Speaking from ITC Holdings’ new headquarters in Novi (Michigan), Welch speaks to Adam Burns, Editor-in-Chief at MeetTheBoss.tv, about the state of the US utility system, Welch defines it as the “Achilles’ Heel of the 21st century”. He tells Adam, “I don’t think the utility business is hallmarked by people of passion. I think it’s hallmarked by people of ‘this is the way it is’. Everything is viewed as truly evolutionary. If you were to measure this as a one mile run, the people in the utility business look at one millimetre a year as being success. We need to make a change there.”
“The system that we have in the United States is not well positioned to move the country forward,” warns Welch. He believes the perfect system would be to have all States electrically interconnected in a way that we could allow the country to develop a competitive wholesale market where power could be transacted competitively. “Today if you look at the system that we have it’s not unlike the interstate highway system that existed in the 1940s where there was no interstate highway system. We only had a bunch of state roads. So you’d go from state to state. The rules would change. There was no coordination across the state lines.”
Welch has found, much to his chagrin, that it is not easy to get 50 independent states or the 48 contiguous States to play like they all belong to the United States. “Every State has their own position for themselves.”
Change needed
“When we look at this big, vast grid that we have out here today and all of the generators and everything out here we don’t want to look forward and say, ‘Look, we have wind blowing every day. Why don’t we harvest that? We can harvest that every day.’”, says Welch, adding that we absolutely have to change or we are going to be held hostage to a whole host of foreign governments and a whole host of things that we do not want to do.
“We are the most energy consuming nation in the world but we optimized around the price signals that we’ve been given. It’s been cheap in this country. It’s been cheap for a lot of y ears and it’s still cheap today relative to terms of people external to the United States. We have a way to transform ourselves to where we can hold the price not to escalate as bad as it’s going to,” he says during the interview, concluding that: “We have a way where we can change the way we do business, for instance, commuting. We don’t have to pour gasoline into a car. We actually can use an electric vehicle to do that and I believe it’s a smart thing to do. It’s a smart thing to do because it’s good for my grandkids”.
To see the interview in full visit MeetTheBoss.tv:
Interview with Joseph L. Welch, CEO of ITC Holdings
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