Meet the Ridley Park native who says she’ll keep your power on as Peco’s first female COO
The Inquirer asked Nicole LeVine about being a woman leader in a traditionally male-dominated field, how Peco’s doing on storm response, and what she wants its 1.7 million customers to know.
Nicole LeVine had been out in the field all morning, attending a safety meeting with Peco employees and touring new construction at the company’s gas plant.
Still, she wore a relaxed smile as she sat down with a reporter in a conference room at the utility’s service center in Plymouth Meeting.
LeVine has served as Peco’s chief operating officer — the first woman to hold that position — for less than a year.
But after 28 years at the company, there haven’t been too many surprises in her new role. The 47-year-old has worked her way up from University of Delaware intern to full-time engineer to director of gas operations to vice president of electric operations (with no less than eight stops in between).
A Ridley Park native, she is familiar, too, with the region and its 1.7 million Peco customers.
In this role, she wants to improve service for those customers, building on the success of last year, during which customers experienced the fewest power outages in the utility company’s history. Storm season runs from May to September or October, so now is a critical time for accomplishing that goal.
The Inquirer asked LeVine about being a woman leader in a traditionally male-dominated field, how Peco’s doing on storm response, and what she wants customers to know.
Questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity
What was your experience like coming up as a woman in this industry?
Early on, I felt like I needed to know the business better than my male peers because I wanted to be taken seriously. In hindsight, that benefited me because I’ve gained a significant amount of knowledge that I may not have had otherwise.
I volunteered after Hurricane Katrina to take our crews down to Mississippi to help restore power. I was the lead and we got assigned our job for the day. I said, “Let’s pull into this parking lot so we can get our arms around what we have to do today.” A gentleman came out of the property and was like, “Hey, I would love to be able to talk to who is in charge here.” I was like, “Nicole LeVine, Peco energy, what can I do for you?” And he looked me up and down, and he’s like, “No, no, no, no. I wanted to know who is in charge.” And I’m like, “Yeah that’s me, Nicole LeVine. What can I do for you?” And he looked me up and down again and said, “Does your daddy own this company?” It was the first time I [realized] people looked at me and — partially because my age and mainly because I am a woman — said I don’t belong. That fueled me.
How is Peco doing in terms of gender equity, including in field positions like line workers?
When I started, the landscape looked a lot different. Today, all four of our senior vice presidents are females.
We could use some more women in the field. We do have some women field workers. They are amazing. I and a couple of my female managers and directors take them out to lunch quarterly. And I joke with them a lot that I can usually afford to take them to a nice restaurant because the table is small. I hope we get to the point where I can’t afford to take you to a nice restaurant anymore.
Summer seems like it would be a busy time for operations here. How has Peco been doing in terms of outages?
We’ve done a significant amount of work over the last several years to prepare for storms. Last year, we actually had our best-ever reliability performance on record. And that was mainly due to a lot of the investments we’ve made, a lot of the automation we’ve put into our system, including a device called a recloser. And what that does is basically try to isolate where the damage is and then allow the remaining customers just to experience a momentary interruption [when your lights flick off for just about 30 seconds]. We’re on track again to have an exceptional reliability year, even with storms.
Excessive heat has been a growing issue nationwide. Could that directly cause power outages?
No, it shouldn’t. It’ll cause higher loads but our system should be able to keep up with those higher loads.
What tips do you have for customers worried about outages this summer?
Know how to contact us, whether through the app, through calling us [at 1-800-841-4141], through texting us [at 697326]. If you see anything out there, whether it’s a wire sagging or a tree potentially growing into our facilities, let us know so we can get out there and fix it before it becomes an outage.