Agenda

Investigate the practical steps utility leaders and finance professionals can take to stay ahead of the evolving financial and regulatory landscape for public utilities. Delve into the upcoming changes to governmental accounting standards, including walking through practical examples of how these changes could affect financial reporting and decision making. Then explore common attributes of fraud and how organizations are preventing and addressing it, including why strong internal controls and proper segregation of duties remain essential. Discuss single audit and regulatory considerations and how control weaknesses can create broader compliance risks. Conclude with a forward looking discussion on funding capital projects, including the role of financial forecasts, key budget to actual controls, and how capital decisions affect rates and your long term financial planning.

Topics: 

• GASB changes on the horizon and what they mean for your financial reports
• Fraud prevention and internal controls for resource-constrained organizations
• What utility finance pros should know about regulatory changes and compliance
• Financial planning and sustainable options for funding capital projects

Build core literacy in the concepts surrounding risk and critical infrastructure and learn about the frameworks and assessment tools that can help your utility prioritize and manage risks surrounding your assets. Begin with an introduction to the fundamental components of risk — threats, vulnerabilities, consequences, and likelihood — and then explore how structured frameworks can support clearer decision-making across your organization’s leadership. Designed for professionals who need a grounded, shared understanding of strategic risk and the emerging challenges utilities face in managing it. Walk through how to conduct qualitative and quantitative approaches to risk analysis, including developing risk registers and interpreting risk analyses with confidence.

Topics:

• Elements of risk and risk management 
• Developing effective, structured risk scenarios
• Using frameworks to understand and prioritize risk
• Approaches for assessing and analyzing risk
• Challenges for utilities in risk management

Imagine planning a trip without choosing a destination, mapping an itinerary, or knowing who you’ll travel with. Many of us approach our careers this way — hoping things will work out without ever taking the wheel. This is your invitation to stop wandering and start steering — not just for yourself, but for the teams you lead and influence. Learn how to begin to take ownership of your career and professional development, while also learning how to cultivate accountability, foster a growth mindset, and empower others on your team. First, reflect on your values, uncover your strengths, and learn tools to help you create a personalized roadmap for growth. Then explore how to effectively encourage your team to adopt a growth mindset, take accountability, and create a team development action plan. Whether you're just starting out or looking to reignite your path, stop waiting for someone else to lead and start practicing how to guide your own journey toward a fulfilling career and culture of results.

Topics: 

• Leading yourself: build clarity, confidence, and direction in your leadership brand
• Identifying stealth development opportunities and accelerating career momentum
• How to foster a culture of accountability and results within your team
• Developing a growth mindset and empowering others through coaching, feedback, and recognition
• How to create a team development action plan aligned with your leadership values and organizational goals

Join this unique opportunity to practice cyber response in a safe yet highly realistic setting, gaining practical insight into how attacks develop, how defenses are tested, and how teams can respond effectively under pressure. This immersive, hands on exercise from the University of Texas at San Antonio brings you into a simulated, corporate grade digital environment where cyber incidents unfold in real time. Attendees will work individually or in group to detect, identify, and mitigate cyberattacks across tailored scenarios using industry standard security tools. The Cyber Range is a nationally recognized exercise designed to mirror the complexity, pressure, and decision making challenges utilities face during actual incidents — strengthening both your technical skills and readiness for cyber defense. A truly experiential learning opportunity, this session lets you practice responding to a cyberattack before it happens on the job.

Rapid, concentrated demand growth from data centers, advanced manufacturing, and other super sized electric loads have the potential to bring major economic development opportunities, but come paired with complex challenges around service needs, infrastructure investment, procurement, and more. How public power providers structure rates and policies determines both whether your community attracts this growth and to what extent existing customers see effects. Explore what high load factor customers need from the grid and how utilities can translate those needs into thoughtful, defensible rate structures, line extension policies, and contracts. Discuss strategies for balancing opportunity and risk, and considerations for contracts such as firm vs. non firm service, cost recovery mechanisms, and market structures. Examine what other utilities are doing to design competitive offerings that support modern load growth and sustain affordability.

Topics: 

• Industries driving load growth and their energy requirements
• Considerations for economic development
• Rate design strategies for large loads – and the effect on other customers
• Trends in utility policies and rate structures
• Developing contracts that support the community and the large customer

Over the last decade, there has been a push to establish OT asset visibility. But what if this focus is leading us the wrong way? What exactly are we trying to accomplish and why?

This session will touch on how OT network visibility is necessary but not on its own sufficient for meaningful risk reduction. The session will also include an interactive “choose your own adventure” style scenario where the audience collectively walks through an electric incident response to illustrate key themes.
 

Get a peek into how public power utilities are already using artificial intelligence and how they expect it to augment operations in the near future. Hear where AI has been most helpful in their organizations, what risks remain in its use, and learn about open source AI tools utilities could leverage for cybersecurity.

Cloud platforms outpace traditional Active Directory in both scale and complexity. Walk through how Easton Utilities developed a solution to address the resulting visibility and control challenges and improve employee provisioning, which evolved into a governance solution that improves account management, reduces costs, and provides cross-system visibility without deploying a large enterprise Identity and Access Management platform. Review what Easton learned along the way about system architecture, data integration, and governance workflow — and what that could mean for your utility’s identity oversight.

This session will examine important lessons learned from a cyber incident response and speak to the value of cyber mutual assistance for public power utilities. Attendees will get a peek behind the curtain at the response and recovery associated with a ransomware event with actionable insights and resources that can help improve incident response planning. The session will also highlight the ESCC’s Cyber Mutual Assistance Program and provide additional information on how attendees can join this network of utility cyber professionals.

A bevy of state and federal government partners play a role in information sharing to help electric utilities prepare for and respond to cyber threats. Discuss when and how utilities should engage these partners during a cyber event, as well as practical ways to establish trusted relationships and communication channels before an incident occurs, when time and clarity matter most.

Hear perspectives from both a small public power utility and an industry cyber practitioner on field-tested steps that can meaningfully improve your organization’s security posture and resilience. Get ideas and practical guidance for boosting your security, even without large security teams, dedicated OT staff, or enterprise-level budgets to back you up.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by cybersecurity findings and analyses. The challenge lies in producing clear, measurable, leadership-ready decisions out of this sea of information. Gain strategies for how to translate technical results into priorities for taking action, discuss how to establish effective governance structures, and review steps to adopt a measurable assurance model that positions your organization to proactively tackle cybersecurity challenges.