A Q&A with Javier Fernandez, president and CEO of Omaha Public Power District in Nebraska since July 2021. He joined OPPD in June 2017 as its vice president and chief financial officer. Fernandez came to OPPD from the Bonneville Power Administration, where he served as its executive vice president and CFO. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, an MBA from Yale University, a Utility Management Certificate from Willamette University, and a Utility Executive Certificate from the University of Idaho. He currently serves as board chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Omaha Branch and Habitat for Humanity of Omaha; vice chair of the Large Public Power Council; and board member for Ameritas, Bellevue University, the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, and the Askarben Foundation.
What drew you to work in public power?
I was born and raised in Mexico City. I came here to go to school, get my master’s, and seek a better life. Truly the U.S. is the land of opportunity, and I wanted to be part of it. When I graduated from grad school, I didn’t have a clue of what I wanted to do, and I was fortunate enough to be offered a job in public finance. I fell in love not only with the complexity and the intellectual curiosity required in finance, but how purpose was injected into the work of financing public infrastructure, mostly public schools. It was no longer just a paycheck — what the financing was building was leaving a legacy.
I was only planning on staying in the U.S. for a couple of years. After doing this for a few years, it became a passion for me. It was a way for me to give back to this country that was giving me so many opportunities. It was super personal for me to be part of the solution, to help build my new country.
As an investment banker, you’re traveling like crazy. When my wife and I had our first child, I was sleeping in hotel rooms four nights a week. I decided that was not what I wanted for my daughter. I needed a different industry that required less travel but that still stimulated me intellectually and allowed me to continue serving the public. That’s where the electric utility industry came in.
Now I’ve had 14 years in the industry, all in public power. It’s exhausting, very taxing, and you have a lot of weight on your shoulders. But it’s rewarding. The American economy literally depends on what we do. The toughest days I’ve had at work are also the brightest days, because you can come home and say that you contributed something that helped people stay alive. There’s nothing more honorable.
Are there things the financial/banking world tends to not get quite right about the public power perspective, or vice versa?
My colleagues in the financial world, and across the utility world … many of us grew up professionally in the 1990s and 2000s. And in the past 30 years, we’ve enjoyed an abundance of energy, capacity, and transmission. So, for the past 30 years, generally speaking, it was all about designing markets to optimize the resources we had. The [regional transmission organizations], independent system operators, and regulators started playing a big role in rate and market design, much like in the financial world, sending price signals, hedging positions … it was mostly about dollars and financial transactions.
What has changed now, dramatically, is that what we relied on the most — an abundance of energy — is no longer there. I explain to many people about the resource adequacy challenges we are having today. And still, 8 out of 10 conversations today continue to talk about financial concepts — a different pricing mechanism, tax incentives, capacity markets, or auctions — like we did 20 years ago. It’s not just a matter of money; we don’t have enough electrons. That’s a big shift. You hear a lot about market design, but a market without anything to trade is not very meaningful. You can break every other law except for the laws of physics, and that describes where we are today.
What do you hope to instill at OPPD under your leadership?
I am standing on the shoulders of giants. Many leaders have built us to where we are today. We have been studying the problems, the load-growth conditions, and it has been a thoughtful and methodical approach. A big part of my tenure is execution. I literally have to double the size of our generation portfolio by the end of the decade. We cannot continue to tinker and debate to find the perfect solution — it is time to get going.
The last time we built a new power station was 2009. In 2024, we will energize two new power stations and acquire solar and wind farms totaling 1.6 gigawatts — we are cutting ribbons on one in the next few weeks. When I look back, I want to remember not just studies and strategies, but assets on the ground. Just on the generation side, we have 3.2 gigawatts we are building or acquiring, about half of this is natural gas-fired peaking (balancing) stations and the other half is renewables. And believe it or not, that’s not enough. We already need to start planning for what’s next. We have no time to spare.
What skills do public power leaders of the future need to tackle the challenges before us?
The industry is transforming. Our boards are asking us to do the unimaginable, which is decarbonize our fleet while we are seeing gigantic electrification of the economy. And we have to do it all really fast, without losing reliability or making rates unaffordable. It’s not for the faint of heart.
It’s a combination of execution and delivery, of course. You have to be strategic. It’s important for public power leaders to have a good grasp on the reality of the system. It’s no longer the system we grew up with 20 years ago. We need strategy, financial skills, and a sense of urgency. We don’t have decades to begin planning this. We need to begin building now. It’s going to take you eight years to complete a generation project when it used to take us three.
And being nimble — I’ve learned so much more about meteorology than I ever cared. Water scarcity is becoming one of my main operational concerns to run our fossil fuel generation fleet. Sit down with the experts, listen to what they have to say, and translate that into how you can mitigate risks in the most efficient manner.
We in public power — and not just public power, but the entire industry — we take a lot of pride in being out of sight, out of mind. And that’s certainly our mission. It’s important for us to have a sense of humility that we are in a really tight situation. We are all struggling. I don’t know of many utilities today that are just sitting with plenty of excess capacity.
If we were facing a complete collapse of our national financial and banking systems, if they had gone dark for a time, would you call it a crisis? That’s where we are now with electricity. Our national electric industry is seeing regular calls for conservation, energy emergency alerts, having rolling blackouts. Yet we don’t call it a crisis. We must change the narrative. We need to have good, responsible communication skills and an intellectually honest conversation with federal and local officials and among utility CEOs. This is no longer about us being more efficient or having better rates — this is about keeping the lights on. This is the time to say, “How do we come together and build the world-class electric system our beloved country deserves?”
