WOMEN ON WILDFIRE: Balancing Safety, Reliability, & Affordability for Electric Utilities
Join us at SF Climate Week 2026 for a timely and critical conversation on the future of our electricity grid in the face of growing wildfire risk.
Moderated by Gridware’s Chief Operating Officer Meghan Reibstein, a panel of leading experts across electricity regulation, lineworker safety, ratepayer affordability, grid resilience, and risk planning come together to tackle one of the grid’s most urgent challenges: utility-caused wildfires.
The panel will explore how utilities, regulators, and communities can balance safety, reliability, and affordability while reducing wildfire risk, and what it will take to build a more resilient energy system for the future.
Stick around after the panel for a networking mixer hosted at Gridware’s headquarters to continue the conversation, connect with fellow attendees, and engage directly with leaders shaping the future of the grid.
PANELISTS
Carla Peterman
President, PG&E Corporation, & Executive Vice President, Customer & Corporate Affairs
Carla has spent her career focused on California's energy policy and regulatory landscape. At PG&E, she oversees the company's regulatory, legislative, sustainability, and charitable strategies, all focused on delivering for the customers and communities that PG&E serves in Northern and Central California. Prior to joining PG&E in 2021, Carla served as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Regulatory Affairs at Southern California Edison. Before that she served a six-year term as a Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Prior to her CPUC appointment, Carla served on the California Energy Commission, where she was the lead commissioner for renewables, transportation, and natural gas.
Sam Smith
Strategic adviser to the President for clean energy jobs at the AFL-CIO.
Sam Smith was the director of the Just Transition Centre at the International Trade Union Confederation, the global union federation representing 191 million workers. At ITUC, Sam and her team worked with unions around the world to get agreements with governments and employers for good union jobs in clean energy.
Letha Tawney
Chair of the Oregon Public Utility Commission
Chair Tawney has worked regionally and nationally on affordable clean energy deployment, solutions for energy burdened households, and utility wildfire risk mitigation. Throughout her tenure, Chair Tawney has championed regional electricity market cooperation between California and the rest of the West. She was a founding sponsor of the West Wide Pathways Initiative, closely engaging to center customer protection and benefits.
MODERATOR
Meghan Reibstein
Chief Operating Officer at Gridware
As the Chief Operating Officer of Gridware, Meghan and her team collaborate with utility companies to enhance existing grid assets with cutting-edge technology. Their work helps prevent wildfires and other hazards, reduce utility operating costs, and ultimately make the grid more resilient. She leads the end-to-end operation, including the teams responsible for designing and building the digital products that support it, spanning supply chain and manufacturing, field installation, hardware fleet management, machine learning and autonomy, and commercial product development. She also oversees business operations, as well as people and culture.
Meghan’s experience spans two decades of launching software and hardware products, scaling data-centric digital and physical operations, and building multidisciplinary organizations across companies ranging from Series A startups to Fortune 50 enterprises. Before pivoting her career to critical infrastructure and climate tech, she served as a VP of Product at Zillow, an Amazon “S-Team” Technical Advisor, and the global owner of the first Prime Day.
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