Hether Benjamin Brown, senior vice president and chief administrative officer of Calpine, poses for a portrait Wednesday, June 8, 2022, at the company’s building in downtown Houston.Despite a record-shattering freeze that spiraled into power plant outages, continued upheaval related to COVID-19 and uncertainty due to a pending overhaul of Texas’ wholesale power market, merchant power company Calpine managed to keep growing in 2021.
Hether Benjamin Brown, chief administrative officer for Calpine, said none of that success would be possible without the company’s employees, especially those who operate Calpine’s 76 power plants nationwide. The company’s revenues dipped in 2020 after COVID-19 shut workplaces and led to a sag in electricity demand, sliding from $10.1 billion in 2019. Electricity demand nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels last year nationwide, according to the Energy Information Administration, buoyed mostly by commercial and industrial consumers.
Still, she said, power plant operators “worked around the clock in very challenging conditions to keep our plants operating and running.”