Underground Infrastructure - August 2023 - 15

AMERICAN GAS ASSOCIATION
AGA Chair Sees Future
Shaped by Education, Innovation
Suzanne Sitherwood felt at home from
the moment she arrived at her college
co-op job with Atlanta Gas Light. The
daughter of a U.S. Navy chief petty officer,
the environment she found at the
Georgia utility immediately brought to
mind her experience growing up on military
bases around the country.
" I drove up to the facility and saw
barbed wire fence, trucks and people in
uniform and thought, 'Okay, this is the
place for me,' " Sitherwood said. She never
lost that feeling of connection as she trailblazed
through the ranks over three decades
at the later-named AGL Resources.
Starting as a corrosion technician -
taking cathodic protection readings at
customer meters by day while attending
school at night - she became the
utility's first female field engineer after
graduation and, later, its first female vice
president of engineering and senior vice
president of gas operations before serving
seven years as president.
Again, channeling her military upbringing
and tapping into her studies
in organizational design and behavior,
Sitherwood developed a team-minded
management style that emphasized
planning, accountability and communication,
successfully leading operations
and integration, as well as numerous
acquisitions and expansions.
She was recruited in 2011 by The
Laclede Group to replace its retiring
CEO and lead a similarly
aggressive
growth agenda at the St. Louis-based utility.
Under her watch, the company has acquired
four natural gas utilities, expanded
and updated its infrastructure and modernized
its trading and marketing business.
Spire's enterprise value, meanwhile,
has grown more than sixfold and its market
value more than quadrupled. It is now
the fifth largest publicly traded natural gas
utility in the United States.
Sitherwood, who plans to retire from
Spire this December, sat down with
Underground Infrastructure to discuss
her career, her outlook for the natural gas
industry and her work as the 2023 chair
of the American Gas Association (AGA).
UI: You've been on the board of
the American Gas Association
for more than a decade, but this
year was your first term as chair.
Did you adopt a specific theme
for the year, as others have done?
Sitherwood: You're right, it's been
something of a tradition at AGA for the
incoming chair to state a theme for the
year. And I can remember talking with
some of my AGA colleagues and questioning
this some years back. You don't
change your strategy every year. It's a
long-term view of the business and where
we need to be driving, and then the underlying
strategies that we want to deploy
to support that. And the AGA has already
published its strategy in this year's
playbook titled, " AGA's Bold Action for a
Clean Energy Future. "
This playbook may be updated, but
the strategy doesn't change. So that's the
way I think about the idea of a theme -
themes are more powerful when they are
constant. But what is it that I'm most focused
on and feel like I might be able to
accomplish this year? It boils down first
to education, which is part of the reason I
keep this book here.
UI: What led you to focus on
education above all else?
Sitherwood: We, as an industry and
within our organizations, can do a better
job of educating policymakers, businesses
and consumers. The questions facing
us are, how do we effectively educate
about natural gas energy using all our resources?
How do we connect to different
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Underground Infrastructure - August 2023

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