May 8, 2024
2:00 PM ET / 1:00 PM CT / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT
Duration: 1 hour
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Summary
In 2022, World Population Review listed Georgia as the second fastest growing state in the U.S. This growth puts more demand on the energy grid and Georgia Power, like many utilities, is focused on making essential, critical investments to deliver reliable power efficiently to customers today while meeting the growing demand of the future. Georgia Power’s Grid Investment Program goes beyond the day-to-day and addresses underperforming equipment and aging substations, while upgrading transmission and distribution infrastructure across the energy grid to improve the system’s reliability and resiliency and better the customer experience.
This webinar will discuss how Georgia Power initiated this major program and will highlight best practices in regulatory approval, community engagement, design, and construction. Learn about Georgia Power’s strategy for selecting the internal and external resources to execute the challenging scope and schedule of the Grid Investment Program. Explore how Georgia Power measures the success of each aspect of this complex program. Finally, allow Georgia Power to share their roadmap for the future for customers and the communities they serve.
Speakers
Rachel Williams
Title: Vice President, Transmission Field Operations
Company: Georgia Power Company
Rachel Williams is the Georgia Power vice president of Transmission Field Operations. In this role, she leads the strategic direction for Transmission Construction, Transmission Maintenance & Support, Project Management, and the management of Georgia Power’s capital portfolio.
Rachel joined Southern Company in 1998 and has held various roles in Power Delivery across all the electric utilities and Southern Company Services. At Georgia Power, Rachel has held leadership positions as general manager of Transmission Maintenance and Support, manager of Project Management, and manager of Distribution Field Operations.
In her former role as Grid Investment Program director, Rachel established the strategic direction to ensure we successfully execute the 2023 - 2025 plan to invest $1.4 billion of capital expenditures in our transmission and distribution system to ensure optimal reliability, performance, and affordability.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a power systems specialization and an MBA in finance from the University of Alabama – Birmingham.
Madhu Bhargava
Title: Department Manager, Distribution Modernization
Company: Burns & McDonnell
Madhu Bhargava is a Department Manager in the Transmission and Distribution practice at Burns & McDonnell, where she works with electric utilities to help achieve their resilience and reliability goals. She has over ten years of experience supporting transmission and distribution design needs across the energy and utilities domain.
She has been involved with all aspects of project development and execution including staffing and resource management, planning, scoping, engineering, scheduling, material forecasting and estimating, rights-of-way acquisition and real estate coordination, environmental compliance and permitting, stakeholder management, development of requests for proposals, evaluation of bid proposals and quality assurance.
She currently is part of the leadership team for the Distribution Investment on Georgia Power's Grid Investment Program and helps lead strategic initiatives on the program. Her responsibilities also include portfolio planning and sequencing, consulting on scope development, project evaluations, and reliability and program analytics.
Mike Beehler
National Spokesperson
Power Delivery Intelligence Initiative
Mike Beehler P.E. is the national spokesperson for the Power Delivery Intelligence Initiative and the chief opportunity officer for Mike Beehler & Associates LLC. He started his career designing and building transmission lines and substations for Tucson Electric Power and the Hawaiian Electric Co. and then spent more than 20 years designing T&D infrastructure and consulting on emerging trends at Burns & McDonnell.
He has written, presented, and consulted on reliability-centered maintenance, critical infrastructure protection, and program management. In addition, he is a well-known industry writer and speaker on the early definition of the smart grid, 3-D and building information modeling applications in T&D, and development plans for smart cities. Most recently, he is sought for his strategic leadership and vision on the application of emerging technologies in changing business models to include the integration of distributed energy resources, augmented/virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. He authored the book, The Science of the Sale. Beehler is a registered professional engineer in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama. He also is a Fellow in the American Society of Civil Engineers and a member of IEEE and CIGRE.
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