Perhaps because they operate in heavily regulated industries, electric and gas utility companies are not usually regarded as centers of innovation. And to some critics, the utilities operated by San Diego’s Sempra Energy seem to operate in stodgy defiance to anything shiny and newfangled.
But it’s a bad rap to Hal Snyder, who oversees strategy and program development as vice president for customer programs at both San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co. Both utilities are owned and operated by Sempra, and account for more than half of the company’s profits. Snyder and other utility executives talked with me at length about some of the technology advances they have underway and the innovations needed to change the way energy gets distributed in Southern California.
“We have been involved in fuel cell projects, sustainable energy community projects, and photovoltaic solar panels installed in various places,” Snyder says.
In July, SDG&E became one of the first utilities in the country to begin the full deployment of so-called
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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