Fortnightly Under Forty: Abbey Roy

Of the 64 rising stars, we selected eleven of them to highlight. These eleven exemplify the impressive record and pace of accomplishments of the best of our industry's next generation. The inspiring stories of Haben Goitom of Alliant Energy, Jennifer Wischnowsky of Ameren, Keegan Odle of Burns & McDonnell, Delevane Diaz of EPRI, Sean Meredith of Entergy, Illinois Commissioner Maria Bocanegra, Aaron Curtis of ITC, Ana Stachowiak of NYPA, Lisa Dailey of Northfork Electric Cooperative, Abbey Roy of Southern Company, and Brian Van Abel of Xcel Energy are told in part in the interviews that follow. These unique up-and-comers are already leading the industry's transformation and mission-critical groups within their organizations, in some cases as a COO, CFO or division VP.

PUF: What do you do at Southern Company?

Abbey Roy: Southern Company is the parent of several regulated electric utilities and gas utilities as well as several unregulated businesses. We have an interesting view where we see what's going on in the broader energy industry.

My job is to look for opportunities for growth whether that be some type of business transformation within the regulated utilities or new technology coming at us that could be beneficial for growth. 

I spend a good amount of my time looking at how we can grow businesses outside of our core regulated footprint creating new customer offerings. 

We are trying to look at it from our customers' viewpoint. They buy energy products in different ways today. Twenty years ago, you were dealing with a single entity at a large retail chain. Today, energy managers are looking at what's going on with their energy portfolio across the United States.

We're focusing on how we can provide better service and product offerings, whether it's distributed generation or resiliency products behind the customer meter or it's a large scale renewable PPA where they want to procure three hundred megawatts of wind. We are able to offer that suite of services.

PUF: What is your specific role?

Abbey Roy: We purchased a company in 2015 called PowerSecure that's based in Raleigh, North Carolina. They are a fantastic group of people on the cutting edge of developing behind the meter microgrid technology.

I spend a lot of my time with that team. It's learning from them, spending time with the product development engineers, seeing what they're doing, and trying to help promote the innovation that is coming out of there across our company without hindering them or slowing them down in their ability to innovate.

I spend a lot of time with other technology companies seeking partnerships for new technologies we can deploy. We spend a lot of time looking at the technology providers and startups. 

We are the founding member of a large energy venture fund. Where I fit in the equation is if there are companies that we've made investments in, or that we're looking at making investments in through our venture fund, my team forms execution strategies and teams required to pull through that commercialization into our company.

I meet with those companies, understand the technology, come back to Southern, and put together a project team where we're going to implement some kind of pilot or a test scenario or even start to scale a program. It could be anything from a new technology company to a new commercial model where we're offering something like energy as a service versus just a traditional turnkey product or traditional retail energy.

It's a broad spectrum of where I'm traveling and who I'm meeting with. But the end goal is the same, and it's how do we bring this back to our company and implement this at one of our operating companies.

PUF: How do you pick who to work with?

Abbey Roy: It's hard because there are a lot of great companies out there. We don't have one winner. We try to diversify and offer multiple piloting opportunities. We have a lot of needs. Sometimes we might need long duration storage, but in another scenario, we might need short duration storage.

We are trying to establish relationships that vary and then we will also bring in our core subject matter experts from within our company. Southern has a large engineering and construction technical services organization. We bring those subject matter experts in to work with the technology company and help us determine who is furthest along and who is the best fit for our specific needs at the time.

We have to stay open minded enough that we continuously want to let new people in, but we also have to do enough diligence that we know that the people that we're working with are far enough along technologically that we're protecting our shareholder base and utilizing those funds appropriately.

PUF: After graduating from the University of Alabama, what led you to this role?

Abbey Roy: I worked twelve years at KBR, a fantastic company where I learned a lot. I have a heavy commercial background in business development from that time period. At KBR we weren't infrastructure owners, we were executing projects on behalf of infrastructure owners.

As we were looking at extending products, services, and growth in unregulated, I saw an opportunity when I was at KBR for a company like Southern that had an unregulated arm, a super strong balance sheet, a hardcore operations team, and engineering expertise to come in to some of these on-site behind the meter situations that we were thinking were going to occur. I came in with some preconceived thoughts in my head of what Southern could do.

I had no idea when I came that several members of the Southern leadership were already thinking about those things and working on the acquisition of PowerSecure. When I met our CEO, Mark Lantrip, we realized we were thinking along the same lines. That brought me into my current role and the work we're doing with PowerSecure.

Mark is a visionary and sees these things but also understands the complexity of the utility industry and how to navigate it successfully. He's been a great mentor for me because I came from an unregulated space and had to understand how we get things done in the regulated space.

It's been fun. I have a passion for bringing technology innovation to market. That's another fun thing I get to do. How do we take things to the next level and appropriately manage the risk, because that's a risky endeavor for a conservative company. Southern in the utility space is cutting edge with regard to how much innovation they help pull to market.

PUF: What advice do you give to young people who are starting out?

Abbey Roy: I love working with younger people. I learn from them. They are eager. I love the energy they bring to the team. I feed off of the new ways of doing things.

I encourage them to speak up because a lot of times that's where they're scared. The reality is they know so much and don't realize it and that we can learn from them.

My teams today are filled with younger people and I encourage them to be involved. I want them to not be scared to bring new tools to the table because if they know a better way, we want to know it.

I encourage them to continue learning, because the learning journey never stops. You need to do your day to day job, but you also need to learn what other people do in their jobs. The knowledge that we can cross-share across the company is important. They also need to stay open-minded.

PUF: In five to ten years, some of these things that you're bringing are going to change the customer experience in Southern Company. It that right?

Abbey Roy: Yes. That's part of the success of a company. 

That's something that we can't be scared of. If we're not continuously thinking about how to reinvent ourselves and how to offer new products and services, we become irrelevant. If we are successful, then it should look different in five to ten years. Five to ten years from then it should look different again, because that will mean we've been successful, and that is exciting.

Of the 64 rising stars, we selected eleven of them to highlight. These eleven exemplify the impressive record and pace of accomplishments of the best of our industry's next generation. The inspiring stories of Haben Goitom of Alliant Energy, Jennifer Wischnowsky of Ameren, Keegan Odle of Burns & McDonnell, Delevane Diaz of EPRI, Sean Meredith of Entergy, Illinois Commissioner Maria Bocanegra, Aaron Curtis of ITC, Ana Stachowiak of NYPA, Lisa Dailey of Northfork Electric Cooperative, Abbey Roy of Southern Company, and Brian Van Abel of Xcel Energy are told in part in the interviews that follow. These unique up-and-comers are already leading the industry's transformation and mission-critical groups within their organizations, in some cases as a COO, CFO or division VP.