A press release hit my inbox over the weekend that sent me into a nostalgic YouTube spiral. Apparently AEP Texas, Public Service of Oklahoma and the Southwestern Electric Power Co. are bringing back their Louie the Lightning Bug character in safety literature aimed at school kids.
After watching a few of "Louie's" old PSAs, I started emailing people I know who live all over the country to see how widespread the little guy's fame was. Just about everyone remembered him once they saw a clip.
If you don't remember Louie, he was a prominent figure during your Saturday morning cartoons, where his PSAs (sponsored by your regional utilities) would warn you about the dangers of fallen power lines, flying kites near power lines, or messing around with power outlets and cords in the household. (click hyperlinks to see the YouTube videos)
The voice of Louie and his animation style could be familiar to you even if you don't recognize him on sight. In his original PSAs, Louie was voiced (and sung) by Jack Sheldon, whose voice also featured prominently in "Schoolhouse Rock!" Especially the "I'm Just a Bill" skit, that walks kids through how a bill becomes a law.
Being reminded of this stuff and seeing how much of the visuals and music that I actually remember to this very day made me wonder why companies don't bother much with public service announcements anymore. They were hugely popular in the '70s and '80s, made big contributions to pop culture and were clearly successful in communicating their messages.
Utilities are always talking about the lessons they need the public to understand. Maybe a PSA with a catchy tune is in order every now and then.
Showing posts with label utility industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label utility industry. Show all posts
Monday, April 15, 2013
Thursday, November 15, 2012
What will it take to get energy on the agenda?
The elections are over, the White House successfully defended by the incumbent and neither the House nor the Senate changed hands. Now reporters on the Hill and in the White House Press Corps are asking their questions about what will be on the agenda for the next four years.
Those of us in the utility and energy sector are wondering — and I hope we're not the only ones — whether energy policy will have any space at all on that agenda.
If you want to know what will be on the agenda, look at what the winner ran on. President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney's campaign was mostly about taxes, the economy and the role of government — although there were frequent detours into the realms of foreign policy, education and immigration reform.
Energy, when it was mentioned at all, was colored in extremely broad strokes. National politicians seldom get much more specific than the standard lines about energy independence, and the latest buzz phrase appears to be advocating for an "all of the above" energy strategy.
Talking in broad strokes, though, never seems to produce a broad-based, holistic energy strategy that addresses how we generate, deliver and consume electricity. If we want to address the problems we face in this area, we have to get specific.
A complete energy policy would need to take a stand on what our generation mix would be. Where would we get our power from, beginning with what we have work with in the first place? It would need to address the fact that we still use an energy delivery system that Thomas Edison would recognize, were he alive today. How can we improve on that? Finally, our energy policy would need to make investments in the future — not in a way that attempts to pick winners or losers, but instead makes educated guesses at where we could get the most bang for our buck from promising new research areas.
Those of us in the energy arena already know what we need to do, but our friends (if any) in the political arena would tell us it's a matter of political will and ability. As I said before, if you want to know what will be on the agenda, look at who won, consider how much they won by and remember what they talked about before they won.
In this case, Obama won. Again, and by more than 120 electoral votes and all but one or two of the swing states. And he won without talking about energy frequently or specifically. Apparently he (and voters) felt he didn't need to address that subject in any great depth. When his opponent, Gov. Romney, mentioned energy, it was to express his fondness for coal and nuclear energy, or else to name-check Solyndra. There isn't much sign from exit polls that people who didn't vote for Obama made that choice because he wasn't talking about energy issues.
In all likelihood, this means budget battles and possibly immigration reform will probably take the front seat for the next couple of years as Congress handles the fiscal cliff and Republicans and Democrats attempt to find a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants that everyone can live with. Or maybe I'm being too optimistic. One thing I'm less optimistic of is politicians spending much time on energy.
So what would it take? I'm trying to envision a scenario in which energy becomes the No. 1 issue in American politics and coming up short. We just had a major blackout scenario with Superstorm Sandy and that didn't do it. Neither did the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Nothing seems to get people talking about energy, even though this is such an exciting time to be talking about it.
As I was working on this blog, I saw a report that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters, "We would never propose a carbon tax." It wasn't too long ago that a cap-and-trade bill was working its way through Congress — it passed the House before languishing and dying in the Senate. Cap and trade, itself a Republican idea originally, lost its luster in the highly partisan, budget-preoccupied atmosphere of Obama's first term.
Are there still some brief flickers of hope for a dialogue on energy? Well, I thought it was telling that in his election night address in Chicago, President Obama made a pretty direct reference to climate change — no doubt still thinking about the previous week's storm recovery effort along the East Coast. Although few are willing to point to a single storm and say, "This is climate change," it's hard to watch a storm of Sandy's sheer scale unfold without wondering if this kind of weather is here to stay.
In the end, I'm not sure what it will take to get energy back on the agenda. There are plenty of worthy approaches and plenty of policies Congress, the EPA and others could look into, but it feels like the will just isn't there, or else it's gone anemic in the past few years.
Those of us in the utility and energy sector are wondering — and I hope we're not the only ones — whether energy policy will have any space at all on that agenda.
If you want to know what will be on the agenda, look at what the winner ran on. President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney's campaign was mostly about taxes, the economy and the role of government — although there were frequent detours into the realms of foreign policy, education and immigration reform.
Energy, when it was mentioned at all, was colored in extremely broad strokes. National politicians seldom get much more specific than the standard lines about energy independence, and the latest buzz phrase appears to be advocating for an "all of the above" energy strategy.
Talking in broad strokes, though, never seems to produce a broad-based, holistic energy strategy that addresses how we generate, deliver and consume electricity. If we want to address the problems we face in this area, we have to get specific.
A complete energy policy would need to take a stand on what our generation mix would be. Where would we get our power from, beginning with what we have work with in the first place? It would need to address the fact that we still use an energy delivery system that Thomas Edison would recognize, were he alive today. How can we improve on that? Finally, our energy policy would need to make investments in the future — not in a way that attempts to pick winners or losers, but instead makes educated guesses at where we could get the most bang for our buck from promising new research areas.
Those of us in the energy arena already know what we need to do, but our friends (if any) in the political arena would tell us it's a matter of political will and ability. As I said before, if you want to know what will be on the agenda, look at who won, consider how much they won by and remember what they talked about before they won.
In this case, Obama won. Again, and by more than 120 electoral votes and all but one or two of the swing states. And he won without talking about energy frequently or specifically. Apparently he (and voters) felt he didn't need to address that subject in any great depth. When his opponent, Gov. Romney, mentioned energy, it was to express his fondness for coal and nuclear energy, or else to name-check Solyndra. There isn't much sign from exit polls that people who didn't vote for Obama made that choice because he wasn't talking about energy issues.
In all likelihood, this means budget battles and possibly immigration reform will probably take the front seat for the next couple of years as Congress handles the fiscal cliff and Republicans and Democrats attempt to find a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants that everyone can live with. Or maybe I'm being too optimistic. One thing I'm less optimistic of is politicians spending much time on energy.
So what would it take? I'm trying to envision a scenario in which energy becomes the No. 1 issue in American politics and coming up short. We just had a major blackout scenario with Superstorm Sandy and that didn't do it. Neither did the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Nothing seems to get people talking about energy, even though this is such an exciting time to be talking about it.
As I was working on this blog, I saw a report that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters, "We would never propose a carbon tax." It wasn't too long ago that a cap-and-trade bill was working its way through Congress — it passed the House before languishing and dying in the Senate. Cap and trade, itself a Republican idea originally, lost its luster in the highly partisan, budget-preoccupied atmosphere of Obama's first term.
Are there still some brief flickers of hope for a dialogue on energy? Well, I thought it was telling that in his election night address in Chicago, President Obama made a pretty direct reference to climate change — no doubt still thinking about the previous week's storm recovery effort along the East Coast. Although few are willing to point to a single storm and say, "This is climate change," it's hard to watch a storm of Sandy's sheer scale unfold without wondering if this kind of weather is here to stay.
In the end, I'm not sure what it will take to get energy back on the agenda. There are plenty of worthy approaches and plenty of policies Congress, the EPA and others could look into, but it feels like the will just isn't there, or else it's gone anemic in the past few years.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Sorting out the Duke Energy CEO shuffle
Something about the reports coming out of Charlotte are making the Duke Energy merger feel more like a break-up than the start of a new relationship. The merger with Progress Energy was supposed to create one of the biggest utilities in the world, with some 7.1 million customers. Instead, the only thing it seems to be creating so far is a lot of bad press for the newly merged company.
For those who are still catching up, Progress Energy CEO Bill Johnson was supposed to take charge of the newly merged Duke Energy. Instead, shortly after the merger was finalized, reports came out that Jim Rogers would be the top man at Duke instead of Johnson, as was previously agreed upon.
In effect, Rogers was swapped out for Johnson with Johnson having "served" as CEO for less than a day. Duke called this a "mutual agreement," but that phrasing has sounded fishier as time has gone by and people have talked to the press.
Jim Rogers himself laid out Duke's side of the story, telling the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which is looking into the CEO shuffle that followed the merger, that the board simply lost confidence in Johnson as the merger process advanced.
Rogers' people were concerned about Johnson's management methods, Rogers said, adding that the Duke people were afraid Johnson and his people would try to impose Progress Energy's culture onto the merged company.
Rogers said Johnson's management style was "autocratic" and tended to crowd out other points of view. These concerns were held by the Duke people for quite a while, but apparently weren't bad enough to stop the merger in its tracks. It seems they decided that Johnson was the issue, even as they agreed to make him CEO of the combined company.
Duke Energy officials have said, somewhat defensively, that they had a contractual obligation to make Johnson the CEO, and they did — albeit for less than a day.
Meanwhile, the mainstream press is full of stories about Johnson's "$44 million payday," with "nice work if you can get it" being the go-to punchline.
What we're not hearing much of yet, though, is Johnson's side of the story. Right now it's looking like less of a merger of equals and more that Duke Energy simply swallowed Progress Energy whole. Keeping Johnson as CEO was supposed to ensure that Progress Energy's interests were well-represented in the early days of the new Duke Energy's operations, but now that won't be happening.
One thing's for sure: People will be talking, and soon. The latest development in this story is the departure of many Johnson loyalists from Duke. The vice president of regulated utilities, the executive vice president and chief administrative officer and the chief integration and innovation officer have each just handed in their resignations. We'll be keeping an eye on this story, so stay tuned.
For those who are still catching up, Progress Energy CEO Bill Johnson was supposed to take charge of the newly merged Duke Energy. Instead, shortly after the merger was finalized, reports came out that Jim Rogers would be the top man at Duke instead of Johnson, as was previously agreed upon.
In effect, Rogers was swapped out for Johnson with Johnson having "served" as CEO for less than a day. Duke called this a "mutual agreement," but that phrasing has sounded fishier as time has gone by and people have talked to the press.
Jim Rogers himself laid out Duke's side of the story, telling the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which is looking into the CEO shuffle that followed the merger, that the board simply lost confidence in Johnson as the merger process advanced.
Rogers' people were concerned about Johnson's management methods, Rogers said, adding that the Duke people were afraid Johnson and his people would try to impose Progress Energy's culture onto the merged company.
Rogers said Johnson's management style was "autocratic" and tended to crowd out other points of view. These concerns were held by the Duke people for quite a while, but apparently weren't bad enough to stop the merger in its tracks. It seems they decided that Johnson was the issue, even as they agreed to make him CEO of the combined company.
Duke Energy officials have said, somewhat defensively, that they had a contractual obligation to make Johnson the CEO, and they did — albeit for less than a day.
Meanwhile, the mainstream press is full of stories about Johnson's "$44 million payday," with "nice work if you can get it" being the go-to punchline.
What we're not hearing much of yet, though, is Johnson's side of the story. Right now it's looking like less of a merger of equals and more that Duke Energy simply swallowed Progress Energy whole. Keeping Johnson as CEO was supposed to ensure that Progress Energy's interests were well-represented in the early days of the new Duke Energy's operations, but now that won't be happening.
One thing's for sure: People will be talking, and soon. The latest development in this story is the departure of many Johnson loyalists from Duke. The vice president of regulated utilities, the executive vice president and chief administrative officer and the chief integration and innovation officer have each just handed in their resignations. We'll be keeping an eye on this story, so stay tuned.
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