Against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving power sector, public power leaders speaking at the American Public Power Association’s 2026 National Conference detailed how they are proactively engaging with customers and emphasized the need to remain nimble when it comes to decision making.
The public power officials made their remarks at a panel discussion on June 30 at the National Conference in Boston, Mass.
The discussion was moderated by Scott Corwin, President and CEO of APPA, and the panelists were:
• Carrie Meek Gallagher, CEO of the Long Island Power Authority
• Jimmy Staton, President and CEO of South Carolina’s Santee Cooper
• Tim McCollough, General Manager of Rochester Public Utilities in Minnesota and
• Emeka Anyanwu, CEO of Nebraska’s Lincoln Electric System.
Corwin kicked off the conversation by asking the public power leaders to discuss some of the challenges their utilities are facing.
Staton noted that South Carolina, “over the last five years in particular, has been one of the fastest growing states in the country” and is drawing interest from businesses including data centers.
“We are dealing with a confluence of growth, affordability and bananas,” he said.
Noting the bananas acronym refers to “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone,” Staton said: “We are dealing with that kind of infrastructure challenge.”
With respect to growth, “we are effectively going to have to double the size of the generation fleet that we have, so what we built in the first ninety years at Santee Cooper – we’re going to replicate that in the next seven.”
McCollough said that “We are a small but strong economic center in Southeast Minnesota, driven primarily by the health care sector with the Mayo Clinic.”
He said the defining challenges for the utility include power generation, “the need to replace aging power generation, build to meet new load growth in an environment where tariffs, supply chain, currency exchange, unfavorable or difficult regulatory environments are all converging in a very acute short term period right now is the biggest challenge.”
Addressing the topic of planning, McCollough noted that he started as general manager “just about three years ago and inherited a very robust strategic plan.” He worked with the utility’s board to reaffirm that “and continue down that pathway, as well as a resource plan that was being presented by the team right about the time that I started.”
Therefore, the utility had about six years before it needs to replace a coal unit “and make some significant resource plan changes,” he said, noting that in the last three years “a lot of those assumptions – almost every one of them – has turned on its head and what we have learned through that is the ability to remain adaptable in our plan has been critically important and also -- indecision is a decision.”
He noted that at the beginning of last year, Rochester Public Utilities needed to take steps to procure “major prime mover equipment, had technology selection, and then in the course of about six weeks the currency exchange went upside down, the threat or reality of tariffs showed up and we switched gears” and went with another supplier which was domestic, “which seemed crazy at the time to make a change midway through a procurement process like that, but that ability to be adaptable and make a decision in the midst of change there – if we would have waited six months, those same engines would have cost us $20 million more, fifty percent more.”
Engaging with Customers
Rochester Public Utilities has had a 100 percent net renewable energy by 2030 goal for a number of years and since that time, the state of Minnesota has adopted a carbon free standard “that would put a target for us as a municipal at sixty percent by 2030,” McCollough said.
The utility tapped Great Blue Research to ask customers if they were still in support of its 100 percent renewable energy goal. The first resource plan question “was the equivalent of do you like ice cream,” McCollough said. “Seven out of our 10 customers are still in very strong support of staying the course for our 100 percent renewable electricity goal by 2030.”
At the same time, the utility also wanted to test price sensitivity so a second question was included in the survey – given the choice of staying on course for 2030 that could come with 34 percent additional rate pressure over five years versus meeting the Minnesota carbon free standard at about 22 percent rate pressure over the same period, “what would you choose,” McCollough said.
“Six out of 10 customers of ours said go slower,” he noted.
For the first time, in 2025 rates rose to the top of the priority list for customers of the utility, eclipsing the traditional priority of reliability, McCollough said.
“That’s the first time in my career that I’ve ever seen customers put rates in that top position over reliability. That’s been the stalwart of my career – keeping the lights on – and now affordability has jumped up there to our customers as well,” he said.
“I think that’s the value of public power…listening to the customer, being locally governed, locally owned and it’s an important part of why we chose to” survey customers in considering the path forward.
Rochester Public Utilities has earned a 2026 Platinum level Reliable Public Power Provider designation from APPA. The RP3 program recognizes utilities that demonstrate high proficiency in reliability, safety, workforce development, and system improvement.
Santee Cooper Holds Focus Group Meetings with Customers
Staton noted that Santee Cooper has held focus group meetings with customers.
“Our typical message is reliability. What we heard back from our customers was – you’re already in the top 10% of reliability in the country and most of us don’t suffer outages, so while that’s interesting,” the customers don’t want to pay more “for what I’m already getting.”
Turning to the need for transparency when it comes to customers, Staton used Federal Express as an example.
FedEx developed an app so that “you could look at it and see where your package was. Did it get there any faster? Nope. Did it cost any less? Nope. Did you feel better about the fact that you had so much transparency into what was happening? And that’s the challenge that I have for my team, that’s the challenge that I think we have as an entire enterprise – how do we give them that level of transparency to the things that we’re doing so that they can appreciate better the value that they’re receiving,” he said.
“And so what’s the value that they’re getting for paying us more… I do think it’s investing in customer systems and modernizing the internal structures of our company, and maybe using AI to enhance that ability to provide that information quickly to customers.”
Separately, Staton noted that Santee Cooper is “rebuilding the transmission grid and we’re doing that for a number of reasons. One of them is to ensure, obviously, that we can move everything around the state that we need to. But the other thing is to provide some equity on economic development.”
Staton noted that “most of our transmission system was not built to serve the rural areas, but now with bringing more data centers to the table – they are comfortable landing in rural areas and, quite frankly, they’re willing to fund much of the infrastructure to get us there and so that has been an added help for us.”
Santee Cooper is also focused on bringing technology to the table to control costs. “That affordability versus growth argument continues to be a challenge,” Staton said. “We are implementing AI in a number of different areas across Santee Cooper.” The objectives of this effort include getting the utility to be “smarter, faster” and give Santee Cooper staff the ability to shift to a more analytical mode.
LIPA’s Carrie Meek Gallagher Addresses Reliability, Affordability
Meek Gallagher noted that challenges facing LIPA include reliability. “Most of our fleet – our on island generation fleet -- is over 50 years old,” so the public power utility is “looking at what we have to do to replace” on island generation.
She also touched upon affordability and renewable energy. “Our customers are educated, affluent in general and very, very focused on the environment and environmental protection, so they want clean, renewable energy. How do we do that and remain reliable and keep rates affordable?"
LIPA built the first offshore utility scale wind farm, Meek Gallagher noted. “It’s been operating really well for two years now giving us really great capacity factors, so that’s been a big win for us. We are leading New York State in the adoption of rooftop solar. We are leading New York State in electric vehicles, but that means electrification, which adds load and so how do we meet that with clean, renewable generation?”
The utility is doubling down on transmission solutions, but also energy efficiency, demand response and distributed renewable sources.
While focusing on reliability, affordability and increasingly clean energy resources, LIPA at the same time is working to stay nimble and agile “in an ever changing energy landscape,” Meek Gallagher said.
Corwin asked Meek Gallagher to elaborate on the utility’s effort to stay nimble as it faces various challenges without losing the direction that LIPA is striving for.
In response, she noted that LIPA just embarked on a new integrated resource planning process.
New York State “has some of the most ambitious climate goals. In 2019, they passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.” The entire state was expected to be entirely fossil free by 2040.
The governor in the budget this year, has “kind of pushed out those timelines a little bit. They realized that in order to meet reliability and affordability, we don’t quite have the technology or the ability to get there,” Meek Gallagher said.
LIPA’s Board of Trustees appointed Meek Gallagher as CEO, effective July 7, 2025, and she “realized as soon as I came onboard last year” that the 2023 IRP needed to be completely refreshed and has launched a related public process.
LIPA is essentially saying “look, everything we do now has to be practical and actionable.”
Against the backdrop of load growth, the utility “took a very much more pragmatic approach this time,” she said.
LIPA is looking at four scenarios. “A do nothing approach. If we just keep on the same path what does that look like? A scenario that focuses on all clean,” she said. “A third scenario that looks at the least cost approach and then the fourth scenario will be a hybrid approach.”
The hybrid approach will focus heavily on affordability and reliability “but also keeping us focused on increasingly clean” resources, Meek Gallagher said.
The current plan is to have the IRP process completed by June 2027,” so a year from now we will have a final new integrated resource plan that will be adopted by our board.”
Anyanwu Focused on Fostering Healthy and Constructive Dialogue
Anyanwu noted that LES is in the middle of a growing city – Lincoln, Nebraska – and is also now host to a data center, “which is our largest customer by several multiples compared to our next largest customer.” Lincoln is also host to the University of Nebraska.
Anyanwu said that he is focused on fostering healthy and constructive dialogue “about the choices that we have to make. There are realities, of course, facing us in our industry and in our society” that can bound the realities of what’s possible.
LES has a goal to be net zero carbon from our generating activities by 2040, “and yet we also recognize that we’ve got to balance that with the realities around what we need from a reliability and affordability perspective.”
He noted that one of the things that LES is “trying to be really forward thinking about and talk to our community about is” the demand side.
The utility is trying to have more dialogue “about what planning assumptions do we want to make around margins so that we can prepare for growth to the scale that our communities are comfortable with,” he said.
“But it’s also one of those great things about public power – you can have transparent conversations and allow that local control model to really work for you,” Anyanwu said.
Picking up on the demand side topic, Meek Gallager noted that time of day rates are now the default rates in LIPA’s service territory.
“We’ve had that for a year and a half now. All of our customers are on AMI, so we have a lot of good data there and what we want to try to figure out is how can we better incentivize our customers? What’s the messaging to them? What’s the right pricing structure? What do we have to do in terms of rates, tariffs, et cetera, so that they will in fact choose to decrease demand – especially during peak periods? Help us reduce the peak, shift the peak,” she noted. “We haven’t found the best model for that yet,” Meek Gallagher said.
