Executive Roundtable Discusses Looming Power Sector Changes

If there was one thing that the panelists at Wednesday’s Executive Roundtable at the ELECTRIC POWER 2015 Convention and Exhibition in Rosemont, Ill., agreed on, it was that change—spurred by new regulations, cheap gas, and the spread of distributed generation—is coming to the power sector.

Beyond that, the executives of five highly influential power companies—Dynegy, Duke Energy, NRG Energy, and Exelon Corp.—contended on points concerning the Clean Power Plan’s impact and regional carbon initiatives; the future of rooftop solar; the viability of energy storage; energy efficiency; and what the power landscape will look like in another five to 10 years.

This year’s high-powered panel featured: Joseph Dominguez, senior VP of government/regulatory affairs and public policy at Exelon Corp.; Lee Davis, executive vice president at NRG Energy; B. Keith Trent, president of Duke Energy Midwest and Florida regions; and Robert Flexon, president and CEO at Dynegy. John Shelk, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, moderated the discussion.

Here are snippets of what the industry leaders said. Look for in-depth coverage of the roundtable discussion on powermag.com later this month.

Duke Energy’s Trent on challenges affecting the power sector: We’ve got fairly anemic load growth, especially when you consider historic growth; you’ve got a lot of environmental policy coming at us; we’ve got distributed generation coming, posing challenges and opportunities; we’ve got an aging workforce … and we’ve got evolving customer expectations.

Exelon’s Dominguez on the future of the utility: We talk, a little bit sometimes sloppily, about the utility death spiral but until we envision a world where customers could really economically have all their generation and reliability needs … the utility is going to play a vital role—but it’s a shifting role. That role is going to be more of a platform for the purchase and sale of electricity from the grid.

Dynegy’s Flexon on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other rules: The coal combustion residual rule is a real thing coming at us and we have to make plans for that today. There are also other environmental rules that need our focus today. Our involvement on the Clean Power Plan at this stage is around policy formulation—things like, why don’t carbon credit offsets count? One of our goals is recycling all of our coal ash, which gets used for cement, and … which reduces the carbon in the atmosphere. If the goal is reducing carbon, why doesn’t that offset count?

NRG Energy’s Davis on how the company approaches distributed generation: We want to take distributed generation and make it less of a stranded cost issue and more of an implementation of how you smartly deploy your future costs. On the future of distributed generation: We’ll see where distributed energy goes. Our company wants it to succeed. If it’s on a slow path to nowhere during [the next five to 10 years], you’ll see a lot of turmoil. If we can coordinate with folks like Duke and get something done that’s appreciable, you might start to see the edge of that universe actually pull in towards the center of how things are managed.

(Photo: Panelists from the Executive Roundtable discuss fundamental changes in the power sector. From left to right: Joseph Dominguez, senior VP of government/regulatory affairs and public policy at Exelon Corp.; Lee Davis, executive vice president at NRG Energy; B. Keith Trent, president of Duke Energy Midwest and Florida regions; Robert Flexon, president and CEO at Dynegy; and moderator John Shelk, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association.)