With Great Power

There are genuinely useful operational details buried here - the shadow billing/bill protection concept, the bolt-on advanced billing engine workaround for a 1970s mainframe, and the segmented customer communications approach - but the episode is laced with corporate platitudes and high-level generalities that dilute the signal significantly for a 23-minute runtime.

“with shadow billing and guaranteed bill protection, if your customers would have been better off on their old rate compared to their time of day rate, they would have been made whole”

“we needed an advanced billing engine. So we went to those partner utilities and said, how are you getting the work that you're doing?”

The rate modernization pilot-to-opt-out arc and legacy-system bolt-on approach are mildly interesting as practitioner solutions, but the broader transformation narrative follows a completely standard utility improvement playbook - cross-functional teams, J.D. Power benchmarking, customer centricity - without any contrarian or first-principles framing.

“go slow to begin with so that we can learn and iterate and improve”

“organizational transformation happens when you have a steady focus on the customer experience, the needs of your customers and who you're serving”

Brian Kurtz is a relevant practitioner who demonstrably did this work at scale, but he is a Senior Manager of Special Projects - not a C-suite or VP-level executive - and the episode is produced by GridX, a vendor he explicitly credits, which raises questions about selection bias and candor.

“we are not only the most improved utility since the year after we started in J.D. Power in the residential sector, but we are the top highest rated utility in business this last year”

“we got authorization to finish off the AMI deployment and deploy smart meters to our 1.1 million customers”

The episode offers a handful of real data points and named references - SRP, APS, PGE site visits, 1.1M customers, 80% awareness, 70% shifting/saving - but lacks dollar figures, specific J.D. Power score changes, timeline milestones, or cost savings numbers that would make the evidence genuinely actionable.

“there was Salt River Project. There was APS, Arizona Public Service. There was PGE. All of these utilities we had the opportunity to learn from”

“Over 80% of our customers are now aware that they have rate options, and that time of day is out there. Over 70% of those customers three months after them being on a time of day rate have reported some level of shifting and saving”

The host asks serviceable setup questions but never pushes back on a single claim, accepts vague answers without follow-up for specifics, and closes with a superhero metaphor question; the dynamic is unsurprisingly soft given this is a branded podcast produced by GridX - the exact vendor the guest credits for the program's success.

“So selfishly, I'm very interested in the rate modernization projects. So let's dig into that a little bit.”

“So give us a high-level overview of the approach that you all took on that rate modernization piece.”