Our annual Spring luncheon meeting was held on Monday, May 5, 2014 at the Pelham Civic Center.  Our featured guest speaker was Kimberly (Kim) Greene, former President and CEO of Southern Company Services who was recently appointed Chief Operating Officer and Executive V.P. of Southern Company. In her new position, she is responsible for the Southern system’s operations, including generation, transmission, engineering and construction services, research and environmental affairs, as well as Southern Power and Southern Wholesale Energy.

Kim shared her experience with us spanning from her education in engineering science & mechanics at the Univ. of Tenn, Knoxville  to advanced degrees in biomedical engineering at UAB and Business Administration at Samford University.  Kim Green’s biography reads like a “Who’s Who of Young Executives” already on the rise.  She’s a wife to a Southern Company pilot and mother of two children who has deep family roots in Knoxville, Tennessee but calls Birmingham her professional home.  Kim chose to begin her career with SCS-Birmingham in engineering, advancing through operations and finance.  During eight years at Southern Energy, Inc. she progressed in finance, structuring, trading and asset management.

In 2007 Kim was offered and accepted the CFO and Chief Risk Officer position with TVA in Knoxville.  This was a tough professional decision, but Kim placed a higher priority on her family’s happiness and well-being than her own.  After about 5 years with TVA she decided to return to her professional home.  Kim’s time with Southern was positive because of the high caliber and character of employees she worked with, and she enthusiastically remembered several of them in the audience.

From Kim’s tour of TVA’s unfinished Bellefonte Plant, to the new technology plants Southern Company is building in Kemper Co. Mississippi and Augusta, Georgia–each illustrated the history and future of of electric energy production in America.  One is where cost overruns and adaptations to government regulations caused other utilities to back down before completion of new plants–later to wish they had gone ahead and completed them.   The other is where Southern has the foresight, perseverance, and skill to push difficult projects to completion.

Kim covered details from the generation mix, fuel prices, advances in wind power, and stock prices (the year to date trend for Southern stock was higher than the S&P and the DOW).   She also shared some photos of Vogtle’s Unit 3 & 4 progress in Waynesboro, Georgia.

We all enjoyed Kim’s presentation and are proud to have such leadership in charge of the company.

The food was great too!