Mary Powell and the power of giving up the corner office

Mary Powell once shared a stand-up desk with three other people. By then, she was running Green Mountain Power. A chief executive generally acquires more office as a career progresses: a door, a view, enough polished wood to land a small aircraft. Powell had helped sell the corporate offices and move the business into a service center. The desk was a fairly good indication of what she thought a utility needed.

She wanted a company closer to its customers and less impressed with its own arrangements. Years later, at Sunrun, the same preference would acquire a much larger physical expression. Electricity could come from a roof. Storage could sit at a house. A customer could help supply the grid at the moment the grid needed help. The familiar geography of power, with the important equipment somewhere far away, was open to revision.

Powell calls herself an “accidental executive.” It is a disarming description for someone who has spent decades changing how energy businesses operate. The accident explains how she arrived. It does rather less to explain why she stayed.

An actor’s daughter learns another business

She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the youngest of three children, in a family shaped by her actor father. Summers brought the family to Vermont’s Malletts Bay. She attended an arts high school in New York and earned an associate’s degree at Keene State College. The route contained considerably more music and art than preparation for utility regulation.

Back in New York, she took a technical-writing job at the Reserve fund. Over seven years she moved into operations, becoming associate director of operations at 28. During her time there, the fund grew from $200 million to $3.5 billion. What matters to her story is the apprenticeship: she learned to operate inside a growing financial business without first deciding that business was her calling.

Vermont offered another direction. She moved there, started businesses and worked in banking and state government before joining Green Mountain Power in 1998. Her professional life accumulated through encounters and responsibilities. The neat career ladder would have to be drawn afterward.

That background remained part of her public account of leadership. When she received the POWER-GEN Woman of the Year award in 2014, she credited her arts training with helping her lead. An arts education asks a person to imagine an arrangement that does not yet exist, then persuade other people to participate. A utility has rather more paperwork than a rehearsal room, but the second task travels surprisingly well.

The utility gets a smaller desk

Before joining Green Mountain Power, Powell had read about a proposed rate increase of roughly 16 percent. Her interviews left her thinking the organization was bureaucratic and expensive. She proposed an extensive overhaul to the chief executive who was recruiting her. In her later account, the restructuring removed about $8 million from corporate costs and reduced the workforce from 340 to 190.

Those changes carried consequences for employees as well as for the balance sheet. They also explain why the shared desk deserves attention beyond its charm as an executive anecdote. Management was changing the institution’s physical habits along with its spending. Powell wanted Green Mountain Power to have some of the distinctiveness people associated with another Vermont business, Ben & Jerry’s. A utility with a personality: regulation had survived stranger things.

She became chief operating officer in 2001 and chief executive in 2008, leading the utility through 2019. The work expanded from internal organization to the relationship between a household and its electricity provider. By 2016, she was discussing a utility that offered broader energy services, including helping customers save energy. Selling electricity and helping people need less of it required a more interesting conversation than sending the monthly bill.

“I’ve tried to lead the change I want to see.”

Mary Powell, 2022

She also brought a particular view of who belonged in leadership. Discussing the energy industry in 2022, she described a Green Mountain Power leadership team with a roughly even gender split. She had long felt like an outsider, she said, with her theatrical upbringing contributing to that feeling. Her response was to shape the team around her.

Why a solar company hired a utility boss

Sunrun appointed Powell to its board in 2018. Three years later, it chose her to succeed co-founder Lynn Jurich as chief executive, effective August 31, 2021. Jurich moved to executive co-chair alongside fellow co-founder Edward Fenster. Powell entered a business with founders still involved and a substantial customer base already built.

The appointment had an appealing wrinkle. Here was a rooftop-solar business recruiting from the industry whose habits it challenged. Powell, however, had already worked on the connection between household batteries and utility needs. Green Mountain Power had been an early participant in using networks of home batteries as a power resource. Sunrun wanted to develop that approach across a much wider territory.

Her experience gave her a useful second language. She understood the utility’s responsibilities and incentives, and she wanted customers to gain more control over their own energy. In the months after taking the job, she spoke about “radical collaboration.” The phrase acknowledges how many parties have to cooperate before an attractive idea becomes a working electrical system.

The house joins the power plant

Consider the household battery. It can hold electricity for later use at home. With the appropriate equipment, enrollment and coordination, it can also participate in a program that supports the wider grid. A collection of these systems is often called a virtual power plant. Powell prefers distributed power plant: the equipment is quite real, even when it has no single address.

That preference for tangible benefits runs through her interviews. She has discussed customers seeking steadier costs and greater independence alongside cleaner electricity. In 2023, she described the frustration of a process whose permitting and grid-connection requirements varied by location. A family could want the equipment and still tire of the journey to getting it switched on. The operational challenge begins well before anyone admires a finished roof.

Powell’s proposed remedies included standardized interconnection requirements, clearer costs and simpler approvals. These are modest-sounding ambitions beside the language of energy revolutions. They are also the sort of changes that determine whether a customer completes a purchase. Bureaucracy rarely photographs well. It can still occupy most of the picture.

At a live conversation in Brooklyn in 2024, she asked the Sunrun team in the audience to stand for applause. She also talked about calling customers weekly, working in stores and knocking on doors with employees. The desk had become a doorstep. Both put the executive within conversational reach of the people whose decisions keep the enterprise going.

Two numbers that refuse to tell one story

By the second quarter of 2026, Sunrun reported a 74 percent storage attachment rate, compared with 70 percent a year earlier. Batteries were increasingly part of new installations. The same results showed subscriber additions down 31 percent year over year, to 19,793. A stronger battery mix was arriving alongside slower additions.

That combination gives Powell’s present assignment its difficulty. Turning homes into useful energy infrastructure requires customers, installations and financing that work as a business. In August, Sunrun reduced its annual cash-generation guidance and described a greater focus on direct sales and the value of assets it had already installed. A persuasive account of the future still has to make it through the quarterly results.

Recognition has accompanied her career, including a place on the 2024 TIME100 Climate list and the 2026 CNBC Changemakers list. Awards capture the appeal of the proposition. Execution measures whether the proposition holds together. Powell’s job requires attention to both the person answering the door and the investor reading the accounts.

A power station with many front doors

In October 2026, the distributed-power idea received another practical test. Sunrun announced that its combined dispatch with Tesla delivered 669 megawatts of peak power on October 5 and 745 megawatts on October 6 during California’s heat wave. Those figures describe the companies’ combined effort. They measure peak power, rather than the total energy supplied across an evening.

Another extension was taking shape in September, when Sunrun and SPAN announced plans to pair home solar and batteries with distributed computing equipment in new residential communities, beginning in Texas and other specified markets. The proposal adds another possible use for a network already attached to homes. It remains a deployment plan, with the work of proving its economics and operation ahead.

Outside the corporate account, Powell has described enjoying farm life with her husband Mark, daughter Alex, dogs and barn animals. It is a pleasingly crowded alternative to the solitary executive portrait. Her public life also keeps returning to groups: a leadership team, installation crews, founders around a table, households participating in a grid program.

The shared desk offers a useful way into that story. Giving up an office did not supply anyone’s electricity. It expressed a preference about where a leader should stand. Powell has spent the intervening years moving closer to the customer, then asking what the customer’s house might do. The next power station may require a surprising number of doorbells.