CPS Energy Chief Strategy Officer Elaina Ball has spent years in an industry built around machines that cannot be allowed to fail. She has also raised a family. On Wednesday afternoon at POWERGEN 2026, she offered a comparison that drew knowing laughter from a room full of power professionals.

“I don’t know what’s worse, a colicky turbine or a colicky baby, but both keep you up at night,” Ball said.

The power generation industry does not pause for convenience, and neither does life. The inaugural Women in Power panel at POWERGEN 2026 Wednesday leaned into that reality, pairing candid stories about leadership, self-doubt and risk, along with lessons about building a career in an industry that often demands everything.

The panel and subsequent networking event, sponsored by Kingsbury, was held at the Center Stage in the exhibit hall at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio.

Jhansi Kandasamy, vice president of advanced nuclear at The Nuclear Company, framed the discussion as both overdue and broadly representative of where the power sector is headed. She traced her own career through four decades in nuclear, beginning in electrical engineering and expanding across nearly every major plant and corporate function.

“This is amazing to be a part of the first inaugural women in power,” she said. “I love that this panel really represents very diverse positions or diverse energy fields.”

Ball anchored her remarks in the operational reality of a vertically integrated municipal utility serving Central Texas. When asked about defining challenges, she focused less on technology and more on timing.

“I’ve been a wife and a mother while running very large power plants,” Ball said. “I think one of the most challenging experiences that that I have throughout my life is just, it’s not work-life balance, but it is about understanding the seasons of your life and the seasons that you go through as a working mother.”

She described early mornings, nights and weekends that came with balancing plant operations with family life.

“There were times when I had to forego work responsibilities to be at a band concert,” she said.

Those tradeoffs, she said, shaped her leadership approach.

“Give yourself grace,” Ball said.

Gretchen Dolson, senior vice president and renewables practice lead at HDR, described a career built through pivots rather than planning. A registered civil engineer, she started in heavy highway and municipal work before moving through water resources, industrial facilities and biofuels, eventually transitioning into power.

She said her most difficult lessons were not technical. Mentors helped her recognize that leadership required more than delivering projects on time and on budget.

“What I maybe didn’t do so well was communicate with my own team, and I have almost zero empathy,” said Dolson. “If you do like the personality test, oftentimes, women who are driven don’t necessarily have some of those soft skills.”

Meghan Eyvindsson, general manager for the Americas at Stamford | AvK, offered a story that began far from an executive role.

“I have a very non-traditional educational and professional background,” she said. “I am the cliche college dropout. Originally, I pivoted and went to cosmetology school, so I was working as a hairdresser before I stumbled into power gen.”

She applied for a receptionist job at a Cummins distributor in Wyoming and did not get it.

“I was devastated,” she said, believing she had failed. Two weeks later, the company called back with a different offer in parts.

“My first thought was, I don’t know anything about diesel parts,” she said. Then she reframed the moment. “What I do have is the desire to learn, and I’m capable, and I can do hard things.”

That experience shaped her leadership philosophy.

“I end up looking for potential, not credentials,” Eyvindsson said. Even now, she admitted, self-doubt persists.

“I still feel like I can’t believe I’m sitting on the stage,” she said, recalling that when she was offered her current role, her first thought was, “Why me?”

Eyvindsson argued that “soft skills” and “relationship building” are often treated as secondary to technical expertise, even though the industry’s challenges now require teamwork across disciplines, geographies and business models.

“If we all had the same skill set, we wouldn’t have the diversity of solutions,” she said.

As the conversation turned to mentorship, the panelists emphasized that advancement often comes through sponsorship and visibility, not just advice. Eyvindsson credited a mentor who taught her to set boundaries.

Dolson described mentorship as a series of relationships over time, adding that her earliest influence was her mother, who taught her, “You can fail, but you aren’t quitting.”

Kandasamy closed by naming what she sees missing at the highest levels of the industry.

“What I noticed moving up is less and less women sitting across the table,” she said. Paying it forward, she added, means “making room,” recognizing talent and making contributions visible.

Then the microphones went down and the networking began, with a roomful of power professionals trading stories that, like Ball’s opening line, were equal parts demanding and familiar.

With the U.S. energy sector in the middle of unprecedented load growth driven by data centers and industrialization, it would likely be unwise to turn your nose up at any specific generation source. But with everything changing so fast, and with remaining uncertainty about how much actual load growth we will experience, how can utilities know they’re adequately preparing without taking on unnecessary costs?

Those were the sentiments at POWERGEN 2026’s Opening Keynote, which brought together leaders from utilities, engineering firms, technology providers and the research community to examine how the industry is responding to rapid change.

‘We’ve got to have it all’

The opening keynote began with a session between Rudy Garza, President & CEO – CPS Energy; and Victor Suchodolski, Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer – Sargent & Lundy; moderated by Ahsan Yousufzai, Global Director Energy – NVIDIA. The trio discussed the unforeseen changes in the power industry that AI has stirred up; how to plan for uncertain projected load growth; how nuclear’s role will evolve in Texas; and pesky bottlenecks that can bring entire projects to a halt.

“The industry’s changing at a pace quicker than I think any any of us ever thought,” Garza said. “The pressure is exponentially changing on us in a way that is requiring us to really stretch every part of our business.”

There’s still plenty of uncertainty in the air surrounding the projected load growth the U.S. could experience. It’s currently unclear if all of the gigawatts of projected load growth will actually come to fruition, but utilities need to be prepared anyway, Garza argued. Otherwise, they may be blindsided by the lack of generation, transmission, and all of the components of these systems that can have large lead times.

“You’re going to have to teach an old dog new tricks, and the old dog is the utility industry,” Garza said. “We’re not used to changing the way we think about things. And if we don’t, the industry is going to go around us, and that’s not good for anybody.”

With so much on the line, the power industry doesn’t have much room to be picky. Nearly every existing form of generation will have a seat at the table – something Texas is already plenty familiar with: the state currently leads the nation in renewable and battery deployments.

“We’ve got to have it all,” Garza said. “And, you know, we don’t spend a lot of time here in San Antonio arguing over which resource is the right resource or the wrong resource.”

At Sargent & Lundy, Suchodolski is seeing firsthand how the markets are responding positively to more certainty – even gas and nuclear are both showing growth, when they have historically always run opposite to each other.

“With respect to bulk gas generation, regulatory and permitting are less of a driver now, and that’s primarily due to the longer lead time, so you can run in parallel with the permits,” Suchodolski said. “You also have partnerships with OEMs, and you can see there that there’s synergies with knowing what your air missions are going to look like, or what kind of designs you’re going to get. And you can design these projects a little bit more on the front end, you can buy equipment more on the front end.”

However, as some bottlenecks ease up, others become more prominent. Now, delays are being caused by power delivery center components, circuit breakers, and even emergency diesel generators, Suchodolski noted.

“This is really a power generation conference, but the grid is out there too,” Suchodolski said. “We are seeing transmission still having some issues with respect to the permitting process and getting things done as quickly as we want them. So it still takes time. There have been some strides here, but the transmission line projects are not going as quickly as we would hope that hope they would.”

Future nuclear deployments are going to look much different than what the U.S. saw in the 20th century. Garza argued that without state or federal incentives, new, large baseload nuclear generators like we built in the 70s will remain a relic of the past: there’s currently just too much risk and cost involved for that to be feasible. But next-gen nuclear reactors like SMRs, which have a much smaller footprint, could have a very promising future, especially for large loads like data centers, which are now required in Texas to have the ability to go off-grid on their own power sources if the grid gets squeezed.

At least one thing is clear though: the U.S. is going to have to build a lot of new generation, especially as older generating units are retiring. Many of those old units are on their last limbs already, being kept running now only out of necessity.

“ERCOT put one of our older units that we were trying to retire into what they call a reliability must run status, and it’s cost us millions of dollars trying to give that unit another three years of life,” Garza said. “So is that the most efficient, you know, use of our of our limited capital, or do we just need to build new stuff?”

How can AI help speed up new nuclear deployments?

In the next panel of Tuesday morning’s opening keynote, Raiford Smith, Global Market Lead for Power and Energy – Google Cloud; and Lou Martinez Sancho, CTO – Westinghouse Electric Company discussed a collaboration between Google and Westinghouse to create a custom AI-powered platform meant to assist and speed up reactor construction.

Westinghouse plans to have 10 of its AP1000 reactors under construction by 2030, and this platform is a key part of getting that plan into motion. The nuclear industry is notoriously heavily regulated, which can cause projects to take longer than some would like.

“We started this journey and needed to downsize basically the time to deliver new nuclear into market,” Sancho said. “But we needed also to utilize it to improve the way we are operating the current plants, [so] we can understand better how to do super power upgrades to deliver more.”

AI’s ability to learn and retain information has made it attractive to users like Westinghouse. The days of simple “if, then” statements may soon be behind us, Smith argued.

“Better yet, this is a solution that we collectively worked on for a work management problem for nuclear, but work management problems can be addressed using the same capabilities, as long as you have the foundational data and the frameworks – they can also be addressed the same way,” Smith said. “So the technology isn’t a one-off. The technology is not so bespoke that it cannot be applicable elsewhere.”

Details matter

In the final portion of Tuesday’s opening keynote, Mike Caravaggio, Vice President, Energy Supply, Fleet Reliability – EPRI painted a picture of the current moment the industry has unexpectedly found itself in, and what the coming years could look like.

Caravaggio echoed previous panelist arguments that each and every form of generation will have its own role to play, even though all gigawatts aren’t created equal.

“A gigawatt is not a gigawatt, is not a gigawatt,” Caravaggio said. “Our different technologies will fill this load growth void in different ways. A solar plant can’t do what a nuclear plant can can do. A gas turbine can move a lot faster than a combined cycle. We need to balance these technologies to meet the needs of these data centers.”

But that variance applies to the load side as well. Depending on their purpose, data centers can have vastly different load profiles from each other.

“These details are really going to matter,” Caravaggio said.

POWERGEN 2026 continues through Jan. 22 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, building on Monday’s technical foundation with a week of executive dialogue, technical sessions and networking for the power generation community.