Meeting the Challenge with Over 200 Years of Experience

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Dr. Howard J. Axelrod is President and founder of Energy Strategies, Inc. He has over 45 years of experience and provides a multi-disciplinary approach to each consulting engagement.  Dr. Axelrod combines his skills as a power systems planner and economist to identify, measure and mitigate risk exposure.  Howard has worked with numerous electric utilities to develop and implement best practices in energy procurement, trading and risk management.  He currently serves as chief risk officer of joint action agency.

Prior to consulting, Dr. Axelrod has had extensive regulatory experience in New York State serving as Special Assistant to the NYPSC Chairman, Alfred Kahn, and as Director of the Consumer Protection Board representing residential and small businesses before the PSC. 

 Bob Dyer, for over a decade has been CEO of RTD Consulting LLC with a focus on electric wholesale markets and best practices in energy trading and risk management.  This follows his remarkably successful tenure as CEO and President of The Energy Authority, the Nation's premier energy trading and risk management organization.  TEA is jointly owned by over 50 municipal electric systems and manages over 24,000 MW of generation.   

Mike Harreld, for nearly 30 years of service, held numerous executive level positions including EVP and CFO at Southern Company and its subsidiaries. Mike was Southern Company's "go to" executive for new or complex areas such as:

• Executive oversight of MIS initiatives
• Sarbanes Oxley compliance 
• International leadership in England,   China, Europe, the Virgin Islands,   and the Bahamas
• BOD and Audit Committee liaison
• Credit Agency representative

Bill Hederman is a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. He teachers the core course: Introduction to Energy Policy, as well as being part of the Wharton Executive Education Faculty for the "Futures of Utilities" program. In addition, he advises 3 startup firms, two in demand-side management and one in advanced encryption technology.

He also currently serves as a Senior Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is teaching Geopolitics of Energy for the joint CSIS_Maxwell School master’s program. A retired Deloitte Director, Bill is now an independent senior adviser at Deloitte and Touche. He served as senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, providing leadership on Department of Energy (DOE) missions to Ukraine, the Baltics, and Germany. In this position, he was also the chief architect for the analytic framework developed for DOE's groundbreaking Quadrennial Energy Review.

 Cynthia H. Pepper, Principal of Pepper Consulting Group and a licensed counselor, brings an extensive background in human behavior, organizational behavior and evolutionary behavior to her work as a consultant in leadership and organizational effectiveness. She is a frequent presenter and an expert in professional and organizational development in the higher education and non-profit institutions. She serves as an executive coach and private business counselor for leaders of world-class institutions across the country. 

She has more than 35 years of consulting experience to the energy and utility markets, focusing on the impact of organizational culture and human resources strategies on business success. In addition to working directly with gas and electric companies to find solutions to operational challenges, she has performed management audits of the human resources, labor, safety, and service operations of major utility companies across the United States and Caribbean.