Fifty Million for Affordability
Exelon Chief Operating Officer Mike Innocenzo sat down with PUF's Steve Mitnick last week. The focus, Exelon's just announced fifty million dollar fund to help customers get through their short term affordability challenges. While it's working towards longer term solutions.
For a real quick read, here's the essence of our conversation on this unique initiative:
PUF’s Steve Mitnick: What’s this new Exelon initiative on affordability?
Exelon’s Mike Innocenzo: We all understand the financial pressures that a lot of families in our communities are facing – energy bills being one of those pressures…
We went through a tough winter for some of our customers as we saw increased [electricity] usage. We know all of the issues that we're hearing on [electric generation] supply costs. With the approach of summer, we thought it was really important for us to come up with something different.
In addition to what we [have been] doing, through energy assistance programs and payment programs, we launched a one-time fifty-million-dollar customer relief fund.
This fund is going to provide temporary assistance to low- and middle-income residential customers across all of our territories in Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. And we're going to administer it with local nonprofits in each area.
We have some of our traditional customer assistance programs that we administer through our utilities, but we wanted this relief fund to be something different. To really engage some of our community partners, such as The Salvation Army and United Way. Organizations like these have an infrastructure in place that support the distribution of these funds to those truly in need.
We know we're not going to solve affordability with a one-time piece. That's not the intent.
PUF’s Mitnick: What about affordability longer term?
Exelon’s Innocenzo: On top of the tools and resources available to our customers, beyond the relief fund, we’re working on longer-term solutions around having enough capacity on the grid/system.
On longer-term solutions, we are working with PJM, as well as state and local officials to address this concern. How we can bring more generation online, by making it easier [for new generators] to connect…
You've got the retirement of old [power] plants that's impacting supply. You've got new renewable generation that's on its way, but not yet online. And now you've got a dramatic increase in load, with data centers and onshoring of manufacturing.
In addition to that, we're looking at other medium-term efforts such as enhancing our customer assistance programs, budget billing, and processes around energy efficiency.
PUF’s Mitnick: What’s most rewarding about this initiative for you?
Exelon’s Innocenzo: The one thing I love about our industry, and our company, is how invested we are in our communities. It’s our belief, and we have insights to prove it, that we do better when our communities do better.
To be able to not only feel the pride of a company that's operationally doing well – keeping the lights on, keeping the gas flowing, taking care of our customers – but also doing things to help lift up our communities.
You want to work for a company that performs well, but you want to work for a company that has values and does good for the betterment of the communities where we live and serve. That's always very gratifying. For me personally, what's truly gratifying is leading these six companies in my current role and seeing the pride in our employees knowing they made a difference.
Our employees work hard twenty-four-seven. For them to be able to walk around with pride knowing that we've done what we can is both inspiring and foundational to our success. At Exelon, we’ll continue to do all we can to help and support our customers.