2026 Winners and Finalists

SEPA is proud to announce the winners of the 2026 Power Player Awards, honoring the trailblazers driving breakthroughs in grid resilience, load growth planning, and global scaling. Selected from nearly 130 nominations, these honorees demonstrate the visionary leadership and technical innovation required to deliver a reliable, affordable, and resilient energy system.

Excellence in Leadership

Winner: Pedro J. Pizarro

Summary: Pedro J. Pizarro, President and CEO of Edison International, was recognized for his transformational leadership advancing grid resilience, electrification, climate adaptation, and industry collaboration at both the national and global levels. Since becoming CEO in 2016, Pedro has helped shape the future of the electric power sector through a strategic vision centered on resilience, affordability, decarbonization, innovation, and long-term community and industry impact. Under his leadership, Edison International and its companies have advanced major grid hardening and wildfire mitigation initiatives, accelerated electrification and infrastructure modernization efforts, and strengthened industry preparedness for climate-driven risks, extreme weather events and long-term energy system transformation.

Pedro’s leadership exemplified innovation through his commitment to forward-looking system planning, advanced analytics, AI-enabled operational and infrastructure technologies, and resilience-focused investments. His leadership helped drive initiatives including SCE’s Advanced Waveform Anomaly Recognition System (AWARE), which detects and analyzes grid faults before escalation to improve reliability and safety, as well as large-scale wildfire mitigation and targeted undergrounding programs that continue to shape industry best practices nationwide. His strategic leadership has also informed industry-wide policy and planning through multiple climate and electrification white papers and resilience frameworks that continue to influence resilience planning, infrastructure modernization, and long-term decarbonization strategies across the evolving energy sector.

Collaboration has been foundational to Pedro’s leadership model. Through leadership roles with the Edison Electric Institute, the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, and national and international climate and energy forums, Pedro has helped align utilities, government agencies, regulators, technology providers, and community stakeholders around shared resilience and clean energy goals. His leadership during periods of industry disruption and climate-related challenges emphasized cross-sector collaboration, transparent stakeholder engagement, customer- and community-focused solutions and long-term resilience planning to support both immediate response and long-term community rebuilding.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Winner: Paul Lau

Summary: SEPA is proud to recognize Paul Lau with the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of his extraordinary leadership, enduring industry impact, and longstanding commitment to advancing the electric power sector.

Over the course of nearly 45 years at SMUD, including his tenure as Chief Executive Officer and General Manager, Paul helped shape SMUD into a nationally recognized leader in decarbonization, grid innovation, customer affordability, and community-centered utility leadership. Under his leadership, SMUD launched its ambitious 2030 Zero Carbon Plan, the most aggressive carbon reduction goal of any large utility in the United States, while maintaining rates that remain among the lowest in California and approximately 50% below neighboring investor-owned utilities.

Paul’s leadership consistently demonstrated that ambitious clean energy goals and affordability can advance together. During his tenure, SMUD secured more than 1,430 MW of zero-carbon energy resources since 2021, expanded renewable and storage technologies, pioneered innovative customer programs such as SolarShares and StorageShares, and helped position Sacramento as a national hub for clean transportation and mobility innovation through the California Mobility Center initiative. His leadership also helped drive billions of dollars in regional economic impact, workforce development opportunities, research investment, and community partnerships focused on ensuring the clean energy transition benefits all communities.

Throughout his career, Paul championed collaboration across utilities, government agencies, academic institutions, businesses, and community organizations to accelerate innovation and build inclusive pathways toward decarbonization. He consistently shared SMUD’s model and lessons learned nationally and internationally through industry forums, climate conferences, and public policy engagement, demonstrating how utilities can pursue bold climate goals while maintaining reliability, resilience, and customer trust.

SEPA also recognizes Paul’s exceptional service and leadership within the organization, including his dedicated tenure as Chair of SEPA’s Board of Directors. During his time as Board Chair, Paul played an instrumental role in helping guide SEPA through a period of strategic growth and evolution, strengthening the organization’s impact and reinforcing its role as a trusted convener and industry leader.

Widely respected for his visionary leadership, collaborative spirit, and deep commitment to public service, Paul has left a lasting mark on the energy industry and the communities it serves. SEPA is honored to celebrate his remarkable career and enduring contributions with this Lifetime Achievement Award.

Grid Power Player of the Year Awardee

Winner: PPL Electric

Summary: SEPA named PPL Electric’s Smart Grid, Automation & SCADA Team the 2026 Grid Power Player of the Year for its DER Management Program, the electric industry’s first large-scale deployment of an active DER Management program in the United States. Designed to safely integrate growing amounts of distributed renewable energy while improving power quality, reliability, and hosting capacity. The program addresses the increasing voltage volatility and operational challenges created by rapidly rising DER penetration. PPL Electric implemented a comprehensive solution combining a Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS), utility‑installed DER Management devices, smart inverters, and telemetry via AMI or cellular networks. This enables real‑time monitoring and active management of inverter grid‑support settings, and system‑wide optimization. Since its launch in 2021, the initiative has increased DER hosting capacity by more than 98 MW, supported a 265% increase in DER applications, improved voltage performance and reliability, reduced interconnection costs, and is projected to produce net benefits of $65.5 million over the 2025-2030 period.

Growth Power Player of the Year Awardee

Winner: CPS Energy

Summary: SEPA named CPS Energy the 2026 Growth Power Player of the Year for its strategic acquisition of 1,632 megawatts of natural gas generation to meet the San Antonio region’s accelerating energy demand. By securing modern, dispatchable capacity at approximately half the cost of building comparable generation assets, the utility executed a proactive infrastructure strategy that saved an estimated $2 billion and avoided significant inflationary and supply chain risks. These dual-fuel capable facilities stabilize customer costs and support regional economic development while offering future hydrogen blending potential to align with the utility’s broader clean energy goals. This collaborative effort—supported by cross-functional internal teams and the San Antonio City Council—serves as a scalable model for other public power organizations to address resource adequacy through disciplined financial planning, stakeholder coordination, and long-term infrastructure strategy.

Globe Power Player of the Year Awardee

Winner: EPRI

Summary: EPRI was recognized for its Climate Resilience and Adaptation Initiative (Climate READi), a groundbreaking global effort to create the electric power sector’s first industry-aligned framework for physical climate risk assessment, resilience planning, and adaptation. Launched in 2022, the initiative brings together industry best practices, climate science, and resilience research to help utilities and system planners proactively prepare for evolving climate risks and extreme weather impacts. To date, Climate READi has produced more than 60 technical resources, tools, and guidance documents supporting resilience-informed planning across the energy sector.

The initiative demonstrated innovation by establishing a unified, forward-looking framework that integrates climate risk considerations directly into power system planning and investment decision-making. Climate READi provides utilities and stakeholders with practical methodologies to assess hazards, evaluate asset vulnerabilities, prioritize adaptation investments, and improve long-term system resilience. Through case studies and advanced modeling approaches, the initiative demonstrated how proactive resilience planning can significantly improve system reliability outcomes, including one case showing a 97% improvement in resource adequacy loss-of-load expectation metrics over baseline conditions.

Collaboration was central to Climate READi’s success, bringing together more than 40 utilities, approximately 150 external organizations, and stakeholders across North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, including national laboratories, universities, regulators, NGOs, and standards organizations. Its standardized yet modular approach makes the framework highly replicable and scalable across regions, markets, and regulatory environments, providing utilities and system planners worldwide with adaptable tools to strengthen resilience, improve long-term planning, and support more reliable and sustainable energy systems.