Ted Geisler and the education of a horse trainer

The first useful connection in Ted Geisler’s utility career came through a horse. As a young trainer in Scottsdale, he taught Bill Stewart and Stewart’s wife to ride. Years later, uncertain about pursuing veterinary school, Geisler asked Stewart for advice. Stewart suggested trying another industry. He worked at Arizona Public Service. Geisler applied for an entry-level job in 2001.

An exchange that began at a ranch eventually led to the chairmanship of a publicly traded electricity company. In April 2025, Geisler became chairman, president and chief executive of APS and its parent, Pinnacle West. The distance between those two workplaces makes a good story. The more interesting question is what he carried from one to the other.

He still trains horses. He also describes his job in unusually downward-facing terms for someone sitting at the top of an organization: “I truly believe that I work for them.” The people he means are his employees. A horse, after all, has limited interest in an organizational chart.

A career with several different control rooms

Geisler’s APS career began in generation. It subsequently crossed transmission operations, corporate strategy, investor relations, information technology and finance. Before taking the chief executive’s office, he had been responsible for several of the systems that make the company function, from moving electricity to explaining its finances.

He became chief information officer in 2018 and chief financial officer in 2020. In May 2022, he was appointed APS president. That role brought together non-nuclear operations, public policy, technology, customer experience and strategy. The sequence gave him a view of the utility through several windows before he was asked to take responsibility for the whole building.

There is something practical about that route. A grid decision can become a financing decision, a technology decision and a customer-service problem in the same afternoon. Someone has to understand why colleagues looking at the same project see different risks. Geisler’s résumé offers a reason he might recognize each of their arguments.

His education followed a similarly varied path: a science degree from Colorado State University, an MBA emphasizing strategy at Arizona State University, and later programs in nuclear reactor technology at MIT and strategic financial leadership at Stanford. Those last two were executive programs, rather than additional university degrees. Together, they fit the job’s peculiar combination of physics and money.

The promotion came with a growing load

The succession was announced in December 2024. Jeff Guldner would retire as chairman and chief executive at the end of March, and Geisler would take over on April 1. Guldner stayed in a non-executive advisory role to support the transition. It was a handover between colleagues who had already worked closely on company strategy.

For Geisler, the appointment expanded an existing responsibility rather than beginning an unfamiliar relationship with Arizona. He is a Phoenix native and a third-generation Arizonan. APS is based in Phoenix, too. Its current leadership biography puts its workforce above 6,600 and its reach at approximately 1.5 million homes and businesses across the state.

That scale makes the word “customer” wonderfully inadequate. It covers the resident watching a summer bill, the small business deciding whether to expand and the industrial operation seeking an enormous new connection. Their needs meet inside the same system. The chief executive must explain how serving one group will affect the others.

On August 2, 2026, APS reached a peak demand of 9,164 megawatts. Geisler highlighted the record on the company’s earnings call. It exceeded the previous year’s record by more than 500 megawatts. For a utility executive, a record like that is both evidence of growth and an instruction to keep building.

The bill is part of the biography

Geisler’s public appearances increasingly concern the cost of that construction. In June 2026, he defended a proposed 14 percent residential rate increase, explaining that existing rates reflected costs from 2021 and 2022. Poles, transformers and cable had become more expensive. His argument was that reliable service required rates that reflected current costs.

The word “proposed” matters. A company’s request and a regulator’s decision are separate events. So are an executive’s explanation of an increase and a household’s ability to absorb it. Geisler’s challenge includes making the investment case intelligible to people who encounter the company primarily as a monthly expense.

Utility leadership has an awkward feature: much of the product’s value arrives as an absence. An evening without an interruption attracts little notice. A bill with a larger number attracts plenty. Geisler must make decisions about infrastructure whose ordinary success can be almost invisible to the people financing it.

His experience as CFO gives this part of the job particular weight. He has worked on the financial side of the enterprise whose costs he now defends in public. That background helps explain his vocabulary; it does not relieve him of the obligation to make the numbers understandable outside the company.

A place in the queue, with conditions

In August 2026, Geisler presented APS’s Pledge for Responsible Energy Growth to local government leaders. Its three commitments were to safeguard reliability, protect customer rates and preserve capacity. Behind the language sat a concrete question: what should an extra-large electricity user have to contribute before joining the grid?

APS says such customers must pay the costs associated with serving their needs. Its approach includes long-term agreements, upfront financial commitments and financial security if a customer reduces or ends service early. The company also says it will not connect new extra-large users faster than the system can reliably support them.

These are commitments about how growth will be handled. Their eventual value depends on the agreements, investments and operating decisions that follow. For Geisler, they set a public test: expanding service for data centers and chip manufacturers while reserving room for the homes and ordinary businesses that will also arrive.

It is a complicated form of hospitality. Arizona wants investment. Existing customers want dependable service and manageable bills. A utility can welcome a new neighbor while asking how much of the driveway that neighbor intends to use. The arithmetic belongs in the welcome conversation.

An old plant gets another question

Geisler also has to decide what sort of electricity system will meet that demand. In July 2026, he discussed APS’s plans to convert part of the closed Cholla Power Plant in Joseph City to natural gas. The plant had stopped burning coal in March 2025. The proposal would put part of an existing site to a different generating use.

The distinction between planning and completion is especially important here. A proposed conversion is a decision about a possible resource, with work still ahead. It illustrates the kind of choice on his desk: how to use existing facilities while assembling the supply that future customers will require.

Nuclear power is another part of his remit. APS operates Palo Verde Generating Station, and Geisler joined the Nuclear Energy Institute’s board and executive committee effective April 1, 2025. The industry association role places him in discussions extending beyond Arizona, alongside leaders responsible for commercial nuclear facilities and technologies.

His October 15, 2026 conversation with Nat Bullard on the Nameplate podcast ranged across rising demand, infrastructure investment, workforce development, nuclear power and long-duration storage. The range is revealing. There is no single purchase order that settles the future of this business. People, equipment and long planning horizons all have to meet.

The next hire needs room to learn

When APS interns asked which career skill would matter most, Geisler’s public answer was learning agility. He encouraged curiosity, questions and the willingness to move outside familiar work. He also made room for both specialists and people who build experience across different functions. His own career makes the latter option tangible.

That view creates a useful expectation for a chief executive. If curiosity matters in a new employee, it has to remain respectable in an experienced manager. Admitting that another department knows something you do not becomes part of doing the job. His career across operations and corporate roles offers a practical argument for keeping those conversations open.

His community work extends that interest in people beyond the payroll. His board service includes the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. He also sits on ASU’s W. P. Carey Dean’s Council. These connections place him among people thinking about the state’s businesses, education and future workforce.

As APS Foundation chair, he connects community investment with the demands of a growing state. The foundation’s 2025 activities included bringing together more than 90 people from 45 education nonprofits. He joined Helios Education Foundation chief executive Paul Luna for a conversation at the gathering. The subjects around his desk keep leading back to who will do the work next.

“I truly believe that I work for them.”Ted Geisler, on supporting his team

Responsibility, measured after the speech

Geisler’s message introducing APS’s code of ethical conduct emphasizes respect, honesty, accountability and earning trust through actions. Those are familiar executive commitments. In his industry, they acquire unusually concrete tests: what a customer pays, whether a connection is ready and how a company responds when circumstances change.

The horse trainer’s route to the executive office gives him an approachable origin story. The work ahead gives that story its stakes. He joined APS to try a different direction; a quarter-century later, he is responsible for helping a growing state plan its own. His next chapter will be measured in service delivered, construction completed and bills that customers can understand.