Our May 2018 meeting was held at “The Club” and featured two great speakers. Retired Alabama Power Vice President Julia Segars opened the meeting with informal update on “Life After Southern”, speaking about her second career as an award-winning humor columnist and author of the book Aunt Sister.  She began the columns under the pen name “Aunt Sister” so as not to interfere with her corporate career. Julia’s husband Frank Segars, an SCS retiree, appears frequently in her columns and in the book as Aunt Sister’s husband “Fred”, along with other family members and an odd assortment of Southern folks, “bless their hearts”.  Julia grew up in Bluff Park, which is known as “The Mountain” in her book.   Keep up with her on her Aunt Sister Facebook page, or her website https://auntsister.com/

The excellent Executive Update was given by E&CS Vice President Paula Marino. She explained that consumer demand is changing, and The Southern Company is changing as well. Paula noted that the relationship between economic growth and electricity sales seems to be changing. Despite economic growth, commercial electricity sales remain weak. Energy efficiency and e-commerce may be causing a fundamental shift in the commercial class.

To combat this, Southern is working to find new revenue sources. We are focusing on technology development for the production, delivery and end-use of energy with projects such as APC’s Smart Neighborhood to demonstrate distributed energy resource (DER) use case optimizing cost, reliability, and environmental impact with a community-scale microgrid. The Reynolds Landing neighborhood demonstrates building-to-grid integration with real time utility to customer interaction.

Indoor agriculture is another promising area. Indoor agriculture saves water, reduces pesticides, makes use of vacant buildings, and provides access to fresh foods.

Collaboration with governments, utilities, universities, and technology developers such as EPRI and DOE is key, for projects such as National Carbon Collection Center and the Next-Gen Nuclear.   Electric vehicle use is increasing.

Defensive measures to cut costs include closing business offices, restructuring, optimizing workforce, retiring facilities, increasing efficiencies, outsourcing labor, standardizing work products.   Offensive measures include increasing bill pay options, expanding renewable portfolios, deploying distributed generation, adding service offerings, exploring new revenue streams.

Here are some additional pictures from the meeting: