When Jim Torgerson walked out of his office at Orange-based Avangrid for the last time recently, the company’s outgoing chief executive officer left behind a wide ranging legacy.
In a little less than a decade and half as one of Connecticut’s leading business executives, Torgerson took what was once a small regional utility company and turned it into a much larger force in the energy industry. Avangrid has selected Dennis Arriola, an executive vice president with California-based Sempra Energy, to become the company’s new chief executive officer..
Torgerson, a 67-year-old Ohio native, who put himself through Cleveland State University driving tractor trailer trucks loaded down with steel, came to Connecticut in 2006 to become the chief executive officer of New Haven-based UIL Holdings. The energy holding company was created in 2000 to allow The United Illuminating Co. to get into unregulated businesses.
Torgerson said he knew when he took the job “that we had to get bigger as a company.”
“As a small utility, it’s tough to make things work,” Torgerson said. “With a bigger utility, you can spread your costs more efficiently. And it’s a way to keep rates down.”
Torgerson wasted little time refocusing UIL’s business operations. During his first year on the job, UIL Holdings had divested all of its non-utility businesses.
The sale of its interests in Bridgeport Energy and Cross-Sound Cable were completed in the first quarter of 2006. Another business unit that did systems integration and electrical contracting, Xcelecom, was sold off in September 2006.
“I thought we need to be a pure utility company, not all these diverse things,” Torgerson said.
UIL expanded into the natural gas business in 2010, acquiring Southern Connecticut Gas, Connecticut Natural Gas and Massachusetts-based Berkshire Gas Co. from the U.S. operating arm of Spanish energy giant Iberdrola.
Torgerson tried to expand the company’s natural gas business further in March 2014 when UIL Holdings announced plans to acquire Philadelphia Gas Works, the nation’s largest municipally-owned natural gas utility, from the city for $1.86 billion in cash.
It was a move Torgerson would come to regret. Nine months after the deal was announced and unable to get the necessary approval from the Philadelphia City Council, UIL Holding abandoned the deal in December 2014.
“We did our due diligence, but we didn’t realize the extent of the politics that was involved,” he said. “We didn’t realize that the parties involved (then-Mayor Michael Nutter and the City Council) didn’t get along very well. We spent a good year trying to make this happen and came away with nothing.”
But Torgerson and the company rebounded nicely from Philadelphia Gas Works setback. A little more than two months after abandoning its efforts with the Pennsylvania utility, UIL Holdings became a merger target with Iberdola announcing its plans to acquire the Connecticut company in a deal value at $3 billion.
The deal closed at the end of 2015 and Iberdola created Avangrid, which it holds an 81 percent stake in, to oversee all of its U.S. energy holdings.
Torgerson has been active in industry organizations servings as the 2019 chairman of the American Gas Association and a member of the board of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electric utilities. He is a trustee of Yale New Haven Health System and was a former chairman and director of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association.
“He took a major leadership role in advancing the business community‘s agenda,” said Tony Rescigno, the former president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, “He was a force for what was best for our region and state. He just took responsibility for getting things done.”
Avangrid has two primary lines of business, its networks and renewables divisions.
Avangrid Networks owns eight electric and natural gas utilities, serving more than 3.3 million customers in New York and New England. Avangrid Renewables owns and operates a portfolio of renewable energy generation facilities across the United States and employs approximately 6,600 people.
Torgerson said seeing the creation of Avangrid Renewables was rewarding, because he would have liked to have seen UIL Holdings move into the renewable energy field on its own.
“We just didn’t have the resources to do it, either in terms personnel or financially,” Torgerson said. “It’s not something that you can just dabble in.”
Avangrid Renewables is currently the nation’s third-largest wind power operator. And through the company’s Vineyard Wind joint venture, it is poised to become the first developer of a utility-scale offshore wind generation project in the United States.
In addition to the 800 megawatts of wind energy that will be built to help the state of Massachusetts meet its clean energy goals, the company was selected in a competitive bid process to provide 804 megawatts of offshore wind energy for the state of Connecticut.
Another achievement that Torgerson oversaw was joining The United Illuminating Co, and its natural gas sister utilities, in one corporate campus on Marsh Hill Road in Orange. Prior to the opening of the corporate campus in 2012, UIL Holdings was headquartered in the Connecticut Financial Center in New Haven and had operations facilities in Shelton and North Haven.
“We needed more space and for a service territory the size of ours, it didn’t make any sense to be so spread out,” he said.
luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
"Ceo" - Google News
June 29, 2020 at 05:00PM
https://ift.tt/2VtgFiY
Outgoing Avangrid CEO called 'force for what was best' for CT - CT Insider
"Ceo" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37G5RC0
https://ift.tt/2W5rCYQ
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Outgoing Avangrid CEO called 'force for what was best' for CT - CT Insider"
Post a Comment