Mary Kipp, CEO, Puget Sound Energy

“We need to be able to find a way to not let perfect be the enemy of good. We can't just be saying no to everything. We're humans. We want infrastructure.” Mary Kipp, CEO, Puget Sound Energy

Halcyon CSO and co-founder Nat Bullard sits down with Puget Sound Energy President and CEO Mary Kipp to talk about delivering one of the country's most ambitious clean energy laws without losing reliability or affordability. PSE traces back to Seattle Gas Light in 1873, before Washington was a state, and still runs Snoqualmie Falls, an 1898 hydro plant with a powerhouse 270 feet underground.

Mary grew up partly off the grid on a ranch in New Mexico, prosecuted energy traders as an enforcement lawyer at FERC, and was CEO of El Paso Electric before joining PSE just before the pandemic. She also sits on the board of Hawaiian Electric, which she joined two meetings before the Lahaina fire.

Chapters

00:00 | Cold open: "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"
00:21 | Intro: Washington, wildfire and a return to growth
02:39 | 150 years of Puget Sound Energy, from Seattle Gas Light to private ownership
04:08 | The service territory, 7.9 GW of generation and the exit from Colstrip
06:21 | Building wind in Montana, and the transmission bottleneck
07:20 | Snoqualmie Falls: an 1898 hydro plant 270 feet underground
09:13 | Mary's path: climate, El Paso Electric and why she came to Washington
12:19 | Growing up off the grid on a New Mexico ranch
13:51 | From FERC prosecutor to utility CEO
16:20 | Building a team, and the Beyond Net Zero Advisory Group
17:53 | Delivering state climate policy without losing affordability
21:29 | A power-short Northwest, and power costs from $750 million to $2 billion+
23:45 | Wildfire comes to the wet side of the Cascades
26:41 | AI for wildfire: risk modeling, smoke cameras and line sensors
29:20 | Restructuring the company for what's next
30:42 | Hyperscalers: competing for power, and funding serial number one
33:50 | How the regulatory compact is changing
36:40 | The regulatory workload, and the hardest permitting in the country
40:41 | Gas peakers, a line across the Cascades and the permitting crisis
44:18 | Wish list: clean firm power, AI grid planning, a virtual power plant and vehicle-to-grid
47:01 | Customers as participants, and the risk of a two-class grid
53:22 | Utilities as stewards: planning 100 years out
56:52 | Looking back from 2036

More in the series

Pedro Pizarro, President and CEO, Edison International

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