Amid a whirlwind of change and growth in the industry, public power utilities and other entities are setting distinct strategic plans that reaffirm their visions and lay a path for fulfilling key goals. Such planning requires a bigger-picture viewpoint than the typical utility planning processes used to guide operations. In developing strategy, whether long-term or short-term, utilities explore trends, aspirations, and expectations to shape priorities for years to come.
Changing Direction
For the Bonneville Power Administration, one of the federal power marketing administrations under the Department of Energy, updating its strategic plan was seen as an essential step for its new administrator, Travis Kavulla, to set expectations and align with the policies of the presidential administration.
Kavulla began as administrator in June 2026 and released BPA’s updated strategic plan for 2026–2030 in late August. The revised plan updated three strategic goals in particular: grow the grid, increase productivity, and protect ratepayers.
“It’s a personal mission of mine to make sure we put meat on that bone and fully explain what those concepts mean,” said Kavulla, who added that the strategic plan details what those concepts mean in tangible terms for the ratepayers in the Pacific Northwest.
The plan to grow the grid would entail a significant turnaround for BPA. Kavulla harkened back to BPA’s early days, when the efforts to electrify the region led to robust, fast-moving development that supported rural prosperity, production for World War II, and industrialization. After the grand scale of development in its first decades, he said, the pace slowed down significantly, adding about 3,500 miles of 500-kilovolt circuit lines in the 1960s and 1970s and fewer than 500 miles since the 1990s.
“Getting Bonneville off of pause and growing the grid is an imperative that I have heard from nearly every single customer of Bonneville, be they preference customers or our other transmission customers,” Kavulla added.
He said BPA has already made strides in ramping up construction and development, including forming a contractor pool and drawing up transmission plans. The transmission plans would add 10 gigawatts of transmission capacity to the regional grid, supporting new generators and large load customers alike.
Another key area of focus of BPA’s plan is increased productivity, which Kavulla said is about making more efficient use of the capital assets in which it has already invested. He sees this focus as particularly pertinent to other public power utilities.
“This is really a place where public power should be able to shine,” said Kavulla. “In IOU world, the moment that dollar in capital is spent, there’s really no incentive to increase the productivity of the capital asset that you’ve purchased, whereas public power has the opposite incentive of wanting to keep rates low and to stretch out a capital asset as much as possible.”
Engaging Stakeholders
“During the past 20 years, I think we’ve seen more change in the electric power industry than we’ve seen in its entire history,” said Sam Choi, director of strategy and planning for Orlando Utilities Commission in Florida.
“The volume and velocity of change are increasing exponentially, and we think that’s going to continue,” said Kirk Hudson, general manager of Chelan County PUD in north-central Washington state. “Our typical strategic planning process served us well at the rate of change during the time we needed it. Now, change is happening so fast, we have to change how we plan for the future.”
The public utility district has a strategic vision covering the next 50 years, while Orlando Utilities Commission made its plan look 10 years ahead.
Both Chelan and OUC started by looking at trends.
“What defines a trend?” Choi asked. “These are not singular events. These aren’t even sporadic signals: They’re clear directional forces that we’re seeing across the industry.”
OUC created a list of 25 trends, then tapped 120 organizational leaders to score the trends’ levels of impact and uncertainty. In the end, the utility identified 10 key drivers of change in the electric and water industry, which it used to focus the next steps in the process. Chelan also started with a list of trends and had community leaders, employees, and the broader community weigh in on their relative importance via an online survey.
Choi noted that OUC rolled out its 10-year plan to all employees through a series of meetings and train-the-trainer events with supervisors, giving the utility a chance to align the front line with organizational goals.
“We engaged all stakeholders to get their feedback,” Chelan Commission President Kelly Allen said. “In that process, it became very clear that being good stewards for future generations is important.”
Commission Secretary Steve McKenna said utility leadership adopted a quote from medical researcher Jonas Salk to guide much of their thinking: “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”
Both McKenna and Hudson point to their utility predecessors who had the foresight to leverage 50-year contracts for the power output of dams they built as generation resources for the PUD. “We asked the same question: ‘How do we become good ancestors for the people of the future?’” McKenna said, adding that this question underpinned the planning process.
As for the trends exercise, the two utilities had very similar lists by the time they whittled down their trends to factors they wanted to address. Load growth, extreme weather, cybersecurity, water scarcity, and artificial intelligence made both lists. Chelan also included increasing storage demand, wildfires, and new generation options for a more diversified portfolio on its list of 12 items to keep in mind, while OUC noted interest rates, emission regulations, supply chain issues, environmental consciousness, and changing workforce culture in its 10-trend list.
One aspect of BPA’s updated plan is to maintain status as a provider of choice for public power. Kavulla strongly affirmed BPA’s philosophy of not establishing mandatory full requirements agreements with customers, in part so there is a shared commitment between BPA and its preference customers “to fully subscribe the federal hydro resources of the Columbia River.”
“I believe our customers should be able to choose their own supplier and do what’s right for them and engage in innovative relationships around supply,” he said.
Kavulla said that serving incremental needs beyond BPA’s hydro resources has involved a system of purchases from the wholesale markets. The strategic plan lays out resource acquisition plans that he expects will provide more rate stability and certainty for its customers.
For utilities within BPA’s footprint, Kavulla encouraged customers to read the plan so that they can hold BPA accountable for the activities and vision it lays out. “Bonneville really prides itself on stakeholder input and decision making … and that only works if those customers bring their best efforts and contribute.”
He specifically invited customers to provide input on decisions regarding how BPA will go about its strategy of protecting ratepayers, citing a question on whether the agency should expect equity contributions from customers or lean more into debt to finance its growth activities.
Imagining the Future
Both Chelan and OUC are targeting more partnership with the community, resiliency, workforce excellence, and sustainability of their power and water.
Strategic foresight is a systematic approach to exploring a variety of conceivable futures. “It’s used to anticipate different possibilities that could unfold, look over the horizon, and plan against potential blind spots,” Choi said.
For OUC, developing strategic foresight meant creating dramatic scenarios for the strategic team to work through. Scenario planners paired extreme weather events with supply chain issues to get the utility’s team looking at what would happen if both conditions occurred simultaneously, damaging large transformers and other equipment that couldn’t be replaced quickly.
Chelan PUD hired a futurist to help “stretch our thinking beyond the typical five- to 10-year horizon,” Hudson said. As a hydro-based utility, Chelan’s worst-case scenario would be losing its dams and hydropower. After putting that possibility on the table, the utility is exploring other generation options, including geothermal and fusion, Allen said.
One reason fusion is on the table is that it checks the box on one of the nine directives the long-term planning team wound up creating. Called Vision 2075, the directives include “harnessing the power frontier” by leveraging clean energy sources.
Hudson said the long-term strategy in Vision 2075 prompted the utility’s interest in fusion. “When we looked out 50 years, we asked ourselves, ‘What could possibly be as affordable or even less expensive than hydropower?’” he explained. “The only thing we could see out there was fusion.”
The Chelan PUD commission also approved the purchase of 5,000 acres of land to support the utility in exploring new generation resources.
For its part, to identify projects to tackle first, OUC “went through a capability gap analysis across the entire business, covering everything from human resources to procurement and grid operations,” Choi said. “That helped us drive what we identified as key strategic initiatives to close the largest gaps.”
Among OUC’s strategy-driven projects are grid modernization and hardening efforts. These include undergrounding lines, upgrading its energy management system, and adding automated reclosers. “All of that falls under improving our resiliency,” Choi said.
Flexibility and Accountability
Both Chelan and OUC have woven flexibility into their strategic plans. McKenna explained Chelan PUD’s strategic directives as “broad policies that are priorities” based on feedback from the community and utility staff. “We developed a set of directives that give some guidance to the organization as well as an amazing amount of flexibility to the utility.”
One way the utility enables flexibility is by reviewing the trends its plan is built upon each year. “We’ve just put that review on our cycle,” Hudson said. “It gives us the opportunity to refresh that strategic plan on an annual basis should something change significantly.”
OUC also reviews its 10-year plan annually. Choi said planners check whether initiatives still align with where the utility should be investing or whether it’s time to reallocate efforts and funds.
For BPA, Kavulla stressed the importance of accountability.
The plan is “an instrument of accountability. You should be able to look back at the strategic plan in four years’ time and compare it to what Bonneville has accomplished and measure my success accordingly,” he said. “The strategic plan is really a call to action for every single employee to be accountable for the momentum that we need to achieve. It should be something to empower people all the way down the line working at Bonneville to question stagnation or bureaucratic processes that would hinder their momentum” toward the strategic goals.
He said someone at BPA has ownership over each goal, and those goals are factored into scorecards and performance indicators for senior executives and their team members.
Open for Innovation
Beyond providing direction, the strategy creation process can bring other benefits. Allen said the utility-wide focus on pioneering new generation resources has empowered Chelan PUD staff “to be innovative within their own team sets.” As an example, a team of employees went to the board to spur a new IT initiative. “They walked us around a day in the life of how the IT systems don’t work together,” she explained. “Now, we’re undergoing a large overhaul of our integrated resources, but the innovation we’re seeing happen is also on the molecular level within our organization.”
Meanwhile, McKenna said the board is free to become more strategic and leave day-to-day solutions to utility staff. “We have much more time with our executive leadership team and more time at staff meetings to talk and listen to people.”
“The strategic plan should have a clear vision, but enough humility to know when it hasn’t necessarily nailed down the precise answer on a particular question,” Kavulla said.
“Having a capable and cohesive strategy is very important for utilities,” said Choi. “Hopefully, strategic planning is getting more prominence. It’s a muscle that all utilities can develop and grow.”
