Gil Quiniones, CEO, ComEd

“For every one dollar in O&M that I save, I can invest seven to eight dollars in capital and not increase the bills of my customers” Gil Quiniones, CEO, ComEd

Halcyon CSO and co-founder Nat Bullard sits down with ComEd CEO Gil Quiniones. ComEd has 10 GW of likely data-center demand against a 23 GW all-time peak, plus more than $1 billion in letters of credit that keep other customers from paying for stranded upgrades.

Gil is President and CEO of ComEd, the Exelon utility serving more than nine million people in northern Illinois. Born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in the Philippines, he trained as a mechanical engineer and moved to New York in 1987. There he became the first hire in Con Edison's demand-side management program. After 9/11 he helped connect the emergency generators that let the stock exchange reopen. He went on to serve as Mayor Bloomberg's senior vice president for energy and telecom, then led the New York Power Authority for more than a decade before joining ComEd in 2021.

Chapters

00:00 | Intro: Nat and Gil’s New York history 
00:57 | Gil’s career in four chapters: Con Ed, 9/11 and the Bloomberg years, NYPA, ComEd
06:21 | Ames, Iowa and the Philippines to Con Ed’s first demand-side management hire
10:07 | Samuel Insull and the invention of the investor-owned utility
15:22 | ComEd today: nine million people, 75,000 circuit miles and a near self-healing grid 
17:48 | Inside Exelon: “the power of the platform” 
23:08 | A summer of heat waves, 57 tornadoes and 20 major storms 
26:22 | AI storm prediction and Argonne’s 2050 climate model 
29:39 | Plugging emergency generators straight into the grid 
32:37 | Flexible interconnection, DERMS and a private LTE network 
38:03 | 10 GW of data centers and the transmission security agreement 
46:27 | What’s next: smaller inference data centers and state resource planning 
51:06 | Line workers, apprenticeships and a high-tech workforce 
58:59 | How Gil came to ComEd, and what public power taught him 
1:04:50 | Affordability, flat O&M and performance-based regulation 
1:08:35 | Wish list: storage for low-income homes and clean, firm power

More in the series

Pedro Pizarro, President and CEO, Edison International

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