electric-grid
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Ted Geisler and the education of a horse trainer
A riding lesson became a career detour. Now the Arizona native leading APS has to make a growing state’s appetite for electricity add up for the people already paying the bill.
Robert Blue and the problem with going faster
A former policy adviser now runs Dominion Energy, where the digital economy meets the electric grid. His route to the job runs through Virginia government, a law review, and the occasional kayak trip down the James.
Kim Greene and the art of hearing bad news
Before she led Georgia Power, Kim Greene learned how to recover from a failed engineering class. Her career since has turned on a larger question: how do you keep a vast system honest about its problems?
Garrick Rochow and the Things You Cannot Switch Off
His father helped keep Consumers Energy in step with environmental rules. Now Garrick Rochow runs the company, with a harder assignment: change how Michigan gets its power while keeping the lights on.
Hudson Gilmer and the power hiding in plain sight
After a career in telecom and energy analytics, Hudson Gilmer co-founded LineVision to help utilities find spare capacity in existing power lines. Getting the technology into the control room took years of patient work.
Justin Lopas and the Factory That Ends at Your House
A former SpaceX manufacturing engineer is turning home batteries into grid infrastructure. His hardest assembly line runs through driveways, electricians and city hall.
Heron Power
Heron Power is a Scotts Valley, California company building solid-state transformers - power electronics purpose-built for the modern electrical grid. Founded in 2025 by former Tesla powertrain and energy chief Drew Baglino, its flagship Heron Link converts medium-voltage electricity to usable low-voltage power in a modular, software-integrated package, replacing the century-old iron-core transformer. The company targets utility-scale solar, grid-scale batteries, and hyperscale AI data centers, and is building a 40-gigawatt US factory to meet a backlog of orders.
Drew Baglino
Drew Baglino spent 18 years at Tesla building the guts of the electric age - the Model S powertrain, the Powerwall and Megapack, the 4680 battery cell and a clean-sheet 50 GWh factory in Texas. In 2024 he walked away as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy and aimed his next act at the one piece of grid hardware almost nobody had touched in a century: the transformer. His startup, Heron Power, builds software-controlled solid-state transformers and in February 2026 raised a $140 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build a 40 GW U.S. factory. He also quietly founded a residential heat-pump company, Sadi Thermal Machines.
VEIR
VEIR is a Woburn, Massachusetts company commercializing high-temperature superconducting power lines that move 5 to 10 times more electricity than conventional cables at the same voltage and footprint. Its key breakthrough is a passive, evaporative liquid-nitrogen cooling system that keeps superconductors cold without heavy machinery. Founded in 2019 out of Breakthrough Energy Ventures research, VEIR targets utilities, renewable developers, and increasingly the power-hungry AI data center market. It closed a $75M Series B in January 2025 led by Munich Re Ventures, with backing from Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund.