T&D World Live

In this powerful episode of the T&D World Live Podcast, Editorial Director Nikki Chandler sits down with Chad Schimpf, Operations Safety Supervisor at Ameren Illinois, to discuss a life-changing incident that transformed both his career and his mission.

After spending more than two decades as a lineman, Chad survived a 7,200-V electrical contact that easily could have been fatal. Rather than hiding from the experience, he chose to openly share the decisions that led to the incident and the lessons that followed. Today, he has become one of the utility industry's strongest advocates for safety culture, leadership accountability and honest conversations that prevent serious injuries and fatalities.

Chad explains how small shortcuts, overconfidence and the mindset of "that's how we've always done it" can create dangerous conditions — even in organizations with strong safety programs. He reflects on the physical and emotional recovery after the incident, the difficult conversations with his family and coworkers and how his faith helped shape a new purpose focused on helping others avoid similar mistakes.

The discussion also explores why leadership plays such a critical role in creating psychological safety, encouraging employees to speak up, investing in ongoing training and building workplace cultures where stopping work or asking for help is viewed as a strength rather than a weakness.

Whether you're a lineman, supervisor, safety professional, executive or anyone responsible for building a stronger safety culture, this conversation offers practical insights and a powerful reminder that every decision matters — and that one conversation could save a life.

In this episode of the T&D World Live Podcast, host Nikki Chandler sits down with Gina Weber, program director for T&D World Live, to preview the 2026 event. This year’s newly structured conference tracks are designed to help utility professionals navigate overlapping challenges through focused conversations around grid operations and reliability, modernization and infrastructure, and digital innovation and analytics.

In this episode, T&D World Editorial Director Nikki Chandler and Head of Content Amy Fischbach recap their experience at the 2026 IEEE PES T&D Conference and Exposition in Chicago, one of the largest events in the global power and utility industry. The discussion centers on several major themes that dominated the conference, including affordability, resiliency, reliability, and grid modernization. The conversation also focuses heavily on the growing electricity demand driven by AI and hyperscale data centers, and how utilities are preparing for what many executives described as the largest grid expansion cycle in decades.

In this episode of the T&D World Live podcast, we speak with Michael Goggin, executive vice president of Grid Strategies, about the reliability lessons emerging from Winter Storm Fern and what the event revealed about the evolving U.S. power system.

As artificial intelligence accelerates demand for data processing and cloud computing, electric utilities and grid operators are facing unprecedented pressure to deliver reliable, affordable power at massive scale. In this episode of the T&D World Live Podcast, Managing Editor Jeff Postelwait speaks with Deloitte’s Kate Hardin, Executive Director of the Research Center for Energy and Industrials, and Deloitte's Tom Keefe, Vice Chair and U.S. Power, Utilities and Renewables Leader about how the rapid expansion of data centers is reshaping the energy industry.

In this sponsored podcast episode, Nikki Chandler sits down with Jason Huang from TS Conductor to chat about how next-generation advanced conductors address the most pressing challenges for today’s grids. Jason discusses how the next-generation advanced conductor technology is solving these challenges by enabling all five key attributes: reliability, resiliency, affordability, speed to deploy, and safety. Jason points to Aluminum Encapsulated Carbon Core (AECC) conductors, which allow utilities to complete reconductoring projects without structure modifications—something often unavoidable with steel-core alternatives—while also reducing structure requirements in new builds.

This episode is sponsored by TS Conductor. 

In this episode of the T&D World Live Podcast, Christina Marsh and Jeff Postelwait break down insights from the annual Wildfire Special Report, part of the May 2026 T&D World issue. They explore how utilities are adapting to a rapidly changing risk landscape through a mix of advanced technologies, data-driven decision-making and time-tested strategies like vegetation management and controlled burns.

In this episode of the T&D World Live podcast, we speak with Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), for an in-depth conversation on the evolving challenges and opportunities facing electric cooperatives across the United States.