 What a fantastic pleasure it is to be here with all of you to introduce Cheryl LeFleur, the winner of the C3E Lifetime Achievement Award. Let me start by telling you a bit about Cheryl's career. Cheryl currently serves as the chair of the board of ISO New England and is also an adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. Some of you also probably know that Cheryl was one of the longest serving commissioners at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and she was nominated by President Obama in 2010 and served until 2019 and was chair for many years. It is also hard to imagine that National Grid would be what it is today without Cheryl who I think around the early 2000s served as their executive vice president and acting CEO. With only a few minutes to introduce her, I picked these examples from her long CV because they show her ability to build and lead complex organizations to be part of an energy system in transition and to shape a new and better one. Now I'm going to shift now to discussions I had with a handful of Cheryl's former colleagues. One co-worker commented that he first met Cheryl. She was drinking from a coffee cup with the words on it, sleep is for the week and as a new employee I'm sure that set the stage for high expectations. But each person I spoke with including that somewhat intimidated one spoke about Cheryl's ability to infuse humor and fun into the workplace especially after challenging meetings to improve wholesale electricity markets and the reliability and resiliency of the grid. Another C3E ambassador and close colleague Collette Honorable suggested that Cheryl embodies what C3E is all about. A brilliant dedicated public servant who leans in to challenging issues and always is always willing to roll up her sleeve and more importantly listen to others. And most importantly she has made an incredible stride for women many of whom she has mentored and now occupy leadership roles at FERC and beyond. And from Gina McCarthy I just want to quote this directly who many of you know is the White House national climate adviser and her comments were Cheryl and I have spent some entertaining hours together at technical conferences she hosted at FERC when I was at the Environmental Protection Agency. While neither one of us were beloved by most of the other attendees Cheryl always stayed focused, fair and professional and she is the perfect person to download with over a glass of white wine or two. Congratulations Sherry you really are the best and I second that. And finally in closing up Cheryl I just want to say that the qualities you bring to this all important time of energy transformation namely your tireless commitment to make vital changes in energy policy and regulation your ability to bridge divides and your endless championing of women who will become leaders in this crucial sector will continue to inspire me and countless others to build a truly magnificent 21st century energy system. Congratulations on your lifetime achievement award. I'm going to hand it over to you. Well my goodness Lisa thank you so much for that wonderful and very generous tribute and thank you to Colette and Gina for their words in the anonymous allegedly intimidated mug intimidated I still use that mug people it's just really an honor and wonderful to be here with all of you and I when I looked at the website it's particularly an honor to receive this award that has been received by so many of my role models Betsy Moeller, Vicki Bailey, Sue Tierney, Senator Murkowski and I did bring the award which you were kind enough to send it's really quite elegant so I tried to display it on the shelf behind me that I was not capable of doing it properly so I'm going to I'm going to occasionally refer to notes even though I try not to do that because I don't want to you know mess this up because this is an important moment but when I was having my hair done for this award but not even for the award it's even worse than that when I was having my hair done to take the picture to put on the website of me getting the award the haird my hairdresser who I've gone to for a long time said ooh a lifetime achievement award doesn't that make you feel old and I mean really not because I was reflecting that I got my first work permit when I was 14 and a half that was how old you had to be to get a work permit in the state of Massachusetts and that was like 52 years ago so I hope I live a long time and I hope I have more achievements but anyone who's had a work permit for has been working for 52 years has to be self self and acknowledge that they're most of their career is behind them more than is ahead of them um when I first found out I was getting this award the wonderful people at C3E asked me what theme I wanted for the narrative of my clean energy journey um with the award write-up and my first reaction was how about I've lived a lifetime these are my achievements but of course I was being sarcastic um when I thought about it I thought I would choose the theme of mentoring both the mentoring I benefited from as I went along and the mentoring I try to do myself and I think the word mentoring is often misinterpreted when people use it I'm often asked do you have a mentor and the image is of like a single fairy godmother who kind of flits behind you your whole career and does magic whenever you need it and the implication is if you don't have someone like that like a single person who's like looking out for you you can't be successful but the truth is that I like a lot of people had a whole posse of mentors who kind of popped in and out of my life at different times when I needed help and there were other times when I really could have used help and there was no mentor available um it wasn't like a lifetime job for anyone some of the people who mentored me are older and wiser others are people my age who just happened to be in a position to make a difference at a particular time some are women some are men some are people who I've had a long term sustaining relationship with and others are people who just happened to be there for me and I don't have a long term relationship with so I thought I would just mention a few of my mentors and then say because I think they exemplify the issue and say a little bit about how I tried to uh pay it forward so I started out to law firm like a lot of people had a lot of loans to pay and I learned a lot but I didn't make partner and I also had a young baby and was trying to figure out where I went next in my career and I got a phone call from a partner I had worked with who asked me if I ever thought about working for an electric company because he had run into the general council of new england electric system now part of national grid and he thought he offered to make a call to see if they needed a lawyer now the partner I called with was someone I worked on a couple cases with but it wasn't someone who had any obligation to look out for me or find me a job he probably had 20 things on his to-do list that were more important and certainly more billable than making that phone call to me but he made it just to be a nice guy because the thought crossed his mind and that call I had done no energy work you know ended up presenting a major inflection point that led to my working in energy for the next 35 years so I went to the electric company and I ended up loving it right away I just really liked the issues at the intersection of energy in the environment which there have been all along right now it's much more about climate but environmental issues have driven much of what happened in energy for my entire career the general council was really patient with me because I did have this baby very young and I had a messed up child care arrangement and I think I was one of the the first people to work hybrid before that was a word we used or it was even a thing and I did that for a few months and then I kind of went into what was supposed to be my real schedule and I had barely gone into my real schedule when I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant again and I was terrified to tell my boss I just hoped I would be one of those people who like could be like six months pregnant and people didn't know which was like the exact opposite so of course I had to go tell my boss and he was I mean this was in 1987 when things were not as universally civil there even now they're not universally supportive but there was less general support and he was extremely supportive and accommodating and just just extremely understanding that I would be needing more time off and so forth and that single conversation kind of made me go from like the electric company is a place to work for a few years to like maybe I'm going to make my career here I mean that made such a difference to me so a few years later I was still there managed not to get pregnant any more times in close succession and I got another important mentor when we got a new CEO and he had he asked me to come up and write speeches for him and be one of his assistants and that changed my career again because it ended led to my moving into management and we also had a female chairman who was really a pioneer going to law school in the 50s and trying to manage a career in a family decades before I had done it and she was an important role model I left the electric company I left National Grid in 2007 and I had a leave in contract that I had to be out of energy for two years and when that time ended I started networking to try to get back into energy and maybe some of you have had this painful experience this was pre-linked in pre-twitter at least for me of writing cold emails to people seeing if there are opportunities or they know of anything they can suggest you and can you buy them a cup of coffee and can you talk I mean it's just really painful I mean I would get up every day and say okay I'll write six today and but an energy colleague that I wrote to again not someone I was super close to whom I had emailed ended up giving my name to the Obama White House when they were looking for a fur commissioner from the New England region and the fact that she remembered my email and that I was looking for jobs and that she mentioned my name changed my life again it really changed my life and I wasn't prominent outside my local circle and I wasn't even that prominent in my local circle after two years of doing nonprofit work but I competed for and won the FERC seat and that that really did feel like a fairy godmother moment more more so than most of them so I moved to DC I didn't really know many people but people were extraordinarily welcoming to me and um this is a little bit sad actually but I was the eighth female commissioner at FERC in its history and five of which is I really don't feel like I should be in the single digits I mean we're not talking civil war era here but whatever I was the eighth and five of the seven who had served before me all collectively took me out to lunch and offered to be a support network and kind of show me the robes and all and some of them had served decades before and so that was you know again they didn't all have to drive into Washington that day and do that but people go went the extra step I wish I could give equally specific examples of like oh I wrote an email for this person and this happened or I had a call and then they got this job um but it's hard to know if you've actually had that impact sometimes you don't know and maybe you'll never know but I've really tried to help others succeed in their careers in energy when they need help just the little things no matter how busy I am I make an effort to reply to emails whether I know the person or not you know they say oh I went to Columbia a few years ago or someone at FERC to gave me your name or whatever reply to emails reply to LinkedIn messages return calls meet with people when I can I give career advice and suggest people for jobs employees of course who worked with me who I know very well co-workers students others in the energy field whose paths I crossed I try to affirmatively reach out when I know someone is between jobs that I worked with those can be difficult messages to write but sometimes those are the times people don't get enough messages like my own mentors the people I've tried to help include a lot of women but also men both people I work closely with and can really give references to and so forth but also people I've just known over the years through conferences and events and students that I've taught I don't give references for people I don't know well I mean I have to be honest but even with people who I don't have a job or I can't write a big long references almost always something you can say to steer them towards someone or introduce them to someone or suggest something I'm definitely not perfect at it I don't know that there's such a thing but I it's something I really tried to do and I do it partly because I know how much it helped me but also I usually not always enjoy it getting to know people hearing their stories and I also kind of am selfishly aware that at the end of the day the people I mentor are an important part and maybe the most important part of my own contribution to the clean energy field the more time that goes by since I left the electric company which is now quite a long time 2007 and even since I left FERC the less I think about oh I ran that safety campaign or I came out with that brilliant purpose strategy or I helped shape that principle those kind of fade and but the people that I tried to help develop come into more prominence just as one example when I think about the the people I believe I had 12 advisors over nine years in my office at FERC and also assistants who held a similar role in my time in senior management and when I look at what they're doing now already and it hasn't been that long I'm really excited with their accomplishments to say nothing of their potential going forward and then I think about all the people I've kind of interacted with in energy over 35 years and the kind of circle of people expanding and there a lot of them are spread in a position to make a difference I say this all the time when I'm with students but it's really clear to me that the baby boom wonderful and self-absorbed that we have been our entire lives are not going to solve all of the energy and climate problems that are facing the nation in the world so we pretty much had better be developing the generations that have are going to succeed us and so in this stage in my life that's when I'm going to continue to try to do so thank you again for this wonderful honor thank you for everything you do at C3E the ambassadors and all the people involved with the organization to advance and support the role of women in energy thank you