Con Edison
Frances Resheske is a former Senior Vice President at Con Edison.
Successful and storied careers are fascinating and the lives of the people who lived them are the ones we all want to know more about. Frances Resheske is known to most in Public Utilities Fortnightly's community. Listen in on what she said about her accomplishments and the future of this amazing industry.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: You were in the utilities industry at Con Edison. What was your role and what did you do on a typical day?
Frances Resheske: There was never a typical day. I was recruited to Con Edison twenty-three years ago by Gene McGrath, then CEO, and he wanted me to build a public affairs department because it was in various pieces and places in the company. He recognized that it was important to have one department.
Twenty-three years later, I have worked with four chairmen and CEOs. I built a department that was enterprise wide and included all our government and regulatory work, energy markets and policy, as well as the communication and philanthropy functions.
Before I left, I built the company's first ever marketing department to focus on energy efficiency, electric vehicles, geothermal, and heat pumps, all part of the future of renewable energy.
PUF: You retired from that job recently.
Frances Resheske: Yes, in September. We announced it in the spring, but I stayed to help the CEO find my successor.
I ended my operating career and now I'm looking at new and different ways to contribute to both the energy industry and to my city, New York. At the moment, I am staying on the board of Con Edison Transmission. I was on the board of the Clean Energy Businesses until their sale in March.
I'm staying involved in three nonprofits. I'm the Vice Chair of the Association for A Better New York, the Board Secretary of League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, and I'm on the Cardinal's Alfred E. Smith Foundation, which focuses on social services in New York City.
PUF: Talk about how you ran into Gene McGrath, and began talking about work at Con Edison.
Frances Resheske: I wasn't looking for a job. I was at Brooklyn Union at the time, which is now a part of National Grid. I had lunch with Gene, found him amazing, wanted to work for him, and he presented me with a huge opportunity.
I'm a big believer that the corporate affairs function is an important piece of developing strategy and avoiding risk. When done properly, it helps with business opportunities and getting through crises. It also helps avoid pitfalls from not paying attention to stakeholders.
It was an opportunity to contribute to this industry, which is highly technical, in a way that made projects doable, and issues move more quickly. Over the years, concentrating on issues such as reliability, resilience, affordability, clean energy commitments, and cyber policies, all have been integral to moving the issues and projects.
I'm a big believer in diversity and inclusion, and that attracted me to Con Edison. Twenty-three years ago, the company had a woman CFO. There had been a woman general counsel and there were three women on the board in 1999.
When I spoke to women's groups in the company, I used to say, "I got the same opportunities, I got challenged in the same way and that was just fine." I hold myself to the highest possible standards.
PUF: Back up a bit more. How did you get into the utilities area, and what propelled you to senior ranks?
Frances Resheske: I began my career working for the mayor of New York City in the 1980s. It was a junior position, I was young, I learned from senior people, and took every opportunity I could to get involved with complex issues and be part of the team.
I'm a strong believer in a team and I built an incredible team at Con Edison. It wasn't just my work; it was the team. When the mayor lost, I found a job at Brooklyn Union to lead city government relations.
I didn't know what utilities did. It was a fascinating time. There wasn't a lot of diversity, and I worked in that space in the early days. Gas had just been deregulated.
I began my career in politics, which is where I intended to stay. But because I went to Brooklyn Union and learned about the utility world, thirty-four years later, I had stayed in it almost my entire career.
PUF: What was your philosophy about the function of external affairs and trying to help Con Edison succeed?
Frances Resheske: I view us as essential workers, and when we're doing our job, we shouldn't be looking for congratulations, but viewing it as doing our jobs.
The company recognized the importance of the corporate affairs function as part of strategy. I was involved in every issue and project in the beginning. I used to say to people in the operating departments, "I'll slow you down in the beginning, but perhaps we won't have the angry community or the bad newspaper articles."
When I look at issues, I think about six months, a year, five years down the line in thinking through what's a good approach. I respect that various stakeholders have different perspectives. If you factor them into your decisions, you get a better outcome.
I had an amazing team with experience from other places they had worked. When we came to the table to have a discussion, we brought different aspects of our backgrounds to the issue.
I expected everyone who worked in my department to understand the business. You had to learn the business. The corporate affairs function is respected when you know the business.
PUF: Talk about a few rewarding moments or experiences during your time at Con Edison.
Frances Resheske: We always tried to do the right thing because I have the highest ethical standards. That is critically important and the way I looked at every issue.
What is right for our customers, the city, for getting a project or an issue moved forward? Examples are positioning the company for business opportunities, impacting policy, moving through and past crises, and avoiding fines.
Every crisis is an opportunity. I ran the war room after many storms and incidents, notably 9/11 and Super Storm Sandy. It's a complicated business, and it's a complicated city.
Every day was rewarding, often difficult and hard, but always rewarding. I always say crises happen in the middle of the night or on the weekend, but that is the job. To be an essential worker is to be there all the time for our customers.
PUF: Talk through a bit of the 9/11, Super Storm Sandy, and the war room.
Frances Resheske: So, 9/11, the immediate issues were shutting the gas off downtown and employee communication because it was difficult. We had employees who didn't know where their loved ones were, then Manhattan got locked down, the roads were closed, and nobody knew exactly what was going on.
The IT department ran phone lines for me through the computers, something that might not happen today because of cyber concerns. That evening, around five o'clock when 7 World Trade Center fell, it fell on one of our substations, and that's when Lower Manhattan went out of electricity.
You couldn't get underground. The engineers basically designed and built a new electric system, tested downtown on the weekend, and the stock market and much of downtown was back up and running on Monday morning.
Super Storm Sandy was difficult too. The wave turned, came in, and flooded. Many of our customers lost power and there were buildings that had damage in the basement. There was lots of suffering and destruction all over the city and the region.
Everyone in our industry has stories like this because every company has customers that rely on them. That's another thing I like about this industry, the working together.
For instance, I was very involved with EEI. I chaired the Communications Executive Advisory Committee, and we developed a lot of the messages in that committee that were important for the industry.
I served as the industry communication liaison for the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, and we worked on unity of message. Every company is thinking about cybersecurity, storms, events that can impact the grid, and helping support each other on behalf of our customers.
PUF: In 2023, the industry is transitioning so rapidly. How do you view the challenges of today?
Frances Resheske: Different parts of the country have different clean energy commitments, but everyone is moving in that direction. It's here to stay. In many ways, the utility industry has been in the forefront of delivering in that space.
We need to think about clean energy, ESG, whether you call it ESG or not, without losing focus on reliability and resiliency. Customers, rightly so, want to be restored as quickly as possible after a storm and want information about what's going on. Wrapping our arms around all that, while considering the affordability issue, is going to be one of the biggest challenges.
Cyber is always top of mind, and physical security is an issue that everybody's paying attention to. In the diversity and inclusion space, you get to a better place when you have diversity of opinion and diverse groups thinking about issues and looking at problems.
PUF: We talked about Gene McGrath. There is Kevin Burke and John McAvoy, while Tim Cawley is there now.
Frances Resheske: I worked directly for each of them. They all had different styles, but all were committed to our customers and to moving forward energy policy. Even though they had different priorities, their customers, as well as reliability, and resilience were always first.
They were all hardworking, committed, and I learned a lot from each of them. Tim was my last CEO, and it was a wonderful experience working with him. Every CEO has their style, and it was my job to work with each of them to help move issues and projects forward.
PUF: There're some special challenges of working for a utility in New York City. Talk about that.
Frances Resheske: Gene used to tell a story about how difficult it was to open the street, with alternate side of the street parking, and places in the city where manholes were under parked cars. It's a complicated city and difficult to move issues forward sometimes.
I believe in having an extensive network. I've done that over the years. I've spent a lot of time building relationships with people whom I can talk to in order to resolve issues.
In working with political, regulatory, nonprofits, community leaders, and the media, when you have relationships, you're able to come to the table with good people who have their own approaches, and they too want solutions. That is the best way to solve problems, which is why I'm staying involved with several organizations in the next phase of my career.
PUF: What is your secret sauce on how you approach tough issues?
Frances Resheske: My answer is continuous learning, always being open to new perspectives.
It's understanding that smart people have different perspectives, people in different jobs have different goals, and they're bringing all of that to my thinking around an issue or a project, so that I'm not walking into a situation and just pushing forward what I think is the solution.
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