Elevator Sarah Gulezian Named a Rising Star for the 2016 Women’s Energy Summit
We’ve always known that Elevate Dynamic Pricing Program Manager Sarah Gulezian is a rising star. However, our opinions were validated this week by the 2016 Women’s Energy Summit who named Sarah a Rising Star for her knowledge and understanding of the energy industry, participation in her professional community, and her work to ensure that the benefits of smart energy use are accessible to all.
The Summit is an annual invitation-only event which provides a unique opportunity to engage in a national dialogue with accomplished women leaders and identify key strategies for elevating women in the energy industry. Sarah attended the Rising Star Forum on September 19th at Reed Smith LLP, which allowed her to connect with fellow leaders from across the country and discuss how to develop their strengths in the energy industry.
“It’s not uncommon for me to be the only woman in a meeting room, so it was a privilege to meet so many women leaders in energy and hear candid stories of their success and challenges firsthand,” she said. The forum featured standout speakers such as Commissioner Sherina Maye Edwards [Illinois Commerce Commission] and Tarrah Cooper [former Press Secretary for Rahm Emanuel], “who encouraged us to take risks in our careers and ultimately to know the difference between success and significance, and use that to guide our career aspirations.”
Sarah has been a valued member of the Elevate team that partners with utilities for over four years. She joined Elevate after working with the Sierra Club to advance clean energy policy. “I wanted to explore how the policies I worked on played out in the real world,” Sarah said. “The energy landscape has evolved so quickly in the last decade, and people can be overwhelmed by their choices. Now that I manage ComEd’s Hourly Pricing program, my number one goal is to make it easy for people to participate. If it’s easy to participate, it’s easy for them to save money and energy.”
Hourly Pricing gives participants access to electricity prices that change throughout the day and are lower than ComEd’s fixed rate most of the time. By using appliances like the dishwasher at lower priced times, participants can save money and help the environment.
Sarah has increased the success of Hourly Pricing year after year: “We’ve developed new tools and improved the cues we give participants on how and when to adjust their energy usage. As a result, we see that participants are not only shifting their energy load to better ‘off-peak’ times, but are actually conserving more energy by being part of this program.”
Looking forward in her career, Sarah doesn’t have to go very far for examples of strong women leadership in the energy industry. “Watching women lead as the CEOs of Elevate and ComEd shows me a path forward, and I know that this is not necessarily the norm in the energy industry right now. I’m fortunate to see women changing this every day when I go to work.”
Outside of her professional life, Sarah is quite the athlete. In fact, she just completed her first triathlon: “Chicago has amazing natural resources— training on the lakefront motivates me to work hard because smarter energy use is essential for a clean environment.” Spoken like a woman on a mission. Not that we’re surprised.
Interested in saving with Hourly Pricing? Learn more here.
