In Nebraska, a publicly owned utility deftly tackles the challenges of delivering on reliability, affordability, and sustainability.
One morning in the middle of March, a slow-moving spring blizzard stalled above eastern Nebraska, pounding the state capital of Lincoln with 60-mile-per-hour winds, driving sleet, and up to eight inches of snow. Lincoln Electric System, the local electric utility, has approximately 150,000 customers. By lunchtime, nearly 10% of them were without power. Ice was accumulating on the lines, causing them to slap together and circuits to lock. Sustained high winds and strong gusts—including one recorded at the Lincoln airport at 74 mph—snapped an entire line of poles across an empty field on the northern edge of the city.
Emeka Anyanwu kept the outage map open on his screen, refreshing it every 10 minutes or so while the 18 crews out in the field—some 75 to 80 line workers in total—struggled to shrink the orange circles that stood for thousands of customers in the dark. This was already Anyanwu’s second major storm since he’d become CEO of Lincoln Electric, in January of 2024. Warm and dry in his corner office, he fretted over what his colleagues were facing. Anyanwu spent the first part of his career at Kansas City Power & Light (now called Evergy), designing distribution systems, supervising crews, and participating in storm response. “Part of my DNA as a utility person is storm response,” he says. In weather like this “there’s a physical toll of trying to resist the wind and maneuver your body,” he adds. “You’re working slower. There’s just stuff that can’t get done. You’re basically being sandblasted.”
