Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

Wholesale power markets across North America moved through the week ending May 15 in a generally stable shoulder-season pattern, with little evidence of broad regional reliability stress in the reviewed materials. Public daily market publications across the organized markets showed a routine operating cadence, while available real-time price reporting suggested that peak pricing was driven mainly by localized congestion, renewable ramps, and ordinary weather-related load variation rather than systemwide scarcity. In the West, CAISO and the WEIM footprint remained focused on market-integration execution and stakeholder processes, while SPP and Markets+ continued to advance western governance and large-load-related work rather than responding to acute operating events.

If you work in the U.S. electric power industry, you are used to hearing that everything takes longer than expected. Permits take longer. Interconnection studies take longer. New generation takes longer. Transmission siting takes longer. What has changed is that a single piece of equipment can now derail an otherwise sound plan on its own: the transformer. That is why transformer shortages have shifted from a purchasing headache to a leadership problem. When a utility, developer, or grid operator cannot get the transformer it needs, the schedule on the wall no longer means much.

If you manage a plant, field team, service operation, branch, hospital unit, warehouse, or support function that depends on experienced people, you already know the problem. The opening is approved. The budget is in place. The work is ready. The applicants are not. Or they arrive without the needed skills, leave after three months, or are poached as soon as they become useful.

North American wholesale electricity markets remained operationally stable during the week ending May 8, but institutional and infrastructure pressures continued to intensify across nearly every major organized market. Spring shoulder-season conditions generally moderated real-time pricing, with most markets avoiding sustained scarcity despite localized volatility tied to transmission congestion, renewable intermittency, and weather-driven load swings. In the western markets, CAISO and the WEIM footprint continued to emphasize operational readiness, transmission planning, and EDAM implementation. SPP and Markets+ likewise focused on governance and market development as Western integration efforts increasingly evolved into competition among alternative regional market structures.

If you spend your days running utility operations, planning outages, dealing with regulators, or trying to keep projects moving through a company already juggling too many priorities, this week offered a fresh reminder that market design is not some distant policy subject. It becomes a management subject the moment a new market goes live and begins to change how power is scheduled, how transmission is used, how risks are shared, and how accountability is spread across state lines. That is why the launch of the Extended Day-Ahead Market, or EDAM, stood out this week as the most important leadership and management topic in the U.S. electric power industry.

Succession planning is treated like a board exercise until someone leaves at the wrong time. Then leaders discover how much was riding on one person, how thin the internal bench truly was, and how little confidence anyone has in the handoff. By that point, the company is not building a pipeline. It is managing a problem.

That is the wrong way to handle leadership continuity. A sound succession process is not only about replacing the chief executive. It is about ensuring the business can keep moving when a division head retires, a founder steps back, a plant leader is recruited away, or a top operator burns out and decides he has had enough. In plain terms, it is about whether the company has enough ready people to run the place without drama.

North American wholesale power markets spent the week in a broadly orderly spring operating posture, with few signs of acute reliability stress across the major organized markets reviewed. In the West, CAISO and the WEIM footprint continued to operate under relatively mild shoulder-season conditions, and the more important developments were institutional rather than operational: EDAM readiness work, market-simulation activity, queue publication, and transmission governance remained the focus. SPP’s newly expanded western footprint continued to settle into routine committee and stakeholder cadence, while Markets+ remained centered on governance, design, and implementation work rather than live market outcomes. In Alberta and Ontario, short-run market conditions were similarly calm, but both AESO and IESO used the week to advance tariff, planning, procurement, and transmission frameworks designed to accelerate demand growth.

For years, wildfire planning sat in a few boxes. Safety handled emergency response. Vegetation teams cleared rights-of-way. Regulatory staff handled filings. Finance dealt with recovery after the damage was done. That division no longer fits the facts. In the U.S. electric power industry, wildfire exposure now reaches capital planning, liability, insurance, credit, rate design, field operations, communications, and how boards judge management. It is no longer enough to treat wildfire as a seasonal hazard that can be managed with a few operating procedures and a public update when the weather turns bad.