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PowerUp 2026: Utilities’ All-Hazards Event of the Year

Hurricane Helene. Hurricane Milton. A once-in-500-year ice storm. In the last two years alone, utilities across the country have faced some of the most punishing events in industry history, and the ones that came out ahead weren’t just lucky. They had better systems, sharper communications, and stronger partnerships in place before the lights went out.

That’s exactly what Chartwell’s PowerUp 2026: Utility Resilience, Response, and Communications Conference is built around. For two full days in Atlanta, utility professionals from across the country will gather to trade real stories and best practices on emergency management, outage operations, outage communications, and business continuity.

If your job touches storm response, customer communications, or organizational resilience in any way, this is the one conference where you’ll walk away with things you can use on Monday morning.

Why PowerUp 2026 is Worth Clearing Your Calendar

This isn’t a generic industry conference with recycled case studies. Every session is built around a simple idea: Utilities learn best from other utilities. The 2026 agenda features award-winning programs, hard-earned lessons from historic storms, and candid panels featuring leaders from Duke Energy, PG&E, CenterPoint Energy, Alabama Power, National Grid, FPL, Southern Company, LADWP, Georgia Power, Oncor, OPPD, and dozens more.

A few of the storylines you’ll hear straight from the source:

  • Duke Energy’s Taryn Sims will open the general session with Two Hurricanes in 13 Days, unpacking how Duke transformed its outage communications after Hurricanes Helene and Milton battered its territory across Florida and the Carolinas within less than two weeks of each other.
  • OPPD’s Andrew Peacock will share how his team rebuilt customer trust with faster, more transparent storm communications after two of the most destructive storms in the utility’s history – work that just won Chartwell’s 2026 Silver Award for Excellence in Outage Communications.
  • Alabama Power’s Nicole Grove will break down the ETR Monitoring Program that earned the utility Chartwell’s 2026 Gold Award – a system that turns restoration estimates from a passive output into an actively managed discipline.
  • CPS Energy’s Jackie Silva and William Paiz-Tabash will bring an interactive, game-based emergency management exercise to the stage, letting attendees actually play through a simulated regional outage scenario instead of just hearing about it.
  • CenterPoint Energy’s Jonathan Robb will explain how the utility is evolving from a storm-focused response model into an enterprise-wide, all-hazards resilience program in the wake of Hurricane Beryl.

And that’s just the first morning.

Four Tracks, One Goal: Getting You Home Faster and Keeping Customers in the Loop

Sessions are organized around four core tracks so you can build a schedule that matches your role:

  • Emergency Management: Preparedness, incident command, all-hazards planning
  • Outage Operations: Restoration technology, crew logistics, mutual aid and resource strategy
  • Outage Communications: Customer messaging, ETR accuracy, digital and AI-driven engagement
  • Business Continuity: Risk assessment, COOP activation, enterprise resilience frameworks

Standout sessions include a live look at how Entergy’s AI chatbot is reshaping mobile customer interactions, a legal deep dive into TCPA and AI consent risk in utility communications with attorney William Raney, and a practical COOP Activation Toolkit session from Eugene Water & Electric Board that sends every attendee home with adaptable templates and tabletop exercise tools.

Big-Picture Conversations, Straight from Utility Executives

Beyond the breakouts, PowerUp 2026 delivers two executive-level general sessions that frame the industry’s biggest challenges:

  • The Resilience Equation, featuring FPL’s Michael Jarro, Southern Company’s Rick Anderson, and LADWP’s Zoraya Oliver-Griffin, will tackle how utilities balance infrastructure investment, mutual assistance, and a widening generation-demand gap driven by data centers and electrification.
  • PG&E’s Angie Gibson will deliver the closing keynote, Building the Utility of the Future, on how PG&E is advancing resilience through innovation, integration, and preparedness.
  • A Public/Private Partnerships During a Crisis panel will bring together Ameren, the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC), and North Carolina’s Department of Public Safety to explore how utilities coordinate with government and industry partners when the pressure is on.

PowerUp has always balanced hard-won insight with genuine connections. This year’s Curated Connections Hour includes a Women in Energy Happy Hour (with the presentation of Chartwell’s inaugural Women in Energy Leadership Award), a Newcomer Meet-Up, un-facilitated PowerUp Roundtables for peer benchmarking, and even Puppy Playtime at the networking lunch, courtesy of InvoiceCloud. The conference wraps with a farewell reception big enough to earn the name The Main Event.

Chartwell’s PowerUp 2026: Utility Resilience, Response, and Communications Conference

The industry isn’t getting any less unpredictable. The utilities that will handle the next hurricane, ice storm, or grid emergency best are the ones building the relationships and processes right now.

Register today and reserve your seat for the sessions and Curated Connections events – several have limited capacity. We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!