Aired Jun 25, 2026 · 37 min

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Over 80% of installed DER capacity isn't enrolled in a virtual power plant. The technology is ready. The economics are increasingly compelling. What's missing is the regulatory alignment and system-wide planning to bring it all together.

In this episode, host Kinsey Grant Baker sits down with Audrey Zibelman—former CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator, former Chair of the New York Public Service Commission, and former executive at Alphabet's X moonshot factory—to talk about what it will actually take to get distributed energy resources from promising concept to essential grid tool.

From the S-curve of solar adoption in Australia to rethinking how utilities make money, this is a blueprint for what a smarter, more flexible grid can look like.

Check out the Pew report Audrey mentions throughout the episode here: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2026/04/distributed-energy-can-unleash-the-resilient-affordable-grid-of-the-future

Audrey Zibelman: The regulatory system has to be just redesigned to allow for that level of experimentation with the expectation that not everything that they do will work.

Kinsey Grant Baker: A lot of these utilities might be structurally almost disincentivized from DERs because of the way that the markets are set up today.

Audrey Zibelman: All these systems have to align and they have to be forward looking to the future of a much more dynamic distributed grid than we've had in the past.

Kinsey Grant Baker: What the current political reality means for the kind of adoption and cohesion that we're talking about in this grid of the future.

Audrey Zibelman: Why would I not want to adopt technology that is going to drive value to consumers when we make electricity and energy more affordable? That means we have more dollars to spend on other things.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Can DERs save the grid? We'll find out today on Power Perspectives. Hey, everybody, and welcome back. Once again, I'm Kinsey Grant Baker, and we have a great conversation lined up for you today because the future of the electric grid requires innovation. And innovation is exactly what we are after with our esteemed guest, Audrey Zibelman. Audrey has held so many leadership positions within energy that I'm tempted to frankly just make this episode a run through a history of. I won't. We have much bigger topics to dig into, but I will give just a small sampling of some of your experience.

Audrey has been the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator, chair of the New York Public Service Commission, executive vice president of PJM and a longtime executive at Xcel Energy. She's the founder of Viridity Energy and she was an executive at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory. Audrey is an expert on all things energy, but we are lucky to have her with us today to speak specifically about how grid tech, distributed energy resources, virtual power plants can help us move from promising concept to real tool. Because with a grid under as much strain as ours currently is, innovative tech feels like the biggest realist ticket to resilience, reliability and affordability. Audrey, welcome to Power Perspectives. How are you today?

Audrey Zibelman: Great, great. And great to see you, Kinsey.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Great to see you as well. I'm thrilled to have this conversation. You are someone we are really lucky to have on the show today, and we have a lot to talk about. So if it's fine by you, I would love to start by digging right into some of this conversation around theory versus practice, which is something I know our audience is very keen to understand a little bit better. When we're talking about innovation, I would love if you could start by just telling me a little bit more about why this innovation as a concept, as this sort of pie-in-the-sky idea works, feels so integral to the energy industry at this specific moment. Can you kind of sum up before we dig into the specifics, why innovation in the big picture is so baseline important for us?

Audrey Zibelman: Your audience understands probably more than anyone else is that we're, we are at an unprecedented time in this industry. When I, I entered the industry in the late, early eighties, I would guess. And then, you know, through the period of the eighties to the nineties, people would think about post-World War II period, where we're seeing buildup of the grid and continuous load growth in a two to 5% range. And then things began to really flatten out. And now we're at a period of time where we're seeing load growth, demand growth caused by data center growth as well as electrification, putting us into a period of rapid growth, just at a period as well that we're seeing aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced.

And a total change out of the technology associated with electrification, digitalization, and the use of renewables as opposed to just synchronized generation on the grid. So you have this massive thing of things changing very, very quickly in an industry that tends to think in eras or decades as opposed to months and weeks, which is where things are moving. So grappling with all of that, as well as the very fact that we have a very complex regulatory system and different economic models in the U.S. and different market models, is a bit alarming for the industry to try to have how to think about prioritizing and getting this done right. Because the other piece that we know about our industry is that it's one that can't fail, not even for a second.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Absolutely. This idea of getting it done and getting it done right is something that really underpins, I feel like, every conversation that we have on this show. With the idea of innovation specifically serving a purpose and getting us out of this sort of sticky situation of the duality of rapid growth and aging infrastructure at the same time. I would love to hear your thoughts on the sort of innovator's timeline. You mentioned the importance of energy as an industry that cannot afford to fail. Innovation is something that prizes and prioritizes, in a lot of other industries, failure and failing quickly. How do you reconcile those two things? And do you think that the innovator's timeline can happen in energy and vice versa? Can the two coexist?

Audrey Zibelman: I think it can. So here's a few things. I mean, we used to, when I had PJM, we used to talk about the fact that, you know, running the power grid is very much like running, flying the airplane and building it at the same time. And you have to, you've got to continue flying. It's a 24-7 problem. But that doesn't mean that we can't innovate through it. And the question is, how do we innovate? I think the challenge that I see with the industry is that there's a tendency versus trying to fast forward and learn by other experiences and being able to take on that information.

So there's a few things that we could do. One of the things that we did in New York, and I think the industry recognizes, is you could start with small demonstrations. And you can allow for failure within those demonstrations. There was always an issue in terms of the regulatory world: can you spend money that doesn't end up being used and useful, in the sense that if we ran an experiment and it didn't work, can that be recovered? One of the things that we looked to do when I was at REV was actually do these demonstrations and think about it in terms of R&D. For example, I chair Landis+Gyr, and we expect to spend a certain amount of R&D on new development. We don't expect it all to work, but we want to do it because we want to be cutting edge.

And I think one of the things that we need to think about for utilities is that regulation, because it's a system of systems, and the regulatory system has to be just redesigned to allow for that level of experimentation with the expectation that not everything that they do will work. And in fact, to desire that not everything we could do at work. One of the things I learned when I was at X with the Moonshot Factory, and any innovator or VC will tell you, is that most of their investments don't work. But that doesn't mean they were bad ideas, because you learned something. So I think getting that happy medium of how much utilities should be experimenting with the expectation that that experimentation will yield positive results, if not in the particular project, but in the next project that comes afterwards, is a way to rethink how we move things.

The other is to get out of this bias that we have with utilities that just because utility A did it, B can't do it. They have to do something different. If A did it and it worked, then damn it, everybody should do it. And so we also need to think about learning that and, uh, I know you just asked one question, but you triggered something for me. I know that when I was in Australia, we were running into oscillation issues on the grid associated with wind. I talked to California, Texas, National Grid in the UK. They were all experiencing the same things. And we thought, well, we really ought to get together. And we ought to also all learn. So the other piece is how do we bring to the table for utilities? One is what experiences you can expect to have at different levels of penetration. And then secondly, how are those issues solved? And we can share that learning across the industry.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Such rich insights, Audrey, to start this conversation with, that we certainly will spend much, much more time in this conversation speaking about specifically. I really want to dig into the regulatory aspects. We'll get to that in a few minutes. I think before we do that, I would love to talk a little bit more about this idea of utility A learning from utility B. If plan A works, you don't need plan B, right? Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about maybe some examples where you have seen that come to pass. I would like to talk specifically about some of the DERs and the VPPs that I know you have worked on, have recently published a report through the Pew Charitable Trusts talking about some of this technology. Let's start by digging into some of that conversation, if that sounds good.

You know, I think a lot of the utility audience listening to this conversation today would agree with one of the findings from that Pew report that I just mentioned. U.S. is facing rapidly rising electricity demand, data centers, manufacturing, electrification, the usual suspects, at the same time as the grid is aging. It's expensive to replace. A lot of our listeners kind of know this. I think the question is that, you know, given the landscape that feels like it's evolving really, really quickly, maybe faster than it ever has before, should that change the way that utility leaders are thinking about distributed energy resources, their role on the grid, especially in the context of maybe what they're seeing from some of their peers? Can you tell me a little bit more about what that kind of paradigm looks like these days?

Audrey Zibelman: So one of the things that I think is really interesting to see is how utilities are experimenting with how to integrate distributed energy resources differently. And one of the areas that we, what we explored in Pew, is how do we create a roadmap towards scaling DER in a sensible way, recognizing that in the U.S., we have the complexity of having different structures of ownership as well as different market structures, and how to create a roadmap that could be adopted in various forms that are irrespective of the particular structure you're in. So I think one of the things that becomes very critical that we highlighted is we need to start thinking about the industry differently in terms of doing things: integrated planning.

And the challenge or the opportunity we have is that as we think about electrification, there's also the issue in terms of how to integrate that with not just good electric planning, but good gas planning. So we have both the exit, entry and the exit when we think about these things. But also in terms of transparency of where there's opportunities to think, to use virtual power plants or distributed energy resources better. Because until you have a really robust system-wide plan, having it's hard, the policy you might have is may not be well adapted to what you actually need to do to drive this adoption rate, but also the successful execution. So having very granular plans that look at the opportunity to use distributed energy resources as an alternative to traditional investment, and even as a way to offload the transmission grid, I think is a really important aspect of how we need to do this better. So that kind of system-level planning, as opposed to just policy planning, will be important.

The second is then to look at how we do tariffs and programs around adoption of DER at scale to make it easy for consumers, and the role that utilities could play. So I'm well aware of the work that Xcel is doing in terms of utility ownership of DER. That's not going to work in every state, but certainly getting scale adoption will work. And then you have to integrate that into the operations of the system. So it's not enough to just say we have solar and storage on the roof. We need to have programs in place so that those that can be dispatched or managed or send signals to, to allow for very quick adoption.

And the other last thing I think that we all have to recognize, this is no longer a technology issue. The technology is there. Meters can do a lot in terms of identifying loads. You know, certainly companies like SPAN that are looking at smart panels can be really useful. Yeah. And DERMS systems, as well as software that optimizes the grid, that's all there. What regulators need to understand, and where utilities, I think, can work with their regulators, is that as we file rate cases and we look at capital plans, we also have to look at system utilization and the investments that need to be made to optimize that.

And so what Pew has identified is effectively four elements that we think are very, very critical that everyone should look to get right. And getting this right drives the issues of resiliency as well as affordability to allow for DER adoption to be made at scale. And so our goal here is really to say this is not an unreachable goal anymore. Yeah. And their adjustments, and then the complexity of the US compared to certainly other countries like in Europe and Australia, is that we have different regulators in each state. How do we use NARUC really as a leveraging point for people to get to this rapid adoption? And then how do we take programs that are being used and leverage them in the different markets so that not every regulator feels like they have to go out and think through this themselves. So it's the utilities as well as the regulators and state policy makers, how to get an alignment. And then I think the last piece that needs to come along is how do we get programs in place to allow capital to flow much more easily. And that has to be tackled as well.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Audrey, you bring up a really interesting point here that I think is a reality that a lot of people in the industry contend with, which is no two utilities are the same. No two businesses are the same. No two, you know, RTOs are the same. With that in mind, there's also the reality that no two states are the same in the way that they regulate utilities, with both of those kind of, you know, sort of dueling issues in that nothing here is a monolith. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about maybe some of the challenges of that idea of better integrated planning and better regulation. Can you tell me a little bit more about how to overcome, or what maybe some of the processes or the strategies might be to overcome, the pretty significant differences from utility to utility, from state regulator to state regulator, from PUC to PUC? What's your thoughts on how we get through this?

Audrey Zibelman: First of all, I think coming out with really transparent system-wide plans that also look at the economics becomes really important. I think regulators, regardless of where they locate, their goal is to make the best outcome for consumers. One of the things that I, when I started in the industry back when we went to the New Mexico school to learn about regulation, you know, we hear about the economics of regulation being based on the concerns around information asymmetry. You get away from this issue as rate-making processes, like friend Nora Brownell used to say, a bit of a kabuki dance. It doesn't have to be that. We can get transparent capital plans that take a look at policy and look at scenarios.

That's certainly something I did in Australia when I ran AEMO. We were the national planner for the country. And we ran scenarios so that everyone had the same information. We agreed on the inputs and we could then run scenarios on the various outcomes driven by both environmental objectives of the country, as well as the system requirements and the economic consequences of that, so that the state could draw paths to get to a certain point. I think every state should be moving in that direction. And that we should require these planning tools. And I know, you know, and certainly at the RTO level, that should become transparent throughout the system and down to that level, because otherwise you're debating over emotions, and electrons don't have emotions, it's just facts.

And that we should just get the good engineering facts out there and then make plans accordingly. So I think that would be helpful. The utilities certainly would be helpful to regulators, and that to me would be a really natural starting point. Once you get there and you have good plans, you could actually then start testing. Well, what if we had 20% DER? What would that actually do and how would that change things? And then you could design your regulatory policies to go after the good as opposed to hoping the good is what you can achieve. And, you know, this is to me, someone who's run systems as well as regulated systems, I really believe we shouldn't be guessing at these things. We should be using the best of engineering science. And this is where certainly AI can be very useful in developing these risk-less plans.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Absolutely. I think it brings to mind a question for me about maybe a little bit of future casting. But I'm curious how you think the grid looks different with these scale DERs. If we do find alignment on some of these issues that you have brought to light here today, what does the grid look like in that sort of perfect version of this future?

Audrey Zibelman: Yeah, so there's a few things. One is, you know, experience we've had in Australia. And I think this is usually my, you know, conversation I have about this, is the canary in a coal mine, if you will, of what happens. And so in Australia, we had, you know, solar rooftop pickup that was going at a certain pace per year. And then suddenly we hit a tipping point, driven by state policies as well as, that drove both in terms of cost, but also the ease and facilitating uptake. We got to a point where now one in three Australians have solar on their roof and it keeps continuing to go up.

And at the same time, this government is now saying, well, that is good for us. We have so much solar in the afternoon. We don't have enough demand. Bad for us. We don't have so much solar in the afternoon. We don't have enough demand. And so now they're doing the same thing with distributed storage. So they're very quickly moving towards that pace. But what they recognize is that you do get on this S-curve of adoption where suddenly solar stopped being any type of energy political issue or how I'm going to vote in the next election. It just made economic sense to consumers, much like having their own car. And I think we will see the same with heat pumps and induction ovens and electric vehicles. We will get there.

And the thing we know in the utility industry is that happens much faster than typical regulatory-driven change. And so to me, the goal is really, rather than utilities lagging consumer pickup, is how do utilities lead it and how does regulation lead it and how do the markets lead it so that we can accommodate that change? The end being is that we now truly have then a two-way system, where what we know is that by doing this in a planned way and where there's adoption at scale, you have enough flexibility behind the grid that you can manage to create a better utilization of the system as a whole and accommodation of large-scale growth, like in data centers.

So to me, the most exciting development we should be thinking about is that we've always run the power grid to think that the transmission is a balancing system. We were balancing supply and demand. When in fact, when you move to distributed energy resources, you can have balancing systems at the transmission level and at the distribution level that can be highly coordinated to make for much better system utilization across the board, as well as accommodation, better accommodation of transmission, I mean, of wind and solar and renewables. So you're creating a much more dynamic, flexible system. But to do that, the distribution utility essentially in itself, which is what Australia has moved to, becomes its own balancing area where it's balancing demand and supply that sits behind the meter.

And that's a very different way of looking at the system. But I think in the future, if you think about that 1930s, Roosevelt said, I want universal access to electricity across the board. And so we created acts to support that. In 2030, maybe we should be talking about universal access to DER and then the role of the utility to accommodate that and facilitate it.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah, this I think brings up a really interesting sort of thread in the conversation when we're talking about the who of adoption, knowing that adoption is key to bringing this potential future to fruition. But also knowing that over 80% of installed DER capacity isn't enrolled in a VPP currently. I would love to hear your perspective on who plays what role in changing that, specifically with regard to the difference maybe between, you know, like third-party VPP providers versus utility-owned programs. Tell me a little bit about what your thinking is there.

Audrey Zibelman: Well, I think that that's going to evolve and change according to the markets, right? There's a certain element that there will be different models. I would say that I find that for innovation, markets always drive innovation faster, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't start in one place and end up somewhere else. So when I think about it in terms of eventually what we would hope to get to is a fully distributed system, very much like the internet works, where there are prices to devices. That doesn't mean that the rates are variable, but it just means that the utility is sending signals and devices are accommodating them.

And so the question would be, in those instances, much like the internet works today, how many third-party actors need to be between this, or is this something that just becomes automated? But that's, I think, far into the future. First, we have to get to adoption. I think there could be other different market models that evolve to get to that adoption rate. And then if we get to the point where this becomes so automatic to people to participate, then the issue is, is this just a fully automated system? And I would hazard any guess that we can imagine what the future looks like. And innovation always surprises us. So whatever we guess, we're likely to be wrong. But the most important thing is we need to get to scale.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Absolutely. So let's talk about getting to scale, specifically the market models. I think this is a really interesting part of this conversation, especially when you think about the utility perspective that they're bringing to this idea of bringing DERs to scale. A lot of these utilities might be structurally almost disincentivized from DERs because of the way that the markets are set up today, because capital expenditures are what drives profits. DER management is often treated as an operating expense, you know, market idiosyncrasies that might not necessarily encourage the kind of adoption that we're looking for in this kind of conversation.

Audrey Zibelman: The thing that we looked at to accomplish in REV was to say, well, we knew that there was a natural disincentive when utilities make money by capital expenditure, return on capital, that telling them that we wanted them to reduce capital would mean that there would be what we called a minimum-maximum problem. They would do the minimum amount that they could do rather than the maximum that made sense. And to change that, we wanted to make sure the economic incentive was around reduce, that they would make more money or as much money by looking at non-wires alternatives than looking at traditional investment.

I think with DER, there could be a similar type program where we say from a utility's perspective, if they have growth opportunities, and there's lots of growth opportunities now, but there are growth opportunities through DER deployment that have the economic benefit of saving individual consumers money, creating, generating innovation, and in the end, making the power system reliable, more resilient, and more affordable, then regulations should provide the same economic reward to the utility as a market would, that they're driving customer value, so they should be rewarded for it. And I think that to do that means that we have to break this logjam, that the only way utilities make money is through return on capital, and look at something that the UK adopted a long time ago, which is TOTEX formulations that looks like total return, total of capital and operating, as opposed to just looking at capital itself.

The thing that I think is most important that people forget: we think about the power system as a physical system, which it is. But there's also the regulatory system, the policy systems, and the financial systems. And they're all very critical that they align. And for us to get through this transition well, which is a little bit of what I think threads through the Pew work, is that all these systems have to align and they have to be forward-looking to the future of a much more dynamic distributed grid than we've had in the past. And as long as we try to tweak historic ways of doing things as a way to make them better for the future, we won't be as successful as saying, well, actually, we have to rethink this because it's a totally different grid that we're developing.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Absolutely. There are certain periods of time that require that full-scale wiping of the whiteboard and figuring out where we go next.

Audrey Zibelman: We would never have the Internet, which we know has driven a lot of value. I know there's a lot of anxiety about it, but it's driven a lot of value, if we tried to regulate it like we regulated landlines, or if we regulated Wi-Fi like we regulated landlines. And I think in the industry, we just need to take a big step back, see the picture we want to draw, and then look at the regulation that's going to drive us there rather than trying to plan it through the rearview mirror.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Absolutely. So with the example that you mentioned of TOTEX in the UK, with a shift in how regulation is accomplished, how does something like that pan out? Do we have anything to learn from that as an example?

Audrey Zibelman: Well, I think we see examples, I mean, in the UK in terms of utilities driving innovation, and productivity has certainly been there. I also think that the work that I saw in Australia is around utilities, distribution utilities, who at first were reluctant about the impact of rooftop solar and now embracing it and are thinking that 60 to 70 percent of energy could be produced locally. So you see these mind shares changing as people get experience and see the value coming out of it. So I think those are important, good examples. And in the U.S., we have lots of examples, that in the Pew report we identify, where utilities have moved forward and states have moved forward that I would, you know, I think that we should all embrace and take a look at and say, well, how do we make this even better?

Kinsey Grant Baker: And we will, of course, link that report in the show notes because we've referenced it a couple of times. It's very robust. Definitely encourage everybody to check it out. So go to the show notes to see that. One other question, just while we're on the topic of regulation and policy and where the two might intersect and meet one another. I'm curious what the current political reality means for the kind of adoption and cohesion that we're talking about in this grid of the future. Yeah. You know, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, you know, for example, like, did this introduce new headwinds, new accelerants? You know, what are you thinking about right now in terms of the parties in power at the federal level, in terms of the trends that we're seeing at the state level? Tell me a little bit about what the reality is today when we're looking at the politics and how it might impact policy and regulation. Yeah.

Audrey Zibelman: Well, I mean, it's certainly, you know, to be very clear, the Pew work has nothing to do with a policy and it's not something we at all touched on. And in my own thinking about this, I tend to shy away from that because it's, you know, there's a lot of complexities in these issues. What I can say, though, is that all of the evidence that we have is that the power grid can be absolutely made more efficient and resilient and reliable if we take advantage around innovation at the edge of the system to drive value for everybody. And so the question shouldn't be a question of how we're going to vote. The question really ought to be, well, this is an essential service. We can't run any economy without affordable energy.

And as we look at electrification more and more, it's gonna be affordable electricity. And so the question should be on any policy maker's mind: why would I not want to adopt technology that is gonna drive value to consumers, but will drive value throughout the economy, because when we make electricity and energy more affordable, that means we have more dollars to spend on other things. And besides that, we can't do anything else without reliable electricity. So I really loved when I was in Australia, we did talk about this from the standpoint, and it was a conservative government that promoted a lot of the work that AEMO was doing around adoption of renewables, that if you have a good engineering and mathematical science applied to an element, and you recognize that this is a physics issue and an engineering issue, it has nothing to do with politics necessarily. The question is, what is the best outcome for the economy?

And so what I'm hoping is that our work will continue to show that through adopting innovation, through making a system more efficient, we will drive value. And I think the other piece that I learned as a student of this industry is, when I was at Xcel in Minnesota, where you had significant amount of manufacturing load that ran 24 by 7, your system was necessarily more efficient because it didn't have as much peaking, the relative contribution of residential versus industrial. As we move forward and we think about data centers and how they're going to operate, we need to create models of how do we take advantage of these new types of need, as well as these new types of resources to drive, again, outcomes that are better for everyone.

The thing about electricity, because it is a single system, everything's interconnected. And if we make it all work together, like one big machine, then the outcome is improved. And I'm hoping, that was a long way of my saying, I don't think it should matter. I think it should absolutely is what makes economic sense and what makes sense for consumers as well as for the economy. Let the market function as it will.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Right. So as we finish this conversation today, I'm curious if you have any specific advice. Let's say you were regulating a utility leader, a CEO, a decision maker listening to this episode who wants to help further this cause, who wants to get to that future where things are innovated at the edge and distributed energy resources are the norm, the system is functioning much more smoothly than it is today. What would be some of the first steps you would recommend that that leader take to help get to that point?

Audrey Zibelman: Again, I would say, let's start with making sure that our system modeling is robust and that we look at the alternatives. And then secondarily, don't shy away about sharing this best information with their regulators. Some of the best conversations I had as a regulator was when a utility CEO came to me and said, here's my problem. I'll show you all the data. There's nothing to hide here because we're in this together. And as a result of that, we were able to make really much better decisions. And so, you know, we're running into, I think, a period of time where the things are going to be happening very quickly. And transparency across the board, sharing to your regulators, sharing with advocates, is probably going to help you a lot more.

Because I think, and if you talk to most utilities and regulators, it's really important that utilities remain economically healthy and that they are able to drive innovation and participate as partners in innovation. And at the same time, recognize that these issues are complex enough that there needs to be a much more collaborative approach than there was historically. We say that in New York, I think it's even truer now. And you see the most innovative companies, again, I could point to Landis+Gyr, one that is in the innovation space, we find that through collaboration and interoperability, we get ahead much better than we could ever do on our own.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Absolutely. A rising tide, right?

Audrey Zibelman: That's right.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Wonderful. Well, Audrey, I would love to now get to our lightning round. We are going to close out this conversation with three rapid-fire questions. So if you don't mind, keep your answer short, to about a couple words, a sentence or two, and we'll have some fun. So my first question for you today, what is your favorite part about your job?

Audrey Zibelman: Favorite part about my job is being able to see how this works in different countries.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yes, definitely. Second question for you. Do you have any recommendations for anybody who might want to learn more about what we've talked about today? Could be a read, a newsletter, an idea, a person, a watch, someone to follow. What would you recommend as sort of further homework that people could do to better orient themselves with this topic?

Audrey Zibelman: Read the Pew Playbook.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Easy enough. And like I said, we will have that in the show notes. And my final question for you, do you have one small piece of career advice you would give somebody early in their utility career to have one as wonderful as yours has been so far?

Audrey Zibelman: Never say no. Somebody offers you an opportunity, take it.

Kinsey Grant Baker: I love it. I love it so much. Well, Audrey, thank you so much for joining us on Power Perspectives today. It has been such a robust conversation and I have learned so, so much from you. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights.

Audrey Zibelman: Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Wonderful. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into this episode of Power Perspectives. I'm Kinsey Grant Baker, and I will see you next time.