To be a CIO at an electric utility right now has to be—I don't know if I ever had a dream job other than maybe playing shortstop for the Yankees, but this is probably in the top five.
Welcome to Technovation. I'm your host, Peter Hai. My guest today is Richard Donaldson. Richard is the senior vice president and chief information officer of Duke Energy, which is one of the largest energy holding companies in the US with over $30 billion in annual revenue. Richard's been in role for roughly 9 months of his nearly 24 and a half years with the company. In that role, he's responsible for the company's digital strategy, including technology initiatives, reliability, vulnerability, and life cycle management, as well as oversight of infrastructure, operations, and telecom. His current focus is on leveraging digital capabilities and artificial intelligence to transform the company's internal operations, modernize customer experiences, and help the company achieve its energy transition goals. And now for a word from our partner, Aria. There's a reason most enterprise AI initiatives never make it to production. You can't find a platform that's both powerful and secure enough. The result, AI budgets burn with zero business impact. But not anymore. Aria is the enterprise AI platform that delivers speed without compromise. Unlike other platforms that force you to choose between fast deployment or secure operations, Aria brings speed and security together. Launch AI quickly without cutting corners on compliance. Scale rapidly without sacrificing governance. Move at the speed of business without moving past your security requirements. Fortune 500 companies across finance, healthcare, retail, legal, and more choose Aria because they deliver what seemed impossible: enterprise AI that's fast enough to beat the competition and secure enough to protect your most sensitive data. Ready for AI at full speed with zero compromise? Visit aria.com to see the platform in action. That's a-r-i-a.com. Simplify enterprise. And now on to the interview. Richard, welcome to Technovation. It's great to speak with you today.
Thanks. Great to see you again.
Richard, I mentioned a little bit about Duke Energy's business. Take it from there if you would and fill in some blanks as to the business you're in if you would.
Yeah, great. So I mean Duke, very large utility as you said, one of the largest in the US. We are vertically integrated which means we offer generation, transmission, distribution. So basically everything from the source of the power being created right all the way up to the customer's use at their home. It's easy to say a big utility. Some of the things that I find impressive about us is we run 11 nuclear reactors. That always kind of blows me away. We have about 55 gigawatts of generation. And to put that into perspective, you know, data centers are all the buzz. A lot of these data centers are saying they are looking for about a gig of energy and so kind of puts it in perspective. We operate across several states largely in the southeast. We've got North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. We still have Tennessee for our gas business, but as anyone that's read the news recently seen, we are divesting that business in early 2026. So, lot of places to point some technology weapons at and hope to have some fun talking about those today with you.
I'm looking forward to it as well. Talk a bit more about your role as CIO. No two CIO roles are exactly alike. Talk a bit more about what's within your span of responsibility.
Yeah, sure. And none of them are alike, including, you know, my predecessor is also still my superior, but it's not like they hand over a CIO playbook when you get into the role. And so often equate this first year of CIO like the first year teaching. You don't have any lesson plans. You're figuring some things out as you go. Fortunately for me, I've been in IT at this company for 24 years. And so I know the ropes. I know the people. I know where the pitfalls and the strengths are. And so it's been a good little ride the first nine months. But, you know, we've got—just to put in perspective about 1,400 business applications we support. I'd say somewhere on the order of 10 to 15% of those are homegrown applications. When you mentioned digital transformation, that is something we got really intentional about probably 10 years ago, 7 to 10 years ago, is building our own software when the cost to entry, the barrier to entry came down significantly. We have a lot of assets out in the field. So if you think about our telecommunications infrastructure, whether it be fiber, two-way radio towers, and then of course, you know, from our data center assets from where we—when I say data center, I mean the things we run in our internal data center, but also the things we run up on the cloud in some of the cloud providers' data centers. It's just a very, very complex set of applications and underlying infrastructure that really job number one for us is just to keep those—as we try to say, always on. Part of our strategy is as much as possible we want those systems running so our business partners can do what they need to do each and every day and keep the lights on.
Yeah. Very interesting. Talk a bit about how it is organized, a bit more about the roles and how that's distributed across the complex organization you described a moment ago.
Yeah, it's a good question because I think you go to 10 different IT organizations, you'll find 10 different org structures. We've mostly adhered to this business unit facing organizations. So, on my staff, I have for instance someone who is responsible for all IT that goes into our generating business units, nuclear, our renewables, etc. And then I have a direct report who's responsible for all things wires. So distribution, transmission and on and on. And then we have always had kind of what we called IT operations. So that's where we have our telecommunications infrastructure. We have our server and hardware and database administration. Those types of functions. So those kind of sit as a separate organization under me as well. So, one caveat, cybersecurity, you can find that in and outside of a CIO's purview. We have a great CISO, Martin Strawberger. He is a peer of mine. He's not part of IT, but we work very closely together, as you can imagine.
Excellent. Thank you for that overview. And I know from recent conversations you and I have had, the company's in the throes of what is energy modernization. And I'd love to understand more about the goals associated with it as well as the role that you and your team play relative to the topic.
Energy modernization is all the buzz, right? We are a growth company which is very new for a utility person unless you've been around the utilities for about 70 years which most of us have not. So a couple things that we're really focused on. One is getting the generation out there so we can serve the ever-increasing load. So we have load growth which we enjoy load growth and always have in this region of the country because just simple things like population growth in the Carolinas drives load growth for us. We in our service territories that we operate have often been a desirable target for businesses to come, manufacturing to come. All these things that I would have told you three years ago are really big projects to sign up, right? 30 to 40 megawatts. Wow. And so we're constantly looking at what is our strategy to build new generation to create new capacity in our wires business so that we can serve those loads. And then you know 2022 comes in and everybody's talking about what is this data center load going to be when you're talking about a gigawatt of use. And just by comparison I'll go back to the nuclear units. You know our nuclear units, they're AP-1000s or the model of the reactor. They're about a gigawatt. So if you can imagine a data center taking every single electron that can come off a nuclear reactor, that's just—it's a marvel, right, of engineering feat and of size and scale. And so that's a lot of what we're looking at from a company strategy perspective is how do we meet our customers in the moment? And so we've got a lot of new generation that'll be coming online in the next call it 3 to 10 years. But in that we also have to look at well what generation do we have online and how can we get the most out of that and so you know a lot of what we'll do as a company and it plays a part in this sometimes with the models and some of the systems but you know for an asset that we have in operation today what if we could get 1% more efficiency out of that right I mean that's not free but it's sure a lot cheaper than building new generation and so or what if we can get just a little bit more capacity out of an existing distribution or transmission line. So those are some of the things where I would say the rubber hits the road from where my department can help is how do we look at the data? How do we look at massively complex calculations up and down the grid everywhere from what's being drawn down in a meter to what a power plant is producing and figure out how to optimize that from end to end.
Yeah, fascinating, really interesting topics and the complexity of that must be remarkable. You alluded to customers a moment ago and I know that your team is helping to drive customer experience modernization also. I'd love to take it from here to talk about as we're on the topic of modernization, how you think about customer experience and again the role that a team like yours plays in improving that.
