Climate Change, Wildfires, and Serving Her Community: 2013 Graduate Elise Hunter on Her Career in Energy

This story is part of Erb’s 30th Anniversary series, celebrating three decades of impact at the intersection of business and sustainability.

Elise Hunter (MBA/MS ’13) cares about energy. After earning her dual degree, she made her way to Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), working across units, including wildfire mitigation. She learned how a utility operates, but the work was intense and she found herself needing more time for her family and her own well-being. With a toddler at home, she planned to go into independent consulting, and when her local utility had an opening for a board member, she stepped up.

As vice president of the board of Alameda Municipal Power (AMP), Hunter sees firsthand the needs of energy consumers in her community, which includes understanding the local risk of climate change. AMP is 100% clean energy. “That’s directly in response to customers valuing clean energy and thinking about climate change, and making the connection that we’re a coastal community, so climate change is really going to affect us,” she said.

We caught up with Hunter to learn more about her career path and life on a Bay Area island. Listening to her talk is also an empowering reminder that the consumer has a voice when advocating for clean energy.

Can you talk a bit about the community you serve?

The community used to be home to a big Navy base, so that actually makes it really interesting. Because we have this old base that is flat and open, and there are lots of older buildings, like hangars, and it’s open for business, there are a lot of start-ups that have scoped it, and some that have moved in. And from a utility perspective, it’s a challenge because we have all this existing infrastructure that used to be occupied by the Navy, but now it’s being occupied by different businesses that do different things and have varying load profiles and electric needs.

We own and operate our own distribution electric system. I’m fortunate to get to participate in all the aspects of running a utility, such as operations, customer programs, and supply. And I get to be involved in all of that.  

Talk a bit more about your journey to being involved with the utility? What made you want to do this work? 

After I graduated from Erb, I started working at PG&E. So that’s where I started building my experience and learning more about energy. I had several different roles at PG&E. I worked in energy storage—that was the first thing that I did for PG&E. I left PG&E to work for a start-up, but then I found another position at a solar developer called GRID Alternatives that installs solar energy in primarily low-income communities. And it really opened my eyes to energy inequality and concepts like energy burden. Everybody pays for energy in some way, and that is way more burdensome for some people than others.

That experience at GRID Alternatives was invaluable. And I spent several years there, working primarily in policy. And then there was another cool position that opened back at PG&E, so I went back to PG&E and worked at the wildfire mitigation team on PG&E for another 18 months. I really learned about wildfire risk, which goes back to climate change—one of the things that we Erbers learn about very deeply. I got to kind of see firsthand how the effects of climate change are affecting my industry, and how the industry has to change, and how high the stakes are.  

I had a toddler. I just realized I wasn’t spending enough time with my family. So I made the decision to leave PG&E and kind of took a few months off and reflected, and realized I still wanted to stay in energy, I still wanted to work, and didn’t want to be a stay-at-home parent forever. But I wanted to be a little bit more local in my approach. That was really what felt most meaningful to me. So when I heard there were a couple of positions on the board of my local electric utility, I jumped at the chance, because I love being in the utility space. That’s how I got connected to AMP. And at the same time, I was starting my own consulting practice. 

Expand on the local aspect to your work. Are there things that you either learned at Erb, or that you’ve learned since?

I was thinking about marketing when I was at Erb, and I took a lot of marketing classes at the business school. And one of the points that stuck with me the most is to really know and understand your customer and serve their needs, even if they don’t explicitly tell you what their needs are because they often don’t, or maybe you don’t have the forum to understand it.

But being part of a local utility is really important to understand your unique customer base and their needs, because utilities are essentially monopolies. Unlike other industries, like consumer packaged goods, if a customer doesn’t like your toothpaste, then they’ll just buy another toothpaste. But for a utility, if they don’t like what you’re doing, they’re stuck.

So one of the things I enjoy about being on the board is that our meetings are completely open. California has a law called the Brown Act that requires us to make all of our meetings public, and from a logistical standpoint, it can be a little cumbersome. But from a public engagement and serving our customers standpoint, it is really the right thing to do. We get people coming to the board meetings telling us what works for our programs and what doesn’t work for our programs. And the utility also has—and every utility has—a lot of really good customer service folks that work on the front lines and hear from customers. So we are able to take that feedback and make new programs or new rates to better serve the customer needs.

How have you’ve responded to the community?

An example, here in Alameda, a lot of people are interested in heat pump water heaters, and they find that the statewide incentive doesn’t quite cover the difference in cost. So in Alameda, we have our own heat pump water heater rebate program as a response to customers. We’re also hearing from our commercial customers that have pools—so gyms, schools, customers like that—that they would like to electrify, too, and so we created a heat pump water program for commercial pools.

Not many utilities do that, but we just realized in Alameda, we have this customer base that’s really asking for it.

Our power portfolio is 100% clean, a combination of hydroelectric, landfill gas, solar, and geothermal and a little bit of wind. That makes up our entire power portfolio, so people can feel really good about electrifying—switching from gas to electric. Because when they use electricity, it’s coming from this portfolio that is deliberately a clean power portfolio.

What else do you remember about Erb in 2013? What was it like?

The first thing I want to mention is amazing friendships with like-minded people. We had fun together, we learned together. I mostly remember just the adventures we all had. We were all working so hard, and we had to just take the free time that we had to have the best time possible in Erb and in Ann Arbor. So I remember long bike rides when the weather was good, out to the cider mills and other places you could go visit. Camping trips, snow trips, karaoke nights, just time together, hanging out. I really miss it, and I’m still in touch with my Erb friends today.