How would you characterize the operating environment you're in right now?

Rudy Garza: In Texas we're seeing astronomical growth. San Antonio is at about a 6-gigawatt peak, and if all the large loads that are possible come here, we could quadruple that. We've got aging plants that need to be retired, new generation to bring online, and transmission constraints to solve, all at the same time. I'd say we're operating in four dimensions: every element of our business is changing, and the ground is also shifting beneath our feet.

Mari McClure: Vermont is one of the few states in the country facing a declining population, which means the cost of fixed infrastructure may not be spread over a growing customer base. Vermont's peak demand is 1 gigawatt, and for the first time in several years we're predicting some load growth — but it's coming from electrification of heating and transportation, not data centers or large industrial loads. Vermonters heat their homes largely with oil or propane, and the adoption of heat pump technology is driving most of our demand.

Meanwhile, New England is being hit with some of the hardest, most extreme storms we've ever seen in the grid's history. Add on top of it an aging infrastructure and you've got a real test of a system that was built over 100 years ago.

How do these local realities affect how you are each thinking about your clean energy goals?

Mari McClure: Vermont has a Renewable Energy Standard that would hold Green Mountain Power and Vermont utilities to 100% renewable by 2030. A Clean Energy Standard may be considered in Vermont that basically brings nuclear back into the conversation. The Renewable Energy Standard relied quite a bit on offshore wind developing at a very fast pace, though it's clear that's not the case.

Rudy Garza: We're number one in solar in Texas, number two in wind, and we've got big plans for battery storage. But we're still in Texas, so natural gas will continue to be the anchor for our generation fleet. With all this astronomical growth, we have to get every megawatt on the system that we can get. We know we have to continue to build dispatchable resources, while wind, solar, and batteries continue to help us meet our needs over the next five to eight years.

Affordability is a word we can't escape right now. What do you wish policymakers understood about what drives costs?

Mari McClure: The framing of reliability versus affordability is a false trade-off. Reliability failures are unaffordable. A more productive conversation has to be framed more around energy burden, not necessarily "my rates are going up." I worry that if we focus only on cost suppression, we won't make the investments that would actually lower costs over time.

For example, we just had a storm hit a part of Vermont where we've done a lot of undergrounding and storm hardening. Without a doubt, we avoided significant outages and costs. But avoided costs are almost impossible to get credit for, because the bad outcome never happened.

Rudy Garza: I went out and bought close to 3.3 GW of generation in the market to replace aging plants I'm trying to retire — at a savings of over $3 billion to our customers over the long term. But people brush it under the rug because they'll never see it. That's the avoided cost problem. We saved our customers billions, and there's no ribbon-cutting for it.

We've also gotten really good at identifying folks who spend more than 6 to 10% of their discretionary income on energy, and we've developed targeted programs around that. I agree with Mari: the focus for affordability really has to be on cost burden.

Does additional load in your service territory actually help you in certain ways?

Rudy Garza: I have 58 large commercial loads in the queue. If half of them show up, it will have major implications. When those loads come onto your system, it starts to tip the scale more towards cost allocation to commercial customers and less to residential customers. Over time, residential customers should be bearing less and less of the burden.

If you could change one aspect of how you're regulated, what would it be?

Mari McClure: Shifting from a cost-of-service regulation model to a more performance-based regulatory model rewarding resilience, long-term grid investment, and innovation. Right now, most structures incentivize capital deployment more than outcomes. A framework where earnings are tied to reduced outages, faster restorations and customer resilience metrics would go a long way in helping utilities get this grid to the next level.

What are you hoping comes out of Washington in the next couple of years — and what worries you?

Rudy Garza: A lot of these data center players can figure out a way around us if they want to. They're highly capitalized, super innovative, and would love nothing better than to route around the old utility guys they think aren't moving fast enough. Policymakers have a role in helping us become as nimble as possible for a 100-plus-year-old industry. We're still operating under the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, when George W. Bush was president. An updated federal energy policy would be a good step in the right direction.