PENN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STEVE JOHN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) THOMAS J. 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Analysts’ top ESG energy and water stocks and funds include the following. Middlesex Water Co., Invesco Water Resources ETF, American States Water Co., California Water Service Group, Xylem, Fidelity Select Environment and Alternative Energy Portfolio, Calvert Global Energy Solutions Fund Class A, American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, Hubbell, Consolidated Edison, Array Technologies, and TPI Composites PODCAST: Analysts’ Top ESG Energy and Water Stocks Transcript & Links, Episode 52, February 26, 2021 Hello, Ron Robins here. Welcome to podcast episode 52 published on February 26, titled “ Analysts’ Top ESG Energy and Water Stocks”— and presented by Investing for the Soul. investingforthesoul.com is your site for vital global ethical and sustainable investing news, commentary, information, and resources. Remember that you can find a full transcript, links to content – including stock symbols, quotes, and bonus material – at this episode’s podcast page located at investingforthesoul.com/podcasts. And Google any terms that are unfamiliar to you. ------------------------------------------------------------- Analysts’ Top Water Stocks Increasingly, ethical and sustainable investors desire water stocks and funds in their portfolios. Here is a good article for those of you interested in this sector. It’s titled 3 Rising Water Stocks You Can Buy Today. It was on nasdaq.com and written by Robert Ross. Here are some of Mr. Ross’s comments. He says that… “PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that private spending on drinking water infrastructure will total $60 billion by 2027. Over the next 25 years, total spending on wastewater treatment alone will exceed $10 billion per year. Steady and predictable investment like that is a key reason why American water stocks are some of the safest investments on the market. Many offer solid returns, too. Take Middlesex Water Co. (MSEX) for example. The company is one of the oldest water utilities in the US. But even though the business started in 1897, the stock has been pumping out solid returns for years. If you prefer to get some broad exposure to the water market, consider buying the Invesco Water Resources ETF (PHO). It holds everything from utilities to infrastructure companies, and it pays a small 0.5% dividend yield. Personally, I usually prefer buying individual stocks because they offer more upside. And you need look no further than Invesco Water Resources ETF’s holdings to find three stocks that offer waves of profits. 1) American States Water Co. (AWR) Because of constant demand from California’s growing population, American States Water Co. is incredibly stable. And with a safe and reliable 1.7% dividend yield, it is my favorite income-based water play. 2) California Water Service Group (CWT) This is another large California water utility. Considering California Water Service Group has never reduced its dividend payout in the 35 years it’s paid one, you can rest easy with this one in your portfolio. 3) Xylem (XYL) While the company does not pay a dividend, it’s one of the premier water infrastructure companies. It has exposure to global demand for water infrastructure, generating over half of its sales outside the US.” End of quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Analysts’ Top ESG Energy Stocks Now I’m going to mention several articles related to energy but all with some unique perspectives. The first article is titled 3 Clean Energy Funds to Buy as Climate Concerns Intensify. It was on nasdaq.com and written by Zacks Equity Research. Quote. 1) Fidelity Select Environment and Alternative Energy Portfolio (FSLEX) The non-diversified fund invests majority of assets in common stocks of companies principally engaged in business activities related to alternative and renewable energy, energy efficiency, pollution control, water infrastructure, waste and recycling technologies, or other environmental support services. Fidelity Select Environment and Alternative Energy Portfolio has an annual expense ratio of 0.85% versus the category average of 1.04%. Additionally, the fund has significant investment in alternative energy companies like Tesla, Cummins and Linde. Fidelity Select Environment and Alternative Energy Portfolio has three and five-year return of nearly 10% and 15%, respectively. 2) New Alternatives Fund Class A (NALFX) Aims for long-term capital appreciation, with income being the secondary objective. The fund invests in common stocks of YieldCos, American Depository Receipts, real estate investment trusts and publicly-traded master limited partnerships. New Alternatives Fund Class A has three and five-year return of 29.2% and 22.7%, respectively. New Alternatives Fund Class A has an annual expense ratio of 1.08% versus the category average of 1.28%. Additionally, the fund has significant investment in alternative energy companies like Innergex Renewable Energy, Vestas Wind Systems and Nextera Energy. 3) Calvert Global Energy Solutions Fund Class A (CGAEX) Aims to track the performance of the Calvert Global Energy Research Index. The fund invests majority of assets in companies whose main business is sustainable energy solutions. Calvert Global Energy Solutions Fund Class A has three and five-year return of 19.9% and 15.5%, respectively. [It] has an annual expense ratio of 1.24%, which is below the category average of 1.29%. Additionally, Calvert Global Energy Solutions Fund Class A has significant investment in alternative energy companies like First Solar, Nextera Energy Partners and Terraform Power.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Analysts’ Top ESG Energy Stocks The second article features some names that might be unfamiliar to many ethical and sustainable investors. The article is titled 3 Cheap Renewable Energy Stocks to Buy Now and published on fool.com. Three authors each give their number one pick. “1) Scott Levine likes American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP) Although solar, wind, and geothermal stocks all represent viable options from which investors can choose, American Electric Power provides a less obvious approach. And fortunately for investors, they can currently find shares in the bargain bin. American Electric Power has a presence in 11 states and provides electricity to about 5.5 million customers… Management has articulated a clear commitment to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) values. American Electric Power is currently offering investors an attractive 3.8% dividend yield on its stock. 2) Daniel Foelber recommends Dominion Energy (NYSE: D) Dominion Energy is the latest utility stock to launch an aggressive push into renewable energy. The company is a leading energy provider in Utah, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Although Dominion's portfolio is still mostly fossil fuels, it has done a good job of moving away from coal toward natural gas over the past 15 years… Dominion yields an impressive 3.5% -- much higher than the current market average of 1.5%... Dominion looks to be a worthwhile renewable energy stock to buy now.  3) Lee Samaha suggests Hubbell (NYSE: HUBB) What about buying a highly cash generative value stock with some exposure to renewable energy related spending? That's where electrical and electronic products company Hubbell comes into play. If you are going to have investment in renewable energy farms, you are going to need investment in the transmission and distribution (T&D) network, as well… Management expects its utility T&D components end market to grow 2% to 4% and utility communications and controls to grow 4% to 6%.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Analysts’ Top ESG Energy Stocks Now here’s the third energy-related article. It’s titled Got $3000? Here Are 3 Solar Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Long Term. It’s written by Matthew DiLallo -- a regular to this podcast -- and appeared on fool.com. Here are his picks followed by a few of his remarks. 1) Atlantica Sustainable Infrastructure (NASDAQ: AY) Owns a diversified portfolio of infrastructure assets geared toward a more sustainable future, like renewable energy, natural gas, electricity transmission, and water desalinization. Renewable energy makes up the bulk of its revenue at 69% of the total. 2) Consolidated Edison (NYSE: ED) Is a utility focused on delivering electricity to the New York City market. It's one of the country's cleanest utilities, as 71% of its power-generating capacity is renewable energy and the rest is cleaner-burning natural gas. Most of its capacity -- 57% -- is solar power. Consolidated Edison… currently boasts an attractive 4.3% yield. 3) SolarEdge (NASDAQ: SEDG) Makes an optimized inverter system that reduces the cost of energy produced by a solar system. That makes it a key component in making solar energy cheaper.” End quotes ------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Analysts’ Top ESG Energy Stocks Our fourth article in this series is titled 2 Top Stocks in Renewable Energy. Also appeared on fool.com and is by analyst Daniel Foelber -- whom we also mentioned earlier. I’ll mention the companies and follow on with a few key quotes by Mr. Foelber. 1) Array Technologies (NASDAQ: ARRY) Array is an industry leader in single-axis solar tracking systems. These tracking systems rotate solar panels throughout the day to optimize power generation. According to Bloomberg, trackers harness 25% more energy with just a 7% increase in project capital cost… Array is expanding internationally to try to gain a foothold in emerging markets like China, Australia, Europe, and South America… Array stock has a much more attractive valuation than other big-name solar stocks and is growing at a faster rate as well. 2) TPI Composites (NASDAQ: TPIC) TPI Composites is the largest independent manufacturer of wind blades and fills a niche role in the wind energy industry… TPI Composites' business strategy is simple. It believes in the long-term growth of the wind energy market. It has excellent partnerships with original equipment manufacturers. And it opens new facilities wherever the demand for wind energy is growing.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- End Comment Well, these are my top news stories with their stock and fund tips -- for this podcast: “ Analysts’ Top ESG Energy and Water Stocks.“ To get all the links, stock symbols, or to read the transcript of this podcast -- and more -- go to investingforthesoul.com/podcasts and scroll down to this episode. Also, be sure to click the like and subscribe buttons in iTunes/Apple Podcasts or wherever you download or listen to this podcast. And please click the share buttons to share this podcast with your friends and family. Let’s promote a better post COVID world through ethical and sustainable investing! Contact me if you have any questions. Stay well and healthy—and conscious about the ethical and sustainable values of your investments! Thank you for listening. Talk to you next on March 12. Bye for now. © 2021 Ron Robins, Investing for the Soul.

Thirthak Saha is a Business Strategy Consultant. He has been working as a solo consultant for several pre-series A global startups to help founding teams develop their GTM strategies and build data-driven MVPs. He was also the co-founder of Trolysis – an American clean energy startup developing innovative solutions to the world's Energy and Climate Change problems.Previously to this, He lead a program to design a multi-million-dollar portfolio of Smart Grid technology projects at American Electric Power and also conducted research projects in the Space Systems sector, working with NASA (Pennsylvania Space Grant Commission).Time Stamps:0:00 Intro05:00 Language Analogy14:50 Problems with Info Retrieval20:00 Telling Parents to do X44:00 Etymology Example47:00 Hebrew Reformation54:00 Mental Health on Social Media1:00:00 Internet Issues1:03:00 Chat Interaction Connect with Tirthak SahaLinkedin: Tirthak Saha  Instagram: @tirthak.sahaConnect with us onlinepgradio.com  @pgradio.live on InstagramConnect with Prakhar Gupta:@prvkhvr on Twitter  email: pg@pgradio.com

Click to listen to episode (5:03)Sections below are the following:Transcript of AudioAudio Notes and AcknowledgmentsImagesExtra InformationSourcesRelated Water Radio EpisodesFor Virginia Teachers (Relevant SOLs, etc.) Unless otherwise noted, all Web addresses mentioned were functional as of 1-29-21. TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO From the Cumberland Gap to the Atlantic Ocean, this is Virginia Water Radio for the week of February 1, 2021. MUSIC – ~12 sec – instrumental That’s part of “Directional,” by the Richmond, Va., band Carbon Leaf, from their 1995 album, “Meander.”  In Richmond, the 2021 Virginia General Assembly has been considering over 1600 bills and resolutions as it sets directions for the Commonwealth’s laws, policies, and budget. This is Virginia Water Radio’s annual episode giving youa chance to imagine being an Assembly member, and to consider how you’d vote on some of this year’s water-related measures.  I’ll give brief descriptions of each of five measures, based on information from the Virginia Legislative Information System as of January 29.  You’ll have a few seconds of a ticking clock sound to decide if you would vote for or against the idea, and then I’ll give the measure’s status, also as of January 29.No. 1.  House of Delegates Joint Resolution 556is a proposed constitutional amendment stating, in part, that “In the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, it is the policy of the Commonwealth to follow the principles of environmental justice, including the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of every person regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.”  [SOUND – ~2 sec – ticking]  This resolution was in a House committee. No. 2.  Senate Bill 1291 would require that any application for a water-withdrawal permit must include a water-auditing plan and a leak-detection and -repair plan.  [SOUND – ~2 sec – ticking]  This bill had passed the Senate and moved to the House. No. 3.  House Bill 1983 would set conditions for water-protection permit applicants who are seeking mitigation credits for impacts to wetlands or streams, to purchase such credits from a mitigation bank not located in the sub-watershed where the impacts occur.  [SOUND – ~2 sec – ticking]  This bill had passed the House and was in a Senate committee. No. 4.  House Bill 1937, a complicated measure called the “Green New Deal Act,” would, among other things, set a moratorium on new fossil-fuel projects, establish requirements for percentages of electricity generation from renewable sources, require a state Climate Action Plan, set a goal to reduce building energy consumption by 36 percent by 2036, and promote environmental justice in various ways.  [SOUND – ~2 sec – ticking]  The bill was in a House committee. And No. 5.  House Bill 2265 would repeal several previous acts by the General Assembly that promoted renewable energy and called for regulating carbon emissions from fossil fuel-based electricity plants.  [SOUND – ~2 sec – ticking]  The bill was in a House committee. This short game certainly doesn’t capture the scope of the General Assembly’s potential impacts on a subject as complicated, connected, and vital as water.  These measures all involve more details than you heard here, and many other significant measures are also under consideration.  The General Assembly’s Web site, virginiageneralassembly.gov, has tools to help you get more information and express your opinions to Assembly members.  The 2021 General Assembly is scheduled to adjourn on February 11, so now’s the time. Thanks to Carbon Leaf for permission to use this week’s music, and we close with about 10 more seconds of “Directional.” MUSIC – ~ 11 sec – instrumental SHIP’S BELL Virginia Water Radio is produced by the Virginia Water Resources Research Center, part of Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment.  For more Virginia water sounds, music, or information, visit us online at virginiawaterradio.org, or call the Water Center at (540) 231-5624.  Thanks to Stewart Scales for his banjo version of Cripple Creek to open and close this show.  In Blacksburg, I’m Alan Raflo, thanking you for listening, and wishing you health, wisdom, and good water. AUDIO NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “Directional,” from the 1995 album “Meander,” is copyright by Carbon Leaf, used with permission.  More information about Carbon Leaf is available online at https://www.carbonleaf.com/.  Lyrics for “Directional” and many other Carbon Leaf songs are available online at https://www.azlyrics.com/c/carbonleaf.html. Click here if you’d like to hear the full version (1 min./11 sec.) of the “Cripple Creek” arrangement/performance by Stewart Scales that opens and closes this episode.  More information about Mr. Scales and the group New Standard, with which Mr. Scales plays, is available online at http://newstandardbluegrass.com. IMAGES Virginia House of Delegates virtual floor session, February 1, 2021.  Shown in the image are Speaker of the House Eileen Filler-Corn (D-41st District) (back and left) and House Clerk Suzette Denslow.   Image taken as screen shot from House livestream, accessed online at https://virginiageneralassembly.gov/house/chamber/chamberstream.php, 2/1/21 at 4:50 p.m. EST.Virginia Senate floor session on January 29, 2019, being held at a pavilion at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.  Image taken as screen shot from Senate livestream archive, accessed online at http://virginia-senate.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=3, 2/1/21. EXTRA INFORMATION ABOUT LEGISLATION MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Following are Virginia Legislative Information System (LIS) summaries of the one resolution and four bills mentioned in this episode, as of January 29, 2021, accessed at http://lis.virginia.gov/.  The resolution and bill numbers are hyperlinked to the respective LIS pages for each measure. 1.  House Joint Resolution 556 - Constitutional amendment; environmental justice (first reference).  “Section 5. Environmental justice.  In the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, it is the policy of the Commonwealth to follow the principles of environmental justice, including the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of every person regardless of race, color, national origin, or income. Further, it is the policy of the Commonwealth to ensure that no population, especially minority, low-income, or historically economically disadvantaged communities, faces higher levels or greater impacts of pollution and climate change than other populations.” 2.  Senate Bill 1291 - Va. Water Protection Permit; withdrawal of surface water or ground water, plans for water auditing, leak detection.  “Requires that any application for a permit to withdraw surface water or ground water include a water-auditing plan and a leak-detection and -repair plan that comply with regulations adopted by the State Water Control Board pursuant to the provisions of the bill.” 3.  House Bill 1983 - Wetland and stream mitigation banks; proximity of impacted site.  “Provides that when a water protection permit applicant is required to purchase wetland or stream mitigation bank credits but no credits are available (either (i) in any mitigation provider's primary service area or (ii) at a cost of less than 200 percent of the price of credits available from a fund dedicated to achieving no net loss of wetland acreage and functions), the applicant may purchase or use credits from a mitigation provider's secondary service area.  The bill provides certain requirements that the permit applicant must comply with in order to purchase or use such credits from a secondary service area, including minimum tree canopy requirements.”  [Virginia Water Radio note: The bill defines “secondary service area” as “the area outside the primary service area but within the same physiographic province in which the bank is located and any adjacent physiographic province within the same river watershed.”] 4.  House Bill 1937 - Green New Deal Act, establishes a moratorium, effective January 1, 2022, etc.  “Establishes a moratorium, effective January 1, 2022, on approval by any state agency or political subdivision of any approval required for (i) electric generating facilities that generate fossil fuel energy through the combustion of a fossil fuel resource; (ii) import or export terminals for fossil fuel resources; (iii) certain maintenance activities relating to an import or export terminal for a fossil fuel resource; (iv) gathering lines or pipelines for the transport of any fossil fuel resource that  require the use of eminent domain on private property; (v) certain maintenance activities relating to such gathering lines or pipelines; (vi) refineries of a fossil fuel resource; and (vii) exploration for any type of fossil fuel, unless preempted by applicable federal law.  The measure also requires that at least 80 percent of the electricity sold by a retail electric supplier in calendar years 2028 through 2035 be generated from clean energy resources.  In calendar year 2036 and every calendar year thereafter, 100 percent of the electricity sold by a retail electric supplier is required to be generated from clean energy resources.  The clean energy mandates apply to a public utility or other person that sells not less than 1,000 megawatt hours of electric energy to retail customers or generates not less than 1,000 megawatt hours of electric energy for use by the person.  The Director of the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy [the Department] is authorized to bring actions for injunctions to enforce these requirements.  The measure requires the Department to adopt a Climate Action Plan that addresses all aspects of climate change, including mitigation, adaptation, resiliency, and assistance in the transition from current energy sources to clean renewable energy.  The measure provides that any retail electric supplier that fails to meet any goal or benchmark is liable for a civil penalty equal to twice the cost of the financial investment necessary to meet such goal or mandate that was not achieved, or three times the cost of the financial investment necessary to meet such goal or benchmark that was not achieved if not met in an environmental justice community. “The measure provides that it is the goal of the Commonwealth to achieve a 36 percent reduction in electric energy consumption in buildings by 2036.  The measure requires the Department, in coordination with the Virginia Council on Environmental Justice (Council) to establish performance benchmarks for environmental justice communities and to establish programs for jobs for people in environmental justice communities.  The measure requires the Council to develop and make available to each state agency training modules designed to facilitate the promotion of environmental justice. “The measure requires the Department to establish the Transitioning Workers Program (the Program) to provide support for workers in the fossil fuel industry and affected communities and provide such workers job training, relocation support, income and benefit support, and early retirement benefits.  The measure provides for funding such program by 20 percent of the revenue generated by the allowance auction established by the Director of the Department of Environmental Quality.  The measure prohibits the Commission from approving construction of any new utility-owned generating facilities that emit carbon dioxide as a by-product of combusting fuel to generate electricity.  The measure requires that all utility costs associated with the construction of, acquisition of, or agreements to purchase the energy, capacity, and environmental attributes of certain required generation and storage facilities are recovered through the utility's rates for generation and distribution services. “The measure requires that under the renewable energy portfolio standard program, Dominion Energy Virginia and American Electric Power be required to produce their electricity from 80 percent renewable sources by 2028 and 100 percent by 2036.  The measure increases the incremental energy efficiency savings that each investor-owned incumbent electric utility is required to achieve that start in 2022 at 2.4 percent for American Electric Power and Dominion Energy Virginia of the average annual energy retail sales by that utility in 2020 and increases those savings annually.” 5.  House Bill 2265 - Regulation of electric utilities; development of renewable energy facilities; powers of Air Pollution Control Board; powers of State Corporation Commission.  “Repeals provisions (i) requiring the Air Pollution Control Board to adopt regulations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from any electricity generating unit in the Commonwealth and authorizing the Board to establish an auction program for energy allowances; (ii) prohibiting the State Corporation Commission from approving any new utility-owned generation facilities that emit carbon dioxide as a by-product of energy generation, in certain circumstances; (iii) declaring that statutory allowances for energy derived from sunlight, onshore wind, offshore wind, and storage facilities are in the public interest; and (iv) relating to the development of solar and wind generation and energy storage capacity, development of offshore wind capacity, and generation of electricity from renewable and zero carbon sources.  The bill provides that planning and development activities for new nuclear generation facilities are in the public interest.” SOURCES Used for Audio Virginia Legislative Information System, online at https://lis.virginia.gov/lis.htm.  This site provides lists and summaries of all bills, searchable by topic, member, committee, etc.  As of January 28, 2021, “Session Statistics,” online at https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?211+oth+STA, indicated 1233 measures (House or Senate bills, resolutions, or joint resolutions) had been introduced for the 2021 session and 385 measures were continued from 2020, making a total of 1618 measures under consideration in 2021.Virginia General Assembly, online at http://virginiageneralassembly.gov/index.php.  This Web site offers several useful features, including member lists, session calendars, live video of floor sessions, and information on legislative processes. For More Information about the Virginia General Assembly Virginia House of Delegates Appropriations Committee, “Legislative Budget Process,” online at http://hac.virginia.gov/legislative.htm. Virginia House of Delegates live stream video archive, online at https://virginiageneralassembly.gov/house/chamber/chamberstream.php, and Virginia Senate live stream video archive, online at http://virginia-senate.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=3.To express an opinion on legislation, citizens are requested to contact their respective delegate of senator.  If you do not know your representatives or their contact information, you can use the online “Who’s My Legislator” service, available at http://whosmy.virginiageneralassembly.gov/.  You can find members’ contact information at these links: House: http://virginiageneralassembly.gov/house/members/members.php; Senate: https://apps.senate.virginia.gov/Senator/index.php. The Lobbyist-In-A-Box subscriber service also offers free tracking for up to five bills, and it offers tracking of more than five bills for a fee; visit http://lis.virginia.gov/h015.htm.  For assistance, phone Legislative Automated Systems at (804) 786-9631.Virginia Water Resources Research Center, “Virginia Water Central News Grouper” posts on the Virginia General Assembly are available online at https://vawatercentralnewsgrouper.wordpress.com/?s=General+Assembly.  Items ar

Episode #3 of Always Bet on Black with Paula Glover is back, this time talking with Kevin Walker, Chief Operating Officer at Duquesne Light Company. Kevin and Paula have a wide ranging talk about leadership (and how it works both ways) mentorship, Kevin's background as a West Point grad and time serving overseas and much more! For all things AABE, please visit us at www.aabe.org. Follow us on all social platforms @AABE. Show Resources: Kevin Walker Bio: Kevin Walker joined Duquesne Light on April 1, 2020 as Chief Operations Officer. Walker brings more than twenty years of operations leadership experience, having most recently served as the Senior Vice President of Customer and Operations Services and Nuclear Decommissioning at Southern California Edison. In this role, he oversaw the operational services group which included supply chain, corporate real estate, transportation services and corporate environmental services. Prior to joining Southern California Edison, Walker previously held Chief Operations Officer level positions at both Iberdrola and American Electric Power. Walker is a proud former member of the U.S. Army and served six years as a Field Artillery Officer during Operation Desert Storm. Walker holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from West Point Academy and a Master’s of Business Administration from Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

ACBL named Mark Knoy as its president and chief executive officer in August 2011. Prior to joining ACBL, he was vice president of American Electric Power’s (AEP) Fuel, Emissions and Logistics Group and president of AEP River Operations, having joined AEP with its 2001 purchase of MEMCO Barge Line. From 1984 to 1994, he was owner/operator of The Mark Twain Towing Company and Delmar Marine, Inc., Pekin, Illinois. Knoy began his career in 1973 working aboard towboats on the inland waterways as a deck hand and then as a captain. Knoy serves as a director of the Corps of Engineer’s Inland Waterways Users Board, a Board of Trustees’ member for both the Coast Guard Foundation and The Seamen’s Church Institute and its Center for Maritime Education and Ministry on the River, chairman of the National Waterways Foundation, board member for the H.T. Pott Inland Waterways Library at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, treasurer of the Marine Transportation Council and former member of the Board of Directors for the Fund for the Arts and the Boy Scouts of America, Greater St. Louis Area Council. He is a past chairman of both the Waterways Council, Inc. and the Midwest Region of the American Waterways Operators. Mark lives with his wife, Mary, in Louisville and together they have three grown children.

Gerhard Öhler hat mit seinem wikifolio https://go.brn-ag.de/31 derzeit noch immer eine Liquidität von über 91 %. Das Spannende ist, dass der wikifolio-Trader Gerhard (Tradername oegeat) schon Ende 2019 seine ganzen Werte in Liquidität gesichert hatte. Von jeder seiner 60 Aktien hat er immer noch eine Aktie im wikifolio um den Trend zu testen. Die Dividendenbrummer werden nach den Dividenden und nach charttechnischen Kriterien ausgewählt. Warum ist TUI, OMV und Shell noch im Depot? Dividendenbrummer waren bisher P&G, Allianz, AT&T und American Electric Power. Die Performance des wikifolios ist seit Beginn +81,7 % und seit dem letzten Jahr bei +15 %.

Tom Chapman founded Chapman and Company in April 2016. He has worked with hundreds of startups - including roles as a founder, funder, early executive, and sales person. He has expertise in the startup world from many different angles and has been successful frequently, but not every time - that means he can also empathize with the challenges and emotions that are encountered as a company is starting. Tom is also regarded as one of the leading entrepreneurial ecosystem leaders in the world. He has particular expertise in measuring and creating metrics for entrepreneurial ecosystems. His work has been referenced, cited, and quoted in numerous publications around the world, and he is an active speaker on entrepreneurial ecosystems and their importance. Beyond his work for Chapman and Company, Tom helped grow Beehive Industries (a Lincoln based government technology company), Nebraska Global (a Lincoln based funding organization), and is an alum of Enron and American Electric Power in the energy industry. Tom has both a J.D. and an M.B.A from the University of Nebraska and undergraduate liberal arts degrees from Creighton University.

The Dow fell nearly 1,000 points today and Cramer’s putting this volatile week into context. Then, in the midst of market turmoil, Cramer’s sitting down with the CEO of Generac to make sense of the stock gaining over 120% in the last year. Plus, could the utility stocks power through the volatility? Cramer’s checking in with American Electric Power’s CEO to discuss what’s on the horizon for one of the largest electric utilities in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dow closed down 28 points and Jim Cramer is digging into one of the busiest weeks of earnings season. Then, after earnings, American Electric Power hit an all-time high, but could this utility continue to power higher? Cramer’s sitting down with the CEO. And, managed care stocks have been caught in political crosshairs, but could Centene rise from the pack? Cramer’s digging into the quarter with the company’s top brass. Plus, the cloud cohort has looked a little dark as of late. Cramer’s assessing the cloud stock damage and giving you a strategy on how to manage the pain in the cloud space and what to make of today’s moves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hoy en @cdemercados analizamos con @MMPRG, director de @BigDealCapital : #AmericanElectricPower #KeysightTech #CincinnatiFinantialCorp

Hoy en @cdemercados analizamos con @MMPRG, director de @BigDealCapital : #AmericanElectricPower #KeysightTech #CincinnatiFinantialCorp

Two dynamos of the power industry, Calvin G. Butler Jr., the CEO of Baltimore Gas and ElectricCompany , the nation’s first gas utility, and Nick Akins, the CEO of Ohio-based American Electric Power, joined Gil Gross, the host of We The States, the official podcast of the National Governors Association, to discuss the evolution of the power industry and the unique relationship utility companies have with governors.“We realize that at the core it’s a partnership because their constituents are our customers,” observed Mr. Butler.“We’re investing billions of dollars into an infrastructure because I don’t want you as a governor come back to me after the fact and say, ‘Why weren’t you doing something?’. I want to proactively put together a plan in front of you and you hold me accountable for executing to that plan.”Both CEOs highlighted challenges to the U.S. power grid, whether from increasingly frequent extreme weather events or cyber attacks. They emphasized that cooperation with state regulators is essential to fulfilling their public-service missions, which include generating clean power but with an eye toward affordability to customers who span the socioeconomic spectrum.“At the same time with our customers, our customers certainly have different options available to them today, that they didn't have before. Certainly, we used to think about our system is one-way communication: generation, transmission, distribution, customers consume. That's what you got. Well, these days it really is centered on two-way communication so that we understand what the priorities of our customers are,” continued Mr. Akins. Listen to this fascinating discussion of how and why states and utilities work together to serve the needs of the public.

Outperf'n industry peers, in a sector that's also outperf'n peers! Is that enough? $aep #AEP

Tammy Gretz and Wendy Jacobs discuss their talk "From Self Obsession to Self Selection: A Scaled Org's Journey to Value Reorganization" at Agile2018.   Transcript Tammy Gretz Wendy Jacobs ‑ Agile2018   Bob Payne:  "The Agile toolkit." [music] Bob:  Hi. I'm your host, Bob Payne. I'm here with Tammy Gretz of [inaudible 0:25] ... [laughter] Bob:  ...and Wendy Jacobs. We've chatted a bit before this, but this is the first time you guys are doing a podcast, I think. Wendy Jacobs:  A live podcast, yes. Bob:  A live podcast. Wendy:  Correct. Bob:  This is recorded. [laughter] Bob:  You still have had to come. Wendy:  This is the first live or recorded podcast for me. There you go. [laughter] Bob:  You are doing a talk and it's related to team self‑selection, From Self‑Obsession to Self‑Selection. What's that all about? How do you two work together? What's your back story? What's the talk? Wendy:  I work at AEP, American Electric Power ‑‑ this is Wendy ‑‑ and Tammy and I work together there. She is a Scrum master on one of the teams working through our Agile partner, Cardinal Solutions. We started working together when she joined the team that we actually talk about. Tammy Gretz:  I was coming from it from a prospective of, it was a new team and I was there to teach them Scrum. They had never done it before. Bob:  Is this new to the whole organization or just to this team? Wendy:  We are in a multi‑year Agile transformation. The self‑selection and scaling, which is another aspect of the talk that we're doing, is new to the organization. This was the experiment. Bob:  How long have you been running Agile teams before you hit scaling and self‑selection? Tammy:  Before I came to AEP, I had been working about two or three years in an Agile environment. The AEP transformation, I believe, has been between seven and nine years. Bob:  Usually teams don't get to self‑selection until they've been doing it for a while. Wendy:  The group of teams that we're talking about, one of them was new when Tammy came in, newly into Scrum. The other two had been Scrum teams for a couple of years. Bob:  What was the self‑obsession portion of the program? Tammy:  [laughs] My team specifically was new to Scrum. The intention wasn't to go to scaling or do this whole self‑selection when I first started. It was teach this team Scrum and figure out how to get them working with the other two teams. We quickly realized that there were a lot of moving parts that need to have some kind of an organization or some framework to work with. Wendy:  The self‑obsession aspect is just human. We're worried about ourselves. When we're talking about having to all come together and do self‑selection event that involves trying to figure out how to deliver the most value to the company, you have to shed that self‑obsession, that selfishness and become selfless, because you have to see, where can I help most? This was a journey to take the individuals into teaming, into the ability to do self‑selection. That's where the... Bob:  Also, there's team identity, which you blow up with self‑selection. What is the event that caused you to say, "Hey, we need to kind of shake the snow globe here?" [laughs] Wendy:  We took a scaling class with a very experiment‑tolerant manager, we like to call her Andrea. Bob:  Because that's her name. [laughter] Wendy:  Protecting the innocent, whatever. Anyway, there was a kernel of it in there. One of the gentlemen on my team, he had a white paper on self‑selection for teams. We had begun talking about it. He sent her the white paper. We like to call him Greg. He sent her the white paper to just wet the whistle. Get the juices flowing about what does it really mean to do that, and she loved it. She loved the empowerment to the teams to be able... Bob:  It wasn't by Amber King was it? Wendy:  I don't recall. We can check. [laughter] Bob:  That would be interesting. She's a good friend of ours and she did a white paper on self‑selection at Cap One. It's possible. Wendy:  Very well possible. That was the kernel of it. She got a hold of that and really embraced it, and thought, "This could..." We were in a scenario where we wanted to make sure that the teams were formed in a way that delivered the value best. We were focusing on the value delivery. She worked with her business partners to define what those value streams were. Instead of just saying, "OK, you're on this team, and you're on this team, and you're on this team," she decided to let the teams decide, "Where does your value heart sing? Where do you want to put your focus?" thus lead us to self‑selection event. Bob:  How many people? Tammy:  Thirty‑four. Bob:  How many teams did you end up with? Wendy:  Six squads. That was a very critical word in this. We went from three teams to six squads because we're all part of one team. In a scaling event, you're really part of one team. She was really very specific about wanting to call these squads up to the general team. Bob:  How did it go? I'm sure some people were the Cookie Monster characters for the self‑selection. Some people... Wendy:  People were people. [laughs] Bob:  ...wanted to be told where go. "Tell me where to sit." [laughs] Wendy:  Exactly. It's all human. Think about being here at this conference. This is something we're going to talk about tomorrow, is that, how do you even select what session to go to? How do you figure out where you're going to sit? There's all sorts of reasons in your head. Tammy:  Nobody has the same two reasons. People pick things for weird reasons. They pick them for very specific, concrete reasons. You can't plan for that. Wendy:  The event went well. It was a two‑day event. The self‑selection took place the first day. We had some teaming main events on the second day to try to make sure that they were ready to go. Team agreements and let's talk about the definitions. During the actual self‑selection event, Andrea took care to really plan this. We helped her. We met for a couple months to plan this event. She made it fun. She made it seasonal. [laughs] It was right near Valentine's Day. There was a Valentine's Day theme to the whole thing. I was very impressed with what she came up with. Just the creativity that came out of her. Tammy:  For me, I was more of a participant during this. I was embedded in the team and Wendy was a coach with the team. She was working with the manager. It was very interesting to experience what maybe my other coworkers on the team, my other teammates, what they were experiencing, even though I knew what was coming. I still had that knee‑jerk reaction to be a human, and be like, "Oh, you want me to...? Oh, I got to do this? I don't care. Just put me wherever." [laughs] Bob:  Did you end up with any value streams that were starved of folks and then have to re‑negotiate? Wendy:  Interesting you ask. [laughter] Wendy:  Have you seen our talk? No. [laughter] Bob:  I've seen self‑selection events. Wendy:  That was actually the exciting moment. One of the exciting moments of this experience is that there were five total iterations to get to our final teams. It was after iteration four, and we had a starved squad. There wasn't anyone on one of the value streams. The managers stood up and said, "Hey, how are we going to deliver this? How are we going to deliver this value?" It was there that the Scrum value, courage, popped up its head. A couple of people were like, "We want that. We can take that on," and got up from where their friends were, where they felt comfortable, walked over that table and planted themselves, and said, "We got it." It was awesome. Bob:  Was it just Andrea? Wendy:  Yeah. [laughs] Bob:  Was she the advocate for each of them, or were there value stream owners that were...? Wendy:  The product owners were there and they come from the business. They were participating in this. Their management was there, too, watching, helping, and answering any questions if we had any, but Andrea was the manager of most of the people in the room. The answer is she advocated for all the teams and wanted to make sure that we came out with something that would benefit the company overall. Bob:  Is this a one‑time event or are you periodically revisiting as the demands on value streams change? [laughter] Tammy:  Actually, part of the agreement was that if they didn't like where they were, they had a chance to do it again in six months. We're right about at six months right now. They have come back and said, "Maybe we didn't think about this in the right way, necessarily, and we were still self‑obsessed a little bit." Now they're starting to see where, "Oh, maybe it might have been better if these two people were flopped," or, "This value stream might be a little better tweaked." They're learning from it. We're hopeful that they'll get to do that again here shortly. Interestingly enough, we have another group here that is going to be talking about another way that they did it. I've moved on to a different team and I've just completed another self‑selection there [laughs] with that team because they were growing. They were a smaller team and they realized that they needed to hire more. They hired four more people, which made them a massive team. We had to have discussions around the same kind of thing. We learned a lot from the first one, [laughs] applied it to this one. This one went really smoothly. It didn't take quite as long, but it was... Wendy:  The whole company's very supportive of continuous improvement. That's part of our culture, we're a continuous improvement company. I've helped with another self‑selection event not long after the one we did in February, and it was different. We've done it a couple different ways and we're learning each time from it. Tammy has the benefit in her current team to apply all the learnings we had and munge some of that together so they would have a very smooth event. Bob:  One of the things that I've seen in some places, as the business demands change, certain value streams will become higher in priority, where more work needs to flow through them. Have you guys experienced that yet or is that a future event? Tammy:  We might be going through it pretty soon. [laughs] Wendy:  With the current team you're on? Tammy:  Yeah. Wendy:  The current team that she's on, they are going to be sized a little differently based on the amount of stuff that's going to come through them. It is possible that that team may split again, the larger team. We're really looking at what makes the most sense. We're doing these experiments to try to understand what's working, what's not working, how can we tweak it? The managers are just very open and very wanting to try these things to make it the best place that they can. Bob:  One of the things that I saw one client do is quarterly, when they would do the equivalent of a cross‑program planning event, would then allow people to swap chairs, or they would shuffle demand, and say, "We need more folks over here, who would like to come join?" Then people would come, and they were like, "Oh shoot, we're too short over here." I don't know if they did five rounds. I don't remember exactly, but some number of... Tammy:  It's funny you said shuffle chairs, because that was almost more important than which team they were on, is where they were going to sit. Bob:  Oh yeah? [laughter] Wendy:  "I want the window. No, I want the window." They're, again, human. [laughter] Tammy:  It's all about the humans. It wasn't about the work. It was... Bob:  The soft stuff is the hard stuff. [laughs] Agile's easy, people are hard. [laughter] Tammy:  It's especially the different personality types. Even if we go really high‑level, introvert, extrovert, some of these things could be very hard for introverts, I think. You're speaking up and saying, "I want to go there." There's that shyness that they don't want to ruffle any...make any waves or do anything like that. All of these events, we've been very purposeful in thinking about that, making sure that there's no one really uncomfortable to a point where... Bob:  They could be uncomfortable, but not really. Wendy:  Self‑selection is uncomfortable. [laughter] Wendy:  We don't want to push them so far. Bob:  I wouldn't pick me. [laughter] Tammy:  You should always pick yourself. [laughter] Bob:  That's really exciting. Hoping that you'll get a good run of folks at that talk. It'll be very interesting. What else has been exciting about the conference? I know it's only day two. I believe you were at the Women in Agile. Did you do any of the camp before that, or just the Women in Agile? Wendy:  I actually didn't know about the camp before. Now that I know that they happen... [laughter] Bob:  They don't always happen. Wendy:  I know there's one happening, I believe, in Chicago in October or something like that, I was told. Now I'll be looking into this because it sounds like an interesting place to share ideas, get some new thoughts about how to do some things. Improve the toolkit. Tammy:  I'm really enjoying the Audacious Salons. Bob:  Good. Tammy:  Really enjoying them, a lot. [laughs] Bob:  Were you there yesterday? Tammy:  I was there for the leadership one, Agile Leadership. Today is The Next Big Idea. Wendy:  We did hear the afternoon session was quite interesting. Quite charged. Tammy:  I missed that. [laughs] Bob:  George said they went hours over the slot. I know Lisa and George very well. George has been on the podcast many, many times. [laughter] Wendy:  We are in good company. [laughter] Bob:  We have the "Tips and Advice" series on Agile Toolkit Podcast. How was the Women in Agile event? I know you met Amanda there, my colleague. Wendy:  Yes. Bob:  Big Pete was there. I don't know if you met him? Wendy:  I did not meet Pete. Did you meet Pete? Tammy:  No. Wendy:  Women in Agile, I enjoyed it. I like meeting people. I like meeting all kinds... Bob:  You seem very shy. [laughter] Wendy:  Believe it or not. [laughs] Tammy:  She's the connector. She knows people, and she's like, "Hey, you guys should know each other." [laughs] Wendy:  I do. I make sure everybody meets each other. I liked hearing people's stories about where they were in their Agile journey. The table I was at was a table that had no question to answer. We got to make up our own question that we wanted to answer, which was nice. We had a couple of folks at the table that weren't very far in their journey at all, and wanted to understand, what's the benefit of Agile over Waterfall? Those types of things. It was really very enjoyable to hear their perspectives on where they are and to try to share where I've been and where my enterprise is. It was a good event. I really loved hearing the new voices. There were two speakers that came in. They were reasonably new speakers. They had such wonderful stories. Tammy:  They were really great. The two new speakers, the new voices, that was a great element to that conference piece of it, is having these new people get up and speak. Bob:  Do you remember who they were? I wasn't there. No? Tammy:  I talked to them last night. Bob:  [laughs] They're super new voices. Real super nice people as well. [laughs] Wendy:  Their story was really great. Tammy:  Their stories were amazing. The things that they went through and now the places they've been, it's inspiring. I wish them all the best of luck and hope to get to do some of the...they've gone internationally and spoken, and that just sounds really cool and really fun. Just listening to how they did that was neat. Bob:  There's a decent conference ‑‑ Agile India is quite good. The European conferences, I've not actually gone to those either. I'm looking forward to going internationally. Wendy:  Maybe we should all go. Tammy:  Yeah, let's go. [laughter] Tammy:  What time does the plane leave? [laughs] Wendy:  Let's do it. Bob:  It's a red‑eye. [laughter] Tammy:  That's what she's on tomorrow. Wendy:  Yeah, I've got to take a red‑eye back. Bob:  I'm sorry to hear that. I can't do it. I'm staying till Friday morning. Tammy:  I'm staying the weekend. I wanted to get a couple extra days in just to enjoy the beautiful weather. Bob:  The farmer's markets are actually fantastic if you like that sort of thing. Tammy:  Absolutely. Bob:  We had the Scrum gathering out here. I had my favorite breakfast ever, which was a sea urchin shell that had been cleaned out with micro‑greens, tuna pokÈ, more micro‑greens, and then the sea urchin laid out. Tammy:  That is a very specific breakfast. Bob:  Yeah. [laughter] Tammy:  It's not waffles. Bob:  It's not waffles. I had an iced coffee with it so that made it breakfast. Tammy:  She wants waffles. Wendy:  I'm obsessed with waffles right now. Tammy:  She is, yes. Bob:  I don't know that they make sea urchin waffles, but they might someplace. Wendy:  I'm not sure that they should. [laughter] Wendy:  Just saying. Bob:  They should. Wendy:  You do? Bob:  Maybe a keto egg waffle with some sea urchin on would be good. What else are you looking forward to at this conference? Wendy:  Speaking. [laughs] [crosstalk] Wendy:  Actually getting through that. [laughs] Yes, the speaking would be a number high on the list. Honestly, I'm just looking for new ideas. I'm focusing more into the product space, the talks that are going on. I'm looking for some of those new things that I can take back. In my role, I am the product owner coach and I focus on the business side of things. I look for new tools I can use with them to help them understand why to do some of the things that we do, or just ways that they can do it better. Bob:  The product discovery space, it takes almost a completely different tool set. The mechanics are relatively straightforward, but it is the divergent thinking. How do we winnow down these many ideas? How do we get it into that convergent process? Agile is a delivery process and it's a convergent one. I love that interplay of when you can get it going. A little bit of experimentation, divergent thinking. Let's build it, test it. Let's get some data out. Let's have that drive our next set off experiments or experiences. I'm assuming you've looked at Business Model Canvas and stuff. Wendy:  Yep. [laughs] Tammy:  Yep. Bob:  Impact mapping. Wendy:  Yep. [laughter] Tammy:  It's all good. When I approach the coaching of product owners, I don't just dump, "Here. Here's all the tools. Try all of this at once." I layer it in, where, "Hey, I'm having a real problem with trying to figure out how to prioritize. Hey, I'm having a real problem deciding what should be our far‑afield thing? Where should we be heading towards? How do I lay it out for my stakeholders?" Things that people are probably listening to this and saying, "Well, duh." When you're new you don't know about this stuff. You can't overwhelm. Trying to find new tools that make it easier to embrace it and understand it, and may play on things they've done before, that's the things I look for to help them out. Bob:  I'm sorry, you were... Wendy:  No, go ahead. [laughs] Bob:  Do you guys have user experience embedded in with your product teams or are they a separate agency kind of model, or a little bit of both? Wendy:  A little bit of both. I'll say a little bit of both. Bob:  That's great. Tammy:  I was just going to say that I really like the Audacious Salon stuff because it's talking about a lot of the things we've already talked about in a new way or in a new light. I appreciate that. For me, working with the teams that I'm working with, I think they have been inundated with Agile and Scrum. How do we talk about it in a way that they can hear it, and not that stance of, "This is the only way." Bob:  I've always thought that was a ridiculous notion that Agile was a thing to concentrate on. It's a tool. Toyota Production System wouldn't have rested on a single process for very long without changing itself. [laughs] It's a means to great product outcomes. Tammy:  I try to break it down for them as much as possible. Obviously, we care about the frameworks that we're using, but I try to break it down into simple questions. Answer these simple questions and that will help you get to that thing you're trying to produce, your vision. That'll help you develop that vision. That'll help you develop that, "what's the next big thing?" I look for trying to, using Agile principles, break it down as small as possible to help them break through. Bob:  Thank you very much. I really appreciate you guys coming in and chatting. I hope you have a great talk. Wendy:  Thank you for asking us on the show. Tammy:  Thank you. Bob:  Although I think it's right at the same time as mine. Wendy:  It is exactly the same time. [laughs] Bob:  I hope it is not terribly well‑attended. [laughter] Tammy:  Wow, I was going to say I hope you have a full house. [laughter] Bob:  Thank you. Me, too. [laughs] No, I'm sure there are so many folks. We've got 2,300 people at this conference. We're both going to have the right...whoever shows are the right people. Wendy:  Are the right people. Tammy:  Exactly. Bob:  It's open space principle. Tammy:  Thanks for inviting us. Bob:  Yeah, no problem. Wendy:  Thank you very much. Bob:  The Agile Toolkit Podcast is brought to you by Lithespeed. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's show. If you'd like to give feedback or be on the show, you can ping me on Twitter. I am @AgileToolkit. You can also reach me at bob.payne@lithespeed.com. For more free resources, transcripts of the show, and information about our services, head over to lithespeed.com. Thanks for listening. [music]

In this episode, we talk about the RV accessory that we probably complain about the most but also depend upon to get where we are going - the GPS navigation system. We talk to a top government GPS expert this week who explains how GPS works; how accurate and reliable it is, or isn't; what system – the one in the dashboard or the one on your smartphone or tablet - is most accurate and what to do when it is not accurate. Also some spring cleaning ideas for your traveling tech, a great off the beaten path report from New Mexico, RV tips and your questions. Click the player below to Listen Now or scroll down through the show note details. When you see a time code hyperlink, you can click it to jump directly to that segment of the podcast. [spp-player] Show Notes for Episode #185 March 28, 2018 of Roadtreking - The RV Podcast: WHAT MIKE AND JENNIFER ARE UP TO THIS WEEK [spp-timestamp time="2:05"] Happy Easter everyone!  It's Spring Break and Easter Vacation time for much of North America this week and campgrounds are experiencing their first major rush of the 2018 camping season. We're in Florida at our Emerald Coast Location on the Gulf of Mexico again after a great visit last week to Texas. And the first of two videos we did on that trip will go live tomorrow – Thursday April 29 – on our RV Lifestyle Channel on YouTube. It's about our trip to Waco and all the fun we had there. Two of our three kids and five of our eight grandkids will be joining us over the weekend here at the beach to celebrate Easter so we're looking forward to some fun family time. Then we hit the road again for what promises to be perhaps our busiest travel season ever. Though we've been busy all year so far. In fact we travel somewhere in our RV every month. Now…here are the top RV related stories that have interested us this week…. Rangers at Arizona's Saguaro National Park using microchips to thwart thieves  So many people are taking home a piece of Arizona's Saguaro National Park's famous saguaro cactus that rangers have started the unusual practice of micro chipping them. Yes, you read that right. Microchips are being inserted into the iconic plant that can grow up to 40 feet tall and live 200 years because selling them has become a lucrative market that is hurting the national park. Ohio buys 60,000 acres to develop new park, complete with camping We always like seeing stories about new state parks. Ohio announced its plans to buy 60,000 acres of privately owned land in the southeastern part of the state and turn it into the Jesse Owens State Park and Wildlife Area, complete with camping. The rolling hills and lake-specked land is owned by American Electric Power and was once mined for coal. In recent years the electric company allowed public use of the land, and a recent story we will link to in the shownotes presents an interesting picture of how one state is trying to preserve undeveloped land for future generations. Night sky educational programs to get even better at national parks Enjoy viewing the night sky in the nation's national parks? Your experience may be even a bit better this summer. The University of Texas-Austin's McDonald Observatory is creating a training program for park rangers to help them develop better night sky experiences for visitors. This portion of the Podcast is brought to you by Campers Inn, the RVer's trusted resource for over 50 years, the nation's largest family-operated RV dealership with 19 locations and growing JENNIFER'S TIP OF THE WEEK: An easy way to make eggs right every time [spp-timestamp time="13:00"] Kristi Gilson and her Egg Central Egg Cooker by Quisinart In this week's tip, we meet Kristi Gilson, a new RVer, who recently showed us a gizmo she travels with in her RV that makes a perfect egg breakfast every time. The device Kristi showed us is called the Egg Central Egg Cooker by Quisinart. You use distilled water and it quickly cooks eggs just about any way you want from omelets to h...

The Philanthropy Episode – A Holiday Double Feature A CEO’s Virtual Mentor® Episode 14 Holiday greetings from The Leadership Lyceum!  Welcome to our 14th episode of the podcast. ‘Tis the season of giving and we give you our holiday gift in the form of this holiday special double episode on Philanthropy.  We’ll cover the subject from a few different angles. First. from the perspective of the giver – with our first guest, University of Chicago benefactor Bernard DelGiorno.  Bernie also advises his clients on charitable giving in his role in private wealth management at UBS. Next, from the angle of the recipient.  We’ll glean the perspectives of Jennifer Sampson, CEO of The United Way of Metropolitan Dallas.  Jennifer led a remarkable turnaround in Dallas and has led the development of programs that fund impactful and innovative social entrepreneurship.  Finally, we introduce you to a group of public company CEO’s in Ohio that are leveraging their musical talents to raise money for charities in Ohio.  Two of the CEOs that we feature have the ultra-cool distinction of being board members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  We feature the music of the CEO band, Power Chords throughout the music interludes in the program.  Segment I: Bernard DelGiorno, University of Chicago benefactor Segment II: Jennifer Sampson, CEO of the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas Segment III: The Ohio CEO band for charity - The Power Chords.  Perhaps it is not widely known that there is a group of several CEOs in Ohio have given their musical talent and time to charitable fundraising events.  One band that raises money for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame includes three of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board members: Drums: Nick Akins, CEO of utility AEP in Columbus; Guitars, vocals and keyboards: George Barrett, CEO of Cardinal Health; Guitars: Dr. Michael Drake, President of The Ohio State University and; Bass: Greg Harris, President of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Another band, The Power Chords, includes Akins and Barrett, plus multi-instrument virtuoso and vocalist Joe Hamrock, the CEO of utility NiSource.  Segment III is my coverage of The Power Chords at their Thursday, September 28th evening gig fundraiser for the Mid-Ohio Foodbank in Grove City, Ohio, outside Columbus. Conclusion  We hope you enjoyed this holiday season episode of A CEO’s Virtual Mentor and the fitting subject of Philanthropy from its many different angles.  It’s clear across all of these segments the devotion of our guests to something larger than themselves.  Famous Last Words We close our episode in Lyceum tradition with Famous Last Words.  It’s December 24, 1941.  Christmas Eve.  Just 17 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt lights the White House Christmas tree and is joined in this, his 9th ceremonial act (pre-presidential term-limits) by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was in Washington for the Arcadia Conference, the first wartime conference between these two close allies since the US entrance into World War II just 16 days prior on December 8th. Try as I might to edit this down for our 21st Century attention spans and our improved discourse efficiency at between 140 to 280 characters, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, I lacked the courage to cut.  Use a bookmark, because it’s well worth a listen.  On this day, 76 years ago, two of the 20th century’s most monumental figures took the stage with two purposes.  On the surface, they took to the microphone to announce the lighting of a tree.  But in their soaring speeches, they made clear the principles for which they had now committed both of their nations.  The overtones and undertones are thought-provoking and revealing for our current state of sensibility.  Warm wishes for the holidays and for your resolve for the New Year. Thanks for joining us.  We can’t improve without your feedback – write us through our website www.LeadershipLyceum.com and subscribe on iTunes.  See you next time. Program Guide Episode 14 The Philanthropy Episode   0:19        Introduction 0:29        Introduction to specific programming in this Episode 14 2:38        Segment I: Bernard DelGiorno, University of Chicago Benefactor 23:05      Segment II: Jennifer Sampson, CEO of The United Way of Metropolitan Dallas 53:20      Segment III: The Power Chords, Benefit Concert 54:18      Nick Akins CEO of AEP 57:19      Matt Habash, CEO of Mid-Ohio Foodbank 1:04:26   Nick Akins CEO of AEP 1:08:03   George Barrett, CEO of Cardinal Health 1:12:12   Joe Hamrock CEO of NiSource 1:13:04   Nick Akins CEO of AEP & Joe Hamrock CEO of NiSource 1:22:42   Conclusion and Famous Last Words with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (Christmas 1941).    Informative and Helpful Links  Our Sponsor – TransparentCareer https://www.transparentcareer.com   Board Game: Tesla vs Edison War of Currents To ensure pre-Christmas arrival, order your game now through Amazon at www.artana.com/store   Segment I – The Benefactor – Mr. Bernard DelGiorno Article on University of Chicago Alumni Service Medal Award Recipient: http://www.kintera.org/site/c.fnKDIQNsEkG/b.5179039/k.9C22/Bernard_DelGiorno.htm   Segment II – The Recipient – Jennifer Sampson, CEO of the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas https://unitedwaydallas.org/   Segment III – Giving Charitable Talents – Ohio's Rock and Roll CEOs The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame CEO Band: http://www.shadowboxlive.org/shows/are-you-ready-to-rock The Power Chords: https://aepretirees.com/2012/10/08/harvest-palooza-raises-50000-to-fight-hunger/ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: https://www.rockhall.com   Famous Last Words Historical Background on the Darkest Days of World War II – 17 days after Pearl Harbor – FDR and Churchill Together in Washington Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/darkest-days-world-war-ii-winston-churchills-visit-white-house-brought-hope-washington-180961798/   The Full Audio of FDR and Churchill’s Speeches on December 24th 1941 Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony in Washington https://archive.org/details/PresidentFranklinRoosevelt411224WhiteHouseChristmasTreeCeremony   Biographies of Guests    Mr. Bernard DelGiorno Donor profile from the University of Chicago Alumni & Friends online community: http://www.kintera.org/site/c.fnKDIQNsEkG/b.5179039/k.9C22/Bernard_DelGiorno.htm   Ms. Jennifer Sampson Ms. Jennifer Sampson has been Chief Executive Officer and President of United Way of Metropolitan Dallas since September 13, 2011. Ms. Sampson served as an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas Inc. since 2004. Ms. Sampson serves as a Member of Customer Advisory Board at Atmos Energy Corp.   Mr. Nick Akins Nick Akins is chairman, president and chief executive officer of American Electric Power. He is AEP’s 11th chairman, 10th president and sixth CEO in the company’s more than 100-year history. He is a member of AEP’s board of directors and is the only management representative on the board. Akins rose through the ranks at both AEP and the former Central and South West Corp. (CSW), which merged with AEP in 2000. Akins began his career in 1982 as an electrical engineer before moving up to positions of increasing responsibility. Prior to being elected president of AEP in December 2010, he served as executive vice president - Generation from 2006 through 2010 with responsibility for all generation activities of AEP’s approximately 38,000 MW of generation resources. Previously, he served as president and chief operating officer for Southwestern Electric Power Company, and held other leadership roles in Energy Marketing Services, Transmission, External Affairs and Industry Restructuring. A native of Louisiana, Akins received his bachelor’s degree in 1982 in electric engineering from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston and a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1986 from Louisiana Tech. Additional training includes executive management programs at Louisiana State University, the University of Idaho and the Reactor Technology Course for Utility Executives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a registered professional engineer in Texas. Akins is a former chairman of the Board of Directors of both the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and currently serves on both boards. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Roundtable (BRT) and was appointed chair of the BRT's Energy and Environment Committee. Additionally, he is a member of the boards of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), Global Sustainable Electricity Partnership (GSEP), The Columbus Partnership, Columbus Downtown Development Corporation, Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited (NEIL), Fifth Third Bancorp, OhioHealth and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Akins and his wife, Donna, live in Dublin, Ohio. They have two adult sons.   Matt Habash, CEO of Mid-Ohio Foodbank Matt Habash became executive director of Mid-Ohio Foodbank in 1984.  Prior to that, Matt was with the St. Stephen’s Community House, first as a youth worker and then as the assistant to the executive director.  Matt also was a member of Columbus City Council from 1993 to 2006, serving as Council President from 1999 to 2006. As Council President, Matt governed with civility and humanity.  Co-Chair with Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman, Matt led the 21st Century Growth initiative, a plan designed to balance job creation with sustainable neighborhood development.  Other efforts spearheaded by Matt in his role as Council President was the 315 Research Corridor, the City’s Indoor Clean Air Act and the City’s Bike Path Plan.  He holds a Masters of Business Administration from Xavier University, a Masters of Public Policy from The Ohio State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Xavier University. Matt takes an active leadership role in the community, having served on numerous boards and has received numerous awards, recognizing his commitment and work in serving those most vulnerable.   Mr. Joe Hamrock Joe Hamrock serves as NiSource President and Chief Executive Officer. He has been in this role since July 1, 2015, and is also a member of the NiSource Board of Directors. Joe previously served as Executive Vice President and Group CEO for NiSource's Gas Distribution segment, which included local gas distribution companies in Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In that role, he was responsible for all financial, operational, regulatory and commercial performance at NiSource's gas distribution operations. In coordination with leadership teams across each of these areas, he focused on driving the company's long-term growth plan, premised on executing a steady stream of infrastructure improvements and growth investments, synchronized with complementary regulatory and customer program initiatives. Joe joined NiSource in May 2012 after serving in a variety of senior executive positions with American Electric Power (AEP), including President and Chief Operating Officer of AEP Ohio, and roles in engineering, transmission and distribution operations, customer service, marketing and information technology. He began his energy industry career as an electrical engineer in transmission and distribution planning at AEP in Steubenville, Ohio. He went on to work in commercial and industrial customer services, and held leadership roles in commercial marketing and customer services, strategic development and other executive roles. Prior to becoming President of AEP Ohio, Joe was Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer in AEP's Shared Services organization from 2003-2007, and from 2002 to 2003 was Senior Vice President - General Services. Joe serves on the boards of the American Gas Association, Columbus Downtown Development Corp., the Columbus Partnership, the Greater Columbus Sports Commission and OhioHealth. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Youngstown State University and a master's degree in business administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Sloan fellow.   Mr. George Barrett George S. Barrett is chairman and chief executive officer of Cardinal Health, a company ranked among the top 25 on the Fortune 500 and dedicated to improving the cost-effectiveness of health care. Barrett has refocused Cardinal Health on its essential role in supporting hospitals, pharmacies and alternative sites of care in their efforts to improve the quality and safety of patient care, while reducing costs and improving efficiency.  The tagline – Essential to care – embodies the company’s strategy and the culture of the organization. Barrett has been chairman and CEO of Cardinal Health since 2009.  He joined the company in 2008 as vice chairman and CEO of the company’s Healthcare Supply Chain Services. From 2005 to end-2007, Barrett served as president and CEO of North America for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.  During 2007, he also served as corporate executive vice president for Global Pharmaceutical Markets.  He held the position of president of Teva USA from 1999 to end-2004. Prior to joining Teva, Barrett held various positions with Alpharma Inc., serving as president of US Pharmaceuticals from 1994 to 1997, and president of NMC Laboratories, prior to its acquisition by Alpharma in 1990.  Barrett serves on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the board of trustees of the Corporation of Brown University. He is a member of the Healthcare Leadership Council and The Conference Board. He is also a member of the Business Roundtable, The Business Council and The Columbus Partnership. Barrett also serves on the board of directors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Barrett earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University and a Master of Business Administration from New York University.  He also holds an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Long Island University’s Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.   Subscribe to the podcast at iTunes: https://t.co/a70rtSiQnW or SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/thomas-linquist Follow Leadership Lyceum on:          Our website: www.LeadershipLyceum.com          LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-linquist-682997          Twitter: @LeaderLyceum https://twitter.com/LeaderLyceum          Email us: info@LeadershipLyceum.com Please subscribe to the Leadership Lyceum: A CEO’s Virtual Mentor® at iTunes which will enable future content to come to you automatically.  Rate us and spread the word among your fellow executives and board colleagues.  Your host Thomas B. Linquist is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lyceum Leadership Consulting and Lyceum Leadership Productions. Over his 15 years in management and leadership consulting he has served a wide array of industrial clients.  This includes leadership assessment and search for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, chief operating officers and boards of directors.  He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and over his 25-year career has served in a variety of roles: as an engineer with Shell Oil Company, a banker with ABN AMRO Bank, and as treasurer was the youngest corporate officer in the 150+ year history at Peoples Energy Company in Chicago.  He is an expert on hiring and promotion decisions and leadership development.  Over the course of his search career, he has interviewed thousands of leaders.  Please subscribe to the Leadership Lyceum: A CEO’s Virtual Mentor® in the podcast section at iTunes which will enable future content to come to you automatically. Rate us and spread the word among your fellow executives and board colleagues.  Program Disclaimer The only purpose of the podcast is to educate, inform and entertain. The information shared is based on the collection of experiences of each of the guests interviewed and should not be considered or substituted for professional advice. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions, and neither The Leadership Lyceum LLC nor any company providing financial support endorses or opposes any particular content, recommendation or methodology discussed in this podcast. This podcast Leadership Lyceum: A CEO’s Virtual Mentor® has been a production of The Leadership Lyceum LLC. Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.

Dennis Gartman, editor and publisher of the Gartman Letter, says there won't be any gasoline from the Colonial pipelines for the next several weeks. Prior to that, Nicholas Akins, CEO of American Electric Power, says it's critical to get electrical power back up at chemical facilities in Houston. Finally, Michael Brown, an economist at Wells Fargo, says he expects Democrats to support a clean debt-ceiling bill. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Dennis Gartman, editor and publisher of the Gartman Letter, says there won't be any gasoline from the Colonial pipelines for the next several weeks. Prior to that, Nicholas Akins, CEO of American Electric Power, says it's critical to get electrical power back up at chemical facilities in Houston. Finally, Michael Brown, an economist at Wells Fargo, says he expects Democrats to support a clean debt-ceiling bill.

Special Podcast Episode 10 “The Electric Utility Industry’s Golden Age of Innovation: Now” Innovation Interviews with Eight CEOs After a bit of a hiatus, we are back.  I can assure we have been busy on your behalf in the interim.  We are delighted to announce that we formed two companies under Leadership Lyceum’s brand: Lyceum Leadership Consulting which provides executive and board of director’s search, board effectiveness review, and an array of services for successor development and board-readiness.  And Lyceum Leadership Productions which brings you this podcast.  We will be expanding the programming of the episodes this summer so please subscribe through iTunes and give us feedback.  Tell us about leadership situations that you are interested in us exploring.  Please visit our website www.LeadershipLyceum.com for all of our archived media and offerings.  Welcome to this Special Episode of the Leadership Lyceum: A CEO’s Virtual Mentor focused on innovation in an industry that many of us take for granted.  We take an in-depth look at innovation in the electric utility industry.  It’s the Leadership Lyceum’s opening act to Edison Electric Institute’s annual industry convention that starts this weekend, June 11th in Boston. In this Episode, we take a look back at last year’s convention in Chicago, where we conducted 10 interviews that included 8 CEOs from the electric industry covering all points along the electricity value chain from generation to transmission to distribution to the customer meter and beyond.  We also have the perspective of a President of a venture capital-backed, technology provider to the industry; as well as the critical viewpoints of the regulator -- with the President of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (or NARUC).  By way of context for our broad listenership, Edison Electric Institute (or EEI), is the association that represents all U.S. investor-owned electric companies. EEI provides public policy leadership, strategic business intelligence, and essential conferences and forums for the industry.   As a bit of an appeal to our broad listenership --- why should you care about this industry?  Well its impact and influence is far-reaching and profound.  The member companies of EEI provide electricity for 220 million Americans, operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia --- and directly and indirectly employ more than one million workers.  Our esteemed guests are all listed on the back of the album cover and on our website with links to their bios.  As a reminder, we conducted these interviews in June of 2016.  Our guests are as follows: Nick Akins, CEO of AEP in Columbus, OH; at the time, the outgoing Chairman of EEI. https://www.aep.com/about/leadership/profile.aspx?id=Akins Tom Fanning, CEO of Southern Company in Atlanta; at the time, the incoming Chairman of EEI. http://www.southerncompany.com/about-us/leadership/ceo.html Warner Baxter, CEO of Ameren Corporation in St Louis. https://www.ameren.com/about/warner-baxter Pedro Pizarro, CEO of Edison International; at the time, the President of Edison subsidiary Southern California Edison. https://www.edison.com/home/investors/corporate-governance/meet-our-board-of-directors/pedro-j-pizarro.html Jim Piro, CEO of Portland General Electric in Portland, OR http://investors.portlandgeneral.com/management.cfm Ralph Izzo, CEO of PSEG, in Newark, NJ; https://www.pseg.com/family/leadership/ceo.jsp Steve Berberich, CEO of California ISO; the ISO is one of the world’s largest transmission organizations, managing the electric grid and wholesale power markets for 30 million Californians. https://www.caiso.com/about/Pages/OurLeadership/StephenBerberich.aspx Tony Earley, Executive Chair of the Board of PG&E Corporation in San Francisco; at the time, was Chairman, CEO and President of PG&E http://www.pgecorp.com/aboutus/our_team/TEarley.shtml Alex Laskey, Co-Founder and President of Opower; Alex sold his company to Oracle while we were at the convention in June 2016 https://www.ted.com/speakers/alex_laskey Travis Kavulla, Commissioner, Montana Public Service Commission; and at the time, was serving a term as President of National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (or NARUC) http://psc.mt.gov/commissioners/District1/  Just prior to our interviews last year, Neil Irwin, senior economics correspondent for The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/by/neil-irwin) gave us inspiration in his walk down the memory lane of innovation in his May 15, 2016 “The Upshot” column titled “Tracking Down the Golden Age of Innovation”.    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/upshot/what-was-the-greatest-era-for-american-innovation-a-brief-guided-tour.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share Twitter: https://twitter.com/Neil_Irwin He posited in that article that a better way to understand the significance of technological change may be to come as close as we can to actually walking through those time periods, from the end of the Civil War to present, and understand the way we lived, ate, traveled and clothed and entertained ourselves.  Through our conversation with these industry leaders, we will attempt to walk you through our current age of innovation in the electric power industry.   Segment 1: Opening Statements – The Structure of the Industry. Travis Kavulla, President of NARUC and Commissioner of the Montana PSC. Steve Berberich, CEO of California ISO, managing the transmission grid across the state of California. Tony Earley, CEO of PG&E in San Francisco. Ralph Izzo, CEO of PSEG in Newark. Nick Akins, CEO of AEP in Columbus Steve Berberich, CEO of California ISO    Segment 2: Interoperability, Data, and the Customer Steve Berberich, CEO of California ISO He expounds on the subject of interoperability of complex components of the electricity value chain. Nick Akins, CEO of AEP in Columbus Nick transitions into how technology has enabled customer relationships. Advanced Metering triggered proximity to the customer.  Tony Earley, CEO of PG&E in San Francisco. Alex Laskey, President of Opower Pedro Pizarro, CEO of Edison International   Segment 3: Boundary Conditions and how utilities are defining the boundaries of their service.  Warner Baxter, CEO of Ameren in St Louis Pedro Pizarro, CEO of Edison International Steve Berberich, CEO of California ISO Travis Kavulla, President of NARUC and Commissioner of the Montana PSC. Nick Akins, CEO of AEP in Columbus Ralph Izzo, CEO of PSEG in Newark. Tom Fanning, CEO of Southern Company in Atlanta Tony Earley, CEO of PG&E in San Francisco.   Segment 4: Collaboration with Disruptors and how utilities are partnering with the technologists on innovation and solutions. Warner Baxter, CEO of Ameren in St Louis Jim Piro, CEO of Portland General Electric   Segment 5: Regulatory Barriers and Enablers to innovation. Travis Kavulla, President of NARUC and Commissioner of the Montana PSC. Pedro Pizarro, CEO of Edison International Alex Laskey, President of Opower   Segment 6: Are We Pushing Hard Enough to Innovate? Travis Kavulla, President of NARUC and Commissioner of the Montana PSC. Nick Akins, CEO of AEP in Columbus Jim Piro, CEO of Portland General Electric Tom Fanning, CEO of Southern Company in Atlanta   Segment 7: Parting Thoughts and Advice to Stakeholders.  It’s fitting that our three guests with the parting words are those who have transitioned since my interview with them last year.  One through sale of company, one through executive retirement, and the other through expiration of term of service.  Tony Earley, CEO of PG&E in San Francisco - who has now turned the leadership of PG&E over to his successor Geisha Williams. Alex Laskey, President of Opower Travis Kavulla, President of NARUC and Commissioner of the Montana PSC in the anchor position with advice on the posture and approach of stakeholders to foster innovation from the regulatory point of view.   Our Parting Thoughts I can’t think of a more fitting way to close this retrospective than drawing from the opening of Neil Irwin’s NYT article that I mentioned at the outset of this episode.  Are you a skeptical economist who believes that we’re in a depressing era in which innovation has slowed and living standards are barely rising?  Or are you a techno-optimist who believes that that our era, in which digital technology is transforming the underpinnings of human existence, is the golden age of innovation?   Thanks for joining us.  We can’t improve without your feedback – write us through our website www.LeadershipLyceum.com and subscribe on iTunes.  See you next time.    Informative and Helpful Links Edison Electric Institute (EEI): http://www.eei.org/ Ameren Corporation: https://www.ameren.com/ American Electric Power: https://www.aep.com/ California ISO: http://www.caiso.com/ Edison International: http://www.edison.com/ Pacific Gas & Electric: https://www.pge.com/ Portland General Electric: https://www.portlandgeneral.com/ Public Service Enterprise Group: https://www.pseg.com/ Southern Company: http://www.southerncompany.com/ Oracle and Opower: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/opower/index.html Montana PSC: http://psc.mt.gov/ National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC): https://www.naruc.org/ New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/by/neil-irwin    Program Guide: Special Episode 10 “The Electric Utility Industry’s Golden Age of Innovation: Now” Innovation Interviews with Eight CEOs   0:30     Introduction to the Lyceum Leadership Consulting and Lyceum Leadership Productions 1:15     Introduction to “Innovation in the Electric Industry” through 10 interviews including 8 CEOs  4:05     Segment 1: Opening Statements – The Structure of the Industry 11:43   Break 1 11:57   Segment 2: Interoperability, Data, and the Customer 26:02   Break 2 26:24   Segment 3: Boundary Conditions - how utilities are defining the boundaries of their service.  36:50   Break 3 37:03   Segment 4: Collaboration with Disruptors 39:32   Break 4 39:49   Segment 5: Regulatory Barriers and Enablers 45:16   Break 5 45:31   Segment 6: Are We Pushing Hard Enough to Innovate? 51:12   Break 6 51:34   Segment 7: Parting Thoughts and Advice to Stakeholders 57:04   Lyceum’s Parting Thoughts 57:37   End of Episode     Subscribe to the Podcast at: iTunes or SoundCloud Follow Leadership Lyceum on: www.LeadershipLyceum.com LinkedIn Twitter Instagram Facebook   Email us: info@LeadershipLyceum.com Please subscribe to the Leadership Lyceum at iTunes which will enable future content to come to you automatically.  Rate us and spread the word among your fellow executives and board colleagues.    Your host Thomas B. Linquist is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lyceum Leadership Consulting and Lyceum Leadership Productions. Over his 15 years in management and leadership consulting he has served a wide array of industrial clients.  This includes leadership assessment and search for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, chief operating officers and boards of directors.  He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and over his 25-year career has served in a variety of roles: as an engineer with Shell Oil Company, a banker with ABN AMRO Bank, and as treasurer was the youngest corporate officer in the 150+ year history at Peoples Energy Company in Chicago.  He is an expert on hiring and promotion decisions and leadership development.  Over the course of his search career, he has interviewed thousands of leaders.  Please subscribe to the Leadership Lyceum in the podcast section at iTunes which will enable future content to come to you automatically. Rate us and spread the word among your fellow executives and board colleagues. Copyright 2017 by The Leadership Lyceum LLC

At a recent press conference on the new US budget questions were asked about funding for climate change initiatives. The answer was stark. “We're not spending money on that anymore,” reporters were told, they're a “waste of your money”. The new administration is sceptical about man-made climate change. Most of the world's scientists and governments, however, are not. The Paris Agreement committed the world to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees over pre-industrial levels. That target looked close to impossible even before the election of Donald Trump. So – our question this week – do we need a ‘plan B'? Scientists have been developing some very ambitious ideas to re-engineer our climate. They have created materials that could suck carbon dioxide out of the air and a scheme to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere. But – if ‘plan A' fails – might any of these last-ditch ideas actually work? (Photo: The smoke stacks at American Electric Power's Mountaineer coal power plant in New Haven, West Virginia. Credit: Getty Images)

Mark Langford  25-years of successful corporate and entrepreneurial experience, Harvard MBA and coaching training.  He decided to transition out of the corporate world and founded C-Synergy, LLC  to help both people to get clear on their purpose and calling, to develop manageable action plans and to connect and operate from their inner wisdom. Alicia Davis with over 20 years of experience in healthcare – specializing in the healing arts, stress reduction, mind/body connection, mindfulness practices, and individual and team wellbeing – Alicia brings a unique approach to health, wellness and balanced living. As a certified Core Energy and Energy Leadership™ coach, she provides coaching to a diverse range of clients including:  Executives in healthcare who want to improve team engagement and employee retention; healthcare staff who want to prevent burnout; service providers who are looking to elevate the quality of client care; and individuals who want to shift from a high-stress to a high-energy lifestyle Annie Gallagher  president of Gallagher Consulting Group. Annie has worked with clients in more than 39 industries to advance missions and achieve profit goals. Organizations such as American Electric Power, Cardinal Health, Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Longwood Gardens, Nationwide Insurance, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers engage Annie and her firm to help develop top level executives and strategies Pamela Yellen financial security expert and New York Times best-selling author of 2 books, including her latest, The Bank On Yourself Revolution: How to Fire Your Banker, Bypass Wall Street and Take Control of Your Own Financial Future. Pamela researched over 450 different financial products and strategies searching for alternatives to the risk and volatility of stocks and real estate

A case in which the Court that held the Clean Air Act bars suits by governmental bodies and private parties seeking to curb emissions from utilities via the federal common law.