Episode 141: Grid of the Future: Leadership, Legacy & Electrification with David Lebeter

[Music] Underlining all that is the use of electricity and what it can do for us. None of those things happen without electricity. So I think we're going to look back and realize it's just as important as clean air and water. [Music] Francis here from Electricity Canada. Welcome to another episode of the Flux capacitor, a podcast about the future of electricity. This is number one four one episode 141 of the Flux capacitor. I've been chatting with the industry's business leaders, thought leaders, new market players and stakeholders. I build this as an opportunity for you the listener to get a sense of the conversations that are taking place in the sector in hallways over coffee, outside of parliamentary committees, in airport lounges and at industry events. My guest on the podcast today is David Liebeter, recently retired president and CEO Hyder one. David joined me for repulsed retirement conversation about the growing complexity of the electricity sector. We explore rising demand, grid expansion and the challenge of balancing large scale infrastructure investments with affordability. David reflects on leadership, reliability, indigenous partnerships and the real role of AI in operations, emphasizing that while technology matters, success ultimately depends on people, public trust and maintaining focus on customers. We close the conversation with David's book recommendation. Here is my conversation with David Liebeter recorded on Zoom in mid June, 2026. [Music] David, welcome to the podcast. We're chatting at a really interesting time in a lot of ways. We're at a critical moment I think with respect to the electricity sector, rising electrification, grid expansion, demand is increasing. We've got a new federal strategy trying to figure out how we're going to meet this increasing demand. At the same time, you've just recently stepped away from the role of Hyder one. I thought somebody who spent four decades of his career running some pretty interesting sub businesses. Then most recently leading Ontario's largest utility through a pivotal moment, I thought maybe I'd start with what if he'd just pulled you into this business? Well, it was about 26 years ago, almost 27 years ago, and Recruiter reached out to me for a position at BC Hyder. At that point, I'd been working in the forest industry for 22 plus years. It seemed like a really interesting opportunity. Right from the get-go, I felt like it was a chance to give back to the province where I'd grown up. I remember when they were building the infrastructure in the 60s and 70s as a kid. Being in the manufacturing sector, I'd seen how important, reliable energy, low cost electricity was to competitiveness on the world scale. At that point, my career was looking for a change. This was it, it came along. When I got into the utility space, I literally just loved it. Fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic people. Really clear purpose, direct link between what you do and how you benefit your society every single day. There's not many jobs that give you that. We got to be there as a utility employee when people needed us most. What I'm referring to there is when the power went out. The power went out. That's when people needed us the most. That's when we stood up and did our best work, I think. Yeah. If you reflect back on the decades now in the sector, both at BC and then in Hydro One, what is surprised you to the most about how the electricity business actually works versus when you were in forestry or even before that? How do you thought it would work? What was the big insight into how things are different than you would have originally thought? From the outside, the electricity sector looks like a pretty sleepy, straightforward business. Yeah, the power just comes out of the wall. Yeah, power just comes out of the wall. The turbine spins some form of energy spins them. They produce electricity. The power comes out of the wall. Probably for the first five or six years of my career, that was the way it was. I was pretty straightforward. But then as you get into it, you realize it's a lot more complicated than that. If you're running a hydroelectric system, you got to worry about the weather, you got to worry about your reservoirs. If you're running a gas turbine fleet, you got to worry about the cost of fuel. There's a whole bunch of complication that starts to pile in and you don't have the ability to storage. If you're running a manufacturing plant and the demand falls off, you can store your product electricity. You can't store, which is although that's starting to change now, but at that time, you couldn't. So that's a lot more complicated. And the whole thing about electrification, people's use of electricity is going up. We use it, although the efficiency devices become more efficient, people use electricity for more things. Not the least is transportation, but you're starting to see the steel sector electrify in Ontario. You're seeing electricity show up in places where you wouldn't have thought 10 years ago, which show up. So it became a lot more complicated. How do you meet that growing demand with a product that you can't store when you don't, when you know that you're not sure when the demand will materialize, but demand is going up and you know, will materialize at some point and there have been some big step increases that have caught utilities off guard. So it's a lot more complicated because it also takes a long time to build new generation infrastructure takes a long time to build new transmission infrastructure, just the permitting process and site requirements. So I think that was the biggest insight was it's a lot more complicated than I thought. It's a real time business. So your system is always reacting to real time. And it takes a long time to build new assets and put them into service. Right. Right. So was there a point and you know, you mentioned this earlier on about, you know, sort of the societal aspect of this. When was there a particular point when you realized, you know, that it isn't just a technical industry that it is a societal one. Was there an incident that really drove that home for you early on your time in the sector? I would say there was two. The first one was before I joined when I started thinking about the benefits of hydroelectric or electricity provides to Canadians. At that time, I was thinking about DC Hydro and British Columbia. And then the second one was when I moved on Terry and started working for Hydro one and I realized and did my research and realized how electricity prices have been such a battle in the past in that province. I realized that the cost of electricity, how well we spend the money that our customers, the ratepayers and trust us with has a direct impact on the quality of their life and the size of their bill. And those are really the two defining moments. It's, you know, not quite the same as groceries, but pretty close. The price goes, it puts strain on somebody's, somebody's wallet to actually buy the electricity that they need to run their lives the way they would like to run. So those are the two defining moments when I joined BC and then when I joined Hydro one and two different, one is electricity so important for society. The other one is the cost of electricity really matters. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then you came up through operations, which I think probably gives you a bit of a different perspective. How would that have kind of shaped how you think about risk and reliability and leadership as a CEO, given that you had this operational background inside the sector. That probably made it more challenging, Francis, because I knew of all, I knew all the different things that could go wrong. Oh really? Okay. I'm not even worried about having come up through operations, but had I not come up through operations on the plus side though, I also had the advantage of knowing that utilities employ amazing people and that your employees have a lot of really good ideas. And if you release that creativity, they'll come up with solutions. I also got to see, as I said earlier, how well they respond when people need us most that's when they're the happiest is when. And then when the door goes out and they actually have to shine and bring people's pet lives back to normal. So it was that double edge sort. I knew the things that could go wrong having come up through operations, but I also had the confidence and insight. These are amazing people that worked for the utilities and they, you know, Hydro one had some amazing field staff and they would come through when we needed them to come through. Yeah, was there there was a decision that you would have made when you were CEO that only an operator would have made. That's an interesting question. I've been asked that a couple times. I think the decision that I would have made that maybe an only operator would just have more confidence in the crews. Like put the problems in front of them and get them to start telling us how do we get the solution asked them what's working, what's not working. Because I worked with them and I knew them. I had confidence they would give us honest answers and they would be a lot more insightful answers than we would come up with ourselves. That's probably the one thing that is different having come up through operations that confidence and trust in your people. Right. Right. So if I asked your team what really changed under your leadership, you know, not not sort of strategy, but sort of the lived experience. What do you think they'd say? A couple things come to mind. Of course, I don't know what they would say, but I would hope they would say that. I'll ask them on a future podcast. I would hopefully would say the focus on safety. It was already there, but that we sustained it and we increased it and we made significant gains. And we made gains in a way that actually made it easier for the crews to get their work done. one. Yeah. Customer focus. We really did change our view towards a customer. We stopped using the word rate payer. We used the word customer. We wanted to light the customer. We're focused on the customer. And we adopted this mindset. It doesn't matter what the problem is or how it came about or who's who created the problem. How can we solve that problem for the customer? Whoever that might be a residential customer, maybe a large commercial customer. It could be anybody, but how could we then help that that customer solve their particular problem and get moving forward and whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. I hope those may be the two. Maybe the third one I would add is trying to create that safe workplace where everybody could bring the whole self to work and be who they really were and really contributed the way that it was safe for them to say what was on their mind, whether that was an apprentice who didn't understand the job or whether it was a minority person who was the only person in the work crew and they felt uncomfortable speaking of whatever it was that we created that. So those are probably the three things that come to mind. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about reliability because I mean that's one where God, it's kind of like the weather. Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. So reliability, what did you learn about what actually moves the little, the needle on reliability at scale? What are the things that actually can make a difference? I'm going to just take a little detour before I get to that. The first thing I noticed when I got into Ontario was that that province has storm season, all four seasons. There was a really a period when you get a break and you know Quebec's pretty similar. The the topography there and the great lakes when the wind and wind comes in particularly wind but also could be snow rise. It goes across the whole province and it can occur at any time of a year these bad weather. I was the first thing that surprised me when I got back is just how extensive the weather's friends were when they came through and how much damage whether it's the deraucho or the ice storm that hit us. You know, I got lots of other examples. What moves the needle most on reliability? In my you know, you can do lots of things with technology but that's really expensive. And you still need to do those things, you know, create loops in your distribution system, put automated devices in your system so you can track down where the fault is quicker. But the biggest impact is just getting your crews on board with doing the right thing. And you know, when we start focusing the crews and let's start focusing on restoration time, hydro-wantival last five years has consistently reduced the restoration time. We've seen more storms but the restoration time has come down. So there's a lot you can do just with your people, how you dispatch them, do you preposition them. We're using AI tools right now that tell us, give us a really good indication how much damage we can expect from the incoming weather front where it can be so we can start letting customers know, put crews in the right place, the right type of crews. Pre-condition the system, you know, offload certain circuits to the extent you can reconfigure it together. Those are low cost solutions that really hit the bottom line on reliability. And then you get into the more expensive ones. How do you how do you isolate your system, your distribution system, how do you track it? Good real-time feedback on where the faults are so you can get there quickly. So it's a combination of how you deploy your crews, what they do and the technology you're using. There is no there is no, unfortunately there's no silver bullet if there was, we don't have it figured out. Yeah, absolutely. But that's that's the first batch of things that you're talking about are not about technology. They're almost like a philosophy. Yeah, it's about this. It's getting you're getting that mindset that these are the tools we have and we're going to continually get better at bringing customers on quickly. And I get very excited too because you can actually track that and you can see it. That was a big step forward for us. Yeah. Okay, so you talked about customer focus and reliability and change. This might not be a fair question, but you know what David I'm going to ask it anyway. If you had one more year or CEO, what would you push harder on? And you know, why didn't you get there in the time that you had? What's maybe the I guess I'm asking the question, but was that last thing that would have been great to get over the finish line that the clock just ran out on you? Yeah, you know, it's not something I would have pushed harder on because it's something you're working on, but it's our current rate filing. I would have liked to have been able to stick around till that rate. We're going to file that rate filing in September sometime of 2026. We're going to hopefully get a ruling on it in the third quarter or maybe the fourth quarter of 2027. I would have liked to have been able to stay and see that through its through its conclusion. That really sets higher one up for the next five years. It's an important rate filing. So that put a lot of time out and for it to have the rest of the executive team getting ready. So I would have liked to be able to stay with that. Right. I imagine you'll be watching that one from from a distance, but you'll be interested to see how it proceeds. I'll be watching that one from the sidelines and cheering louder than anybody else. Absolutely. It's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, some of the the challenges that we have with respect to growth and electrification and and and maybe first question. You know, again, you know, we talk a lot about electrification and the inevitability of it. And you've seen, you know, some some significant changes in terms of customers and markets. But what is most misunderstood about how hard is going to be to meet that future challenge? I think the piece that's most misunderstood is that electrical infrastructure is expensive to build. Now, it's when you look at it and you build it, it's expensive. When you realize it's going to last 50 to 75 years or perhaps long or all of a sudden it doesn't become so expensive, but that initial upfront cost. Right. When it lands in rate base. Yeah. When it lands in rate base is a big hit. And it's happening. It's you know, it's already started that build out. There's a we're working on 16 transmission lines. And I'm tell we finished once or we're going to finish another one this year. So that's 15 that are being on various stages of construction. You got Ontario power generation building out their four small modular reactors. You got the people up at Bruce looking at building Bruce C. Yeah. Just a lot of infrastructure in Ontario that's going to come online here in the next 15 years, 15 to 20 years. And it's expensive infrastructure. But it's sets the province up really well for another 50 years. Now that's well, that's going to start hitting people's bills at the exact time they're suffering from higher food prices. For a number of factors are suffering from higher fuel, whether it's gasoline or heat renewals coming through. And the economy is slowing down. You know, we've seen Prime Minister Karni talk about the economy is slowing down not in a recession yet, but it is definitely slowing down. And we see that in Ontario. We're still experiencing around 2% growth in demand for electricity, but it's a little bit slower than we had hoped for at this time and expected. So all this is happening at the time that's going to land on the customers back pockets are going to have to pay for this somehow. And I think if the solution for you ask me this is I think it's a combination of customers and governments have to step in and fund some of this to get a pump and then over time government can start recouping their expenses. Right. Right. So with that rising demand, I was going to ask you, what was it that was keeping you up at night? Was it, you know, ensuring supply, the transmission, the permitting, the public acceptance, but it sounds as though you might have said affordability. Yeah, that's a piece I worried about is how do we put all this infrastructure, which is necessary by the way. We're not, you know, we're not overbuilding, we're not gold play. This is necessary infrastructure for Canada's economic future. How do you put that in place in such a way that our customers can afford it and you don't create energy poverty? We already have some energy in poverty in this country. How do you do it so you don't actually increase that energy poverty? And how do you maintain that license to build? Right. The public, the public thinks it's too expensive or doesn't see the benefits, all of a sudden you lose their support and we've seen what happens when that occurs. Projects that are necessary, get stalled, canceled, delayed, all those horrible things that can occur. So it sounds as though, I mean, if we were talking about what is the biggest risk to be overall to the Canada meeting its, you know, electricity needs in the future, it doesn't sound like, you know, we're saying it's a challenge of technology. It's more a challenge of institutional structures, rate structures, financing it and ultimately in the end, whether or not the customer can afford the build. Yeah, I would agree. It's how, how can the customer afford it? How can we break down these silos that also exist within our country? You know, Canada's a blast. We've got amazing resources. We've got a great hydroelectric system in three provinces, BC, Manitoba, Quebec. Yet they're isolated from each other for the most part. Right. You know, there is good connection between Quebec, Hydro and Ontario, but how can we take those natural resources, hydroelectric resources and put them together in such a way that we can, for the energy we do export, we are in a better return and we can then use that to offset costs. We've got great wind resources across this country, both on the Pacific coasts, out in the prairies and on the eastern seaboard. How do we bring those online and integrate them into the system such that again, we can maximize the value that's produced. And then in Ontario, we got this amazing nuclear fleet. Very unique in Canada, very unique in the many, not totally unique world, but not as common as you might otherwise expect. How do we then integrate those renewables, hydroelectric and reservoirs that are created between hydroelectric as big batteries and where do we use gas turbines? Because we're still going to be using fossil fuels. I think that's a challenge. How do you put all those pieces together? I think that's the solution to solving the affordability problem. Put them together in the right way such that all the provinces participate, all the provinces and territories benefit. Yeah, it allows us to build, we need to build and get ready for the future at a more affordable fashion. Right. So it sounds like in that context, the challenge here is one of sort of an institutional federal provincial and inter-provincial lack of collaboration coordination. How would we, because you know, you mentioned the three regions with massive high-tower resources, but they tend to be isolated, and then they tend to trade north-south as opposed to amongst provinces. How could we improve that? Well, fortunately, or unfortunately, I don't have to try to find the answer to be on the challenges. But you know, how do you get people to get along? You have to make the current situation untenable or the future situation so much better. Okay. So if we were able to trade east-west or get the provinces to work more closely together, and that created a bigger return, made the pie bigger rather than just trying to divide the same size, pie up into smaller pieces. Why wouldn't they want to get involved? Why wouldn't the provinces want to get involved? Why wouldn't the federal government want to participate? So I think that's the way we have to look at how do we make the pie bigger rather than just cutting it up into smaller slices. Right. Right. Well, let's talk about building and building being able to meet those challenges means building some pretty big major infrastructure. And you've had a hand in building some pretty significant major infrastructure in the country both in BC and in Tiedro one. What do you think is the thing that folks don't appreciate? And particularly, you know, CEOs don't appreciate until they try it in terms of the biggest challenges. Yeah, building infrastructure, a couple things come to mind. The first one is you need the public consent, the support of the communities that are going to be impacted whether those are municipalities or whether those are Indigenous nations. You need their support. Yep. And they need to see a benefit because you're coming in with a major infrastructure program that's going to impact their community. Not just during construction, but afterwards either visually or in some form, it's going to impact their community. So if you want them to support your program, there has to be a benefit in it for them. And there's many different ways you can structure benefits to get their support. The second thing is that you have to accept that building and big infrastructure is not easy. There's going to be bumps along the way. There's going to be things, no matter how well you plan, something's going to have you to anticipate and you have to respond to that. Unless you're building, you think you've got a good plan, you just launch that plan and everything to go smooth. That is not the case. It's just there's always something to anticipate that comes along, whether it's weather-related, supply chain-related, contract or related, just so many variables have to come together at the exact right moment for the project to go sullously. So you have to build that in that something's going to happen. Build that into your budget. You build that into your timeline when you start the project. And then work really, really super hard to make sure nothing does go off track. And I think the last thing you have to, nothing gets built without people. So you have to put a strong team together. Team that trusts each other, a team that is focused on the end goal, whether it's your contract, your internal workforce, your project managers, your accountants, whatever it is. The whole team has to say, this is the goal that we're achieving. This is the goal we're focused on and we're signing up for that. So that was pretty easy, right? We're going to build a transmission line that will run 100 kilometers through the forest. You cut some trees down, you stick some towers up and hang some, but it's not that easy. It's a lot of work and that's why it takes a lot of time. You know, you've got to get that, you see, they get the public consent. You have to do the appropriate environmental assessments. You have to form your partnerships, you have to tender it so you know you're getting the best value for your dollars. You have to look at innovation and you have to put the right team together to build it. And then commission it and bring it online. So the complicated process is a lot more moving parts than you would anticipate looking from the outside. Yeah, yeah. Well, and one of those, and you mentioned it a moment ago, was Indigenous Indigenous and Indigenous partnerships. And that's I think, you know, not to, not to, you know, go too far out on all of them, but I'm pretty sure that part of your legacy is going to be the work that you and the Hydro One team did under your leadership in terms of building Indigenous partnerships. 50/50 approach. Maybe for the listener, can you just give us a bit of a rundown of how that came about? And you know, how important was it for Hydro One and for those communities? Yeah, happy to. We at that point, I think we were working on three or four transmission lines. And we started off in the same old approach arguing over what's the impact going to be to the community, the nation, what's how we're going to compensate them for that and arguing over the piece of equity. What, you know, how much equity would they be allowed to buy in? And it wasn't moving forward, you know, we were just, we were literally arguing with each other and the lawyers were making some money, but nobody else was really moving forward. And so we broke off, went away and we read, we went and looked at, we were the intent of the treaties that were signed between the Indigenous people and Canada. And they talked about sharing, they talked about partners, they talked about equality. So we came back and said, well, that means that we should, they should be 50% partners if they want to own 50% of the, of a construction project, they should be allowed to do that. Or we should have made that happen. So we went back to the nations and we said, okay, let's not argue about equity anymore. We're offering you up to 50% equity in any new transmission line, the line component, not the stations, but the line component, valued at over $100 million. And that moved the whole process forward. It was like, okay, now you're finally listening to us as the message we got back. And I got to tell you, you know, that is one of the things we are most important and most proud of is actually coming out and setting the, I think we've set the standard for, if you want to develop infrastructure, linear infrastructure in Canada, you're looking at something similar to our model. But those were amazing partners. Every one of the partnerships we've formed so far. And I mentioned we've got 16 transmission lines each. One of those will have Indigenous partners. Two things have happened. One, they've all, the ones that have come to completion, they've all bought up to their 50% ownership. And they've been very happy to do it. And number two, they are great partners. They give us good insight early on in the root selection and the environmental assessment process. They stand side by side with us if we're out there talking about the project and why it's important and why we picked the route we did. Nothing but positive to say about those partnerships. And I think a lot of people view Indigenous partnerships or even compensation with municipalities as just a cost to get their project built. That's the wrong mindset. They can be at tremendous value to your project. They'll help you move your project along faster. They've got ideas to make it better. That is just one of, that's probably one of the proudest things we've accomplished there as a Hider one is actually putting that partnership in place, that model in place of 50/50 Indigenous partnership and then bringing it to life. Yes, I say, I mean, I certainly think that's going to be part of the legacy of your time running the company. I wanted to shift gears a little bit again because you're somebody that had spent time in operations. Even as a CEO, I think because of that had an understanding of what operations and how important it is. So maybe start with what's the most misunderstood thing about running a grid day to day? You know, I'd have to say it's the surprises that come up every day. When you're running a grid distribution and transmission grid that covers the province of Ontario, something is going on somewhere in that province every single day that you didn't anticipate and it's going to impact your plans. So no matter how well you plan to work for your field crews, some are all going to be distracted every day. No matter how much you focus on the customer, somewhere in your system there's a customer who's got a complaint because their project's not moving forward. To me, that was always the exciting part about running the distribution grid was every day was different, something new was going to come up and it was an opportunity for you to, as I mentioned earlier, you know, solve the customer's problem, help them with their worst, but they need us the most if it's an outage related. And then the other thing is you don't realize how much economic activity actually requires power. And if you want the province to be growing, you're a big focus on growing economic development in Ontario and creating new jobs, how do you quickly and cost effect? We're hearing them back to that affordability piece. How do you get those new business opportunities connected to the grid so they can actually start business as soon as possible at the lowest cost? And it's really frustrating when you see an opportunity come along, but you're not able to meet the customer's timeframes for various reasons beyond your control. And you see that opportunity slide away, it's really frustrating. So you really get the first hand seat of all the economic potential that a province could have if it had the system in place or could build it quick enough to meet the demand. All right. So if we kind of take a look at operations and how operations are starting to change, like there's a lot of hype these days, right? About artificial intelligence that you can't, you can't open up a new website without reading something about AI, distributed energy, smart grids. There's a lot of hype around these new technologies, but what's actually real today? and what is overhyped in this space? - Well, there is a lot of hype, absolutely, right? I would share that. - I did see the listener didn't get to see that smile on your face. (laughs) - You know, what's real I mentioned earlier, we've got AI telling us where the storm is going to hit. We've got AI giving us an indication that amount of damage we can expect, so we can put the right crews, or right resources there, the right materials, there we can let our customers know. That's a real application. We're using AI now to determine where the vegetation is growing, so we can make sure that we put our vegetation management crews into the right locations that are gonna have the greatest impact on reliability, so that's a real application. We're using AI for. There's lots of ways you can use AI in the back office to streamline your processes. So from the time you decide you wanna do something to the time you do it, you streamline that process, and you get the work orders out the door faster. And that's a real use for AI. In the control room, I think you're gonna see a lot more automation moving into the control room. Hydra one, we're already deploying our distribution management system, automated distribution management system, we're updating our energy management system, so they can do the real time modeling to the system. If we need to configure it, we don't need to wait for an engineer to go away and do a study, the system gives us the results in minutes versus hours, so we can configure that system. And either improve reliability or restore power in a quicker manager or customers. We're using, we're deploying our second generation of smart meters, those smart meters are gonna tell us, for example, if you've got a hotspot behind your meter, that's a problem that a customer you'd have to bring in electricity, but we can detect that and let you know, it's gonna tell us if the system is the different phases are correctly balanced. We can correct that again, the main system reliability. It also can see through and it can tell us whether you're charging an EV. So that's setting us up getting ready for the future when we wanna be able to have a vehicle to grid and bring that power back onto the grid, so these new meters are allowing us. So that's an example of artificial intelligence work and help us. On the day to day stuff though, we still have to have field crews going out, turning right, just climbing poles, working in the station, switching the system around. You still need people to do a lot of that work. So how do you give them more information so they can do that job better? How do you give them the information that easily get that job completed quicker? They'll compromise 50. And we're starting to see AI actually become more useful in predictive maintenance and identifying things that might fail just before they fail so we can actually extend the asset life even further but still get to it before it actually causes a problem on the system or an outage. So lots of a lot of hype, but there are some real serious applications where you can use AI in the background. - Hey, one of the ones you mentioned, and I'm just, I'm always interested in this one, is vehicle to grid. 'Cause you know, I've done those back of the envelope calculations of how many EVs do we need on the road in Canada to be equal to the total generating capacity of the country? It actually isn't that. It's not an impossible number, but how far off is vehicle to grid in kind of your estimation? Is it around the corner or is it a little bit for the road? - You know, I hate making predictions, but I think it's in the next five to 10 years. It's, I guess, gonna come quicker than we anticipate. You know, you do that calculation, the back of the envelope calculation on how many electric vehicles, I'm always looking for EVs. I try to spot them when I'm driving around. And even with the turmoil we've gone through over the last 18 months with the, you know, election of President Trump, I still see more EVs on the road as I drive around. And I see a greater variety. You know, one point it was predominantly Tesla's. Now I see everything. German made, American made, Korean made, Japanese. So the electric vehicle penetration is continuing. I think Canada's finally on a more realistic path. You know, aspirations, the previous government had weren't achievable. We all knew that. So we've got a more realistic path. That led drive, and it's part of the solution to fordability. If you can use your vehicle as a grid resource, then you should get compensated for that. That can help lower your energy bill. So it helps feed into that affordability problem. - Would it be a lot of time for you to do it as well? - Yeah, yeah. - I would expect to start seeing the next five to 10 years. - Okay. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that one. All right, so we talked a little bit about some, you know, technologies that are overhyped, maybe some later underhyped. But here's the question. If you were starting Hydro One from scratch, just big picture, would you design Hydro One differently? - That's a really interesting what if question. - Oh, yeah. - Yeah. - Because it is, you know, its structure and its approach was something that grew organically over time. But yeah, if you were kind of blue skying it, would you design the company differently today than how it's evolved over the last, well, you know, hundreds of on years? - I wouldn't design the system differently. The distribution system, the transmission system, I mean, it was built for purpose. It was purpose-built in the built-in function. I would have started if the company were the clear focus on the customer and a really long focus on affordability. How do we do this at the lowest cost possible? So, you know, being a crown corporation, you know, when Hydro One came out of being a crown corporation in 2015, focus wasn't necessarily that way. You know, right? As any provincial utility crown, utility would know, the customer's important, but it wasn't number one. I would have designed it. So everything we did was in service to the customer. You could easily draw a line from the activity to the customer. Now we're re-engineering the organization that way now to make that clear connection. - Right. - That'd be the big change, just to focus on the customer. And the other one is I would have really come out hard on safety right out of the beginning. - I think you'd think, design the system with humans in mind, recognizing humans make mistakes, humans can fall into trap. So design a system that's human-friendly, user-friendly, so it doesn't put them in that position. - Okay. - Yeah. - Cool. All right, so you've moved on from Hydro One, but what did you consciously try to lead behind for your successor for Megan? - Yeah, the most important thing for any CEO is after picking a successor, developed a system to build a strong team. And I wanted to make sure that I left a strong team behind and was a team that owned the different parts of the strategy. And I think I've been successful in that. It's an amazing group of individuals and the executive team at the VP level. And that comes in fact throughout the whole company's amazing people. But it's a team that you want a team that is committed, you want a team that challenges each other, you want a team that weighs in and all the challenges that the organization faces, they don't just stay in their little silo with their accountable for it. It was important to me, I left that behind for whoever my successor was. I was training Megan, I really wanted Megan to tell for it to be my successor. The board, after an extensive review of candidates, decided that was the right selection. So happy for that. But leave her a strong team that can help her be successful. We've done that. It's an amazing team there. Now, as somebody who's planning on retiring in three months, asking somebody who has just recently retired, how do you know when it's the right time to step back? You just know. That's a terrible answer. But talk to people and they say, I'm thinking about retiring at this age or that age. And my advice is you'll know when it's the right time to retire, don't pick an age. For most people that doesn't work, there'll be an event that happens in your life where there'll be something that goes on in the company. And you'll say, you know what? Now's time for me to step back. It's time for somebody else to take over. In my case, it was a health issue with my family, with my wife. And when I look back, you know, I love the job. Best job I've ever had. Best company I've ever worked for. But I knew it was a time for me to step back and focus elsewhere and let somebody else run the company. And much like you, you know, you've got, I think you've got over 40 years of electricity, Canada. - Sure. - Yeah. - Well, you've got a huge legacy. You can look back on and, you know, at some point, you'll wake up and say, now it's time for someone else to take over and take it to the next step. But I'm going to stand on the sidelines and cheer them on and be proud of what I did. - Yeah, well, that time now is coming in three months for me. But it's interesting because, you know, it's something that you and I have chatted about over the last decade, at least every now and then, you know, kind of what, when time comes and when will you know? And so I think I've come to the same conclusions you have, you know, when you know. - Yeah, you know, funny story. I was going to retire at 55 and 55 came and I, you know, I'll stick around to 60, 60 came and I had an opportunity to go to Ontario. - Yeah. - So I just don't pick an age just as long as you're having fun as long as you're adding value. And at some point, you'll wake up one day and you'll say, yeah, time for me to move on to do something different. I'll let someone else run with the machine. - All right, so fast forward 20 years and when you look back on and say to yourself, we totally underestimated that. What will that be 20 years from now that we totally underestimated about our sector? - I think we're going to look back and we're going to under, I have underestimated how impactful electricity is on our day-to-day lives and how it's impacted the climate objectives, the quality of the environment. I think we've underestimated the potential that it has to really improve our lives going forward. The conversation gets distracted by artificial intelligence it gets distracted by affordability, but underlining all that is the use of electricity and what it can do for us. None of those things happen. without electricity. So I think we're going to look back and realize it's just as important as clean air and water, electricity is just as important the way that we want to live and protect in our planet. All right, last question and I ask everybody who comes on the podcast, the same question. And that is for a book recommendation and we we've assembled all of these to and put them on our Flexitifacitor book club. So David, if I was going to ask you for a book recommendation, what would that book be? Now this is really get a surprise you, friends. This because you've known me for a long time. This is going to surprise you, but I would say that my recommendation be the profit, which is a book written by Khalil Gbrand. Oh, okay. Why? Why that? It's a collection of, I call it a collection of short stories, but it's just I found it, I've gone back and read it probably four times at different points in my life. It's more of a philosophical read, but if you're going to be a leader, you have to know yourself and you have to be grounded. I found that book was really insightful and helping me understand me better and also keeping myself grounded. All right, so the recommendation is the profit by Khalil Gbrand. G-I-L-B-R-A-N. Fantastic. We will add that to the book club. David, as always, great to chat, but it's interesting to chat with you from now that you're in a different space and able to bring different perspectives to the conversation. It was a really interesting combo. Yeah, I really enjoyed it, Frances, and wonderful to have this conversation. Let's keep in touch, you and I, as we stand on the other side of the, as we stand on the sidelines and watch our loved industry go forward. Absolutely. We absolutely will. Okay, you take care of my friend. Thanks you too. For those that have been with the podcast since the beginning and those that have joined along the way, thanks for listening. Please take the time to rate the podcast on whatever platform you use to listen and let me know what you think of the flux capacitor. You can find me on Instagram as the Brad Bradley on LinkedIn and through our website at electricity.ca. The website for this pod is the flux capacitor dot CA and it includes links for this episode on the show page. This being episode 141 and while you're there, check out the book club page which provides info on and links to the books which have been recommended by guests on the flux capacitor, including David's recommendation, the profit by Khalil Gibran. And let's continue the electricity conversation on our Facebook page on Instagram and at electricity dot CA. , thank you.