Ed Liberty has served as electric utilities director of Lake Worth Beach Utilities in Florida since 2017. His career in the utilities sector began at PSE&G in 1981 and continued through tenures at NUI Corporation, where he focused on natural gas development projects, and as a member of Dome-Tech, a consultancy that specialized in energy efficiency and energy procurement management. Liberty holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Newark College of Engineering and was a 2025 recipient of the American Public Power Association’s Mark Crisson Leadership and Managerial Excellence Award.
What brought you to work in public power, and how has working in public power been different than your corporate experience?
I got my degree in engineering and started in power plant operations doing boots-on-the-ground maintenance and repair before rising through the ranks into power generation management at the corporate level. I also worked in an energy services consultancy, Dome-Tech, which allowed me to work extensively with large industrial customers on energy master plans, solar projects, and energy procurement. I was fortunate to work and learn from outstanding utility and business leaders and brought those lessons with me to Lake Worth Beach when the opportunity arose for me to lead the electric utility through what became a major transition to lower rates and improve reliability.
It has definitely been a shift in terms of adjusting perspective on how things get done and how involved the public is in the decisions that you make compared to the way things are managed in the investor-owned world. Many of the processes are the same on a technical level. When you're repairing a piece of equipment or planning and building new infrastructure, it doesn't matter whether you're in public power or an investor-owned utility, the skill sets you need are the same. Where things begin to change is who you communicate with and are accountable to. In public power, the community has a lot of opportunities and ability to be much more closely involved in understanding how you're making decisions, the basis for these decisions, and what it’s going to cost.
How would you describe your leadership philosophy?
My philosophy has evolved over my career and has been shaped by years of working under tremendous leaders. It’s one I’ve adapted for my time here to be especially collaborative and focused on recognizing the skill sets and experience of your employees and understanding both their capabilities and interest areas.
It helps to set up staff into swim lanes where they can have clarity of focus and purpose to excel in their specific roles and then organize them around the broader goals you want to achieve. One of the things I discovered at Lake Worth Beach is there is a lot more talent and knowledge in the organization than people appreciated, and you want to empower your staff to use that expertise to make the right decisions.
What have been your proudest achievements at Lake Worth Beach?
The first things I focused on were cost and reliability. We buy wholesale power and distribute it through our system to our customers at the retail level. We exist financially in that space between the wholesale price and the retail price, and we achieved some significant potential savings through reviewing and renegotiating our wholesale power contracts. We also looked very closely at where we could create some operational savings beyond the reduction in wholesale power costs and created new revenues not by raising rates but by enforcing decades-long contracts that had not been properly managed.
Another big piece was cutting expenses in ways that have helped us build long-term savings. Sustainable cost reductions allow us to issue long-term debt in the form of revenue bonds dedicated to capital investments for infrastructure improvements, which then brings down outage rates and improves overall reliability. We had to create the vision, show how it could be funded, execute the projects, and use data to measure the improvements. The community trusted us and we’re delivering the results they were counting on.
We created an outage management system that combined SCADA system data, AMI data, and incoming customer phone calls that allowed us to determine which meters were out, diagnose the problem, and dispatch crews more efficiently.
I asked our team to consider what it would take to improve our system along those lines. They spent a couple of months coming up with ideas that evolved into a $140 million reliability improvement program that began in 2017. The initial two to three years saw slower progress, but by 2021, we began to see measurable improvement across all our service reliability metrics. This has also been reflected in what customers say in public about how much better things are today compared to prior years, which has played a big role in building team morale.
What are you looking to accomplish at Lake Worth Beach going forward?
Our focus is growing from continuous reliability improvements to sustaining what we've achieved. I’ve talked with both our team and the public about this next phase, in which they will see us grow our preventive and predictive maintenance programs. We have hundreds of new devices out in the field and now have to maintain them properly. We're also still building new substations, one of which is almost completed, and what we call a new sub-transmission backbone, which will make the system even more reliable.
I’m also working with our team on rotational and promotional assignments to build institutional knowledge and staff skills so we can have continuity and sustainability of performance when our senior leadership, me included, retire someday. Ensuring we have sustainably reliable operations is an obligation we have to our community, and one I want to make sure is lined up with foresight and the resources to keep it going.
