Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Elon Musk chooses Twitter's next CEO, the number of stay-at-home moms is rising, and a CFO job prepared Lynn Good for her decade atop Duke Energy. Happy belated Mother's Day!
- Power on. Before Lynn Good became the CEO of Duke Energy in 2013, she was the company's CFO. She says that finance background has served her well over the past decade as she's prepared the utility business for a renewable future.
"What we’re trying to accomplish with the assets we build using our capital takes decades of investment," she told Fortune's Phil Wahba. "So there’s a lot of strategy that sits in the CFO office. Where are we going? What are we spending money on? What are we trying to accomplish? It allows you to think through a lot of the issues that affect the business."
Good has been a fixture on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list since she became Duke's CEO. Last year she ranked No. 32 thanks to her efforts to fend off an activist-led push to break up the $28 billion company into three parts. Her decade-long tenure makes her one of the longest-serving female CEOs in the Fortune 500.
Duke Energy, based in Charlotte, N.C., serves 8.2 million customers in the U.S. Southeast and Midwest. Eight percent of its power comes from renewable sources (up from 1% in 2005) and Good expects that stat to reach 27% by 2030. She expects coal-based power to be obsolete within 12 years; it accounts for 17% of power today compared to 60% in 2005.
But those aren't stats that are on most customers' minds, even though they influence the American power grid and climate change. Phil asked Good if her CEO job is ever "a thankless task for a customer base that just takes service for granted." "There’s an element of that," Good acknowledged. "Most people see us as ‘I turn on the switch; does it work?’ They often don’t have any idea how we make it work."
Satisfaction, then, comes not from customer appreciation but from acknowledgment from those who do pay close attention to the nation's utilities. "I think about the important role we play and how we enable everything else," Good said. "But I do want policymakers to understand what it takes to make it all work."
Read Good's full interview here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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