For Lew Hay, a Lehigh engineering education was more than a launching pad—it was a proving ground. Drawn to electrical engineering for its rigor, he found that the problem-solving mindset he developed at Lehigh would serve him well throughout his career in corporate leadership. After early roles in consulting and finance, Hay rose to lead Florida-based NextEra Energy (formerly FPL Group), the largest renewable energy generator in the U.S., where he retired as president, CEO, and chairman of the board in 2013. Now, through a transformational gift, he and his wife, Sherry, are investing in the future of engineering education at Lehigh. Their endowment will support the dean of the Rossin College—formally naming the Lewis Hay III ’77 ’08P ’11P and Sherry A. Hay ’78 ’08P ’11P Deanship—to help the college attract visionary leaders, drive groundbreaking research, and expand opportunities for students, including the burgeoning First-Year Rossin Experience (FYRE). “I like to invest in people, and it takes great professors and great leaders to really differentiate a program,” says Hay, who currently serves on corporate boards and advises organizations focused on sustainability and innovation, sharing his engineering-informed perspective on solving critical challenges in the energy sector and beyond.
What do you see as key to accelerating the growth of renewable energy in the U.S.?
For the longest time, renewables were expensive—more expensive than coal or gas or nuclear. That’s not the case anymore. Solar and wind are, on a per megawatt hour basis of electricity generated, the cheapest forms of energy we have. But they are intermittent, so for them to become a bigger share of the U.S. energy mix, we need more energy storage, meaning battery storage. The technology has come a long way, but it’s still costly, so it’s being deployed selectively. It’s no different than with automobiles. As the price of batteries comes down, you’re going to have more storage in the electric utility industry and you’re going to have more electric cars.
Another challenge is getting interconnection agreements with local utilities to connect wind farms and solar plants into the grid. There’s a massive backlog, so we need to streamline and speed up that process. One of the contributing factors is that we don't have enough transmission capacity in the U.S. Most solar farms are located in somewhat remote areas. You need to be able to get the electricity to the “load centers” where people use the energy. We as a nation have to build more transmission to accommodate that. There are numerous challenges in building transmission: It’s not cheap to build and siting it isn’t easy, especially when you start crossing state lines.
Are there other emerging sources of renewable energy that hold promise?
One that gets a lot of hype right now is nuclear power, in the form of small modular reactors. These are would be much smaller than reactors previously built, which are now prohibitively expensive. They’d be manufactured on an assembly line and then shipped out, theoretically making it much cheaper. I’m a big fan of nuclear power, it’s very clean and safe, but I’m skeptical about the economics. It’s very hard to get a real-world estimate of what small modular reactors going to cost. So I think solar and wind are going to be the renewables of choice for at least the next 10-15 years.
What does the term “resilient infrastructure” mean in an energy context?
Resiliency of the electricity supply is the provision of reliable electricity regardless of external factors. In Florida, we think of hurricanes, but it’s much more than that. We have birds and squirrels that create problems. Electromagnetic radiation from solar flares can do a number on electronic equipment. And then there’s cybersecurity. The electrical grid and our systems are constantly being attacked.
We always viewed it as our job to keep the lights on. The typical home has dozens of electrical devices that are connected to the internet, and power is central to everybody’s lives. When I was a kid, we lost power fairly frequently in Western Pennsylvania, but you’d light a few candles and wait it out. People can’t do that today. And in Florida, if you lose power in the summertime, it becomes a threat to people’s health. So we focused a lot on resiliency.
In 2003 and 2004, we had seven hurricanes hit our service territory. With every one, we had millions of customers without service and had to bring in 15,000 to 20,000 linemen to help put our grids back together. Every single person in our company was working on it. At first, we got the power back quickly. People called all the lineman heroes. By the last hurricane, people were pretty upset after multiple experiences of going for days without power. It wasn’t good for our customers or our business. So we embarked on a program, called Storm Secure, to improve resiliency. Even though our network had already been built to a higher standards, it wasn’t sufficiently durable to hold up to massive hurricanes that would hover for days. With Hurricane Wilma, at one point we had 4.5 million customers out of power and it took several weeks to get everybody back on. At that scale, people have a hard time just living their normal lives. They can’t drive their cars. They worry about safe food and water.
First, we hardened major thoroughfares—main roads with four or five grocery stores, multiple gas stations, convenience stores, and so on. We looked at those areas first so people could access the basic necessities. We also prioritized hospitals and police and fire stations, and then slowly started building out from there. Our ultimate goal was getting our entire transmission network—what moves the power from a power plant—closer to load centers, to the major cities. It’s taken close to 20 years to harden the entire grid and make it more intelligent. In many cases, even when you have a fault, the grid can automatically flip switches to work its way around that fault and keep as many people with power as possible.
What impact has artificial intelligence had on the power industry?
There’s a lot of talk recently about AI. But in the energy industry, we’ve been working with machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence for close to 10 years—the applications just continue to expand. A simple example involves the periodic inspections of lines looking for components on the verge of failure. Historically, we’d have people with binoculars in helicopters and trucks patrolling transmission lines. It was very time consuming and not all that effective in finding subtle issues. Now, drones equipped with cameras connect to computers that use image recognition to identify even the smallest of issues that could cause a line to fail. They take thousands images, and AI can sort through them incredibly fast while identifying problems that humans more than likely would miss.
We’re also hearing a lot about increased energy demand as a result of the growing adoption of AI. What compounds the challenge is that tech companies want clean energy for their data centers. Overall, it’s going to create a big demand for renewables, but I don’t see that they will be able to satisfy the demand. I think some coal plants that have been scheduled to be shut down are going to keep running. More gas plants and more transmission will need to be built. Then again, AI models may also become more energy efficient, as is apparently the case with the Chinese startup DeepSeek that has been in the news. We’re definitely going to see growth in demands for electricity, but it might not be as big as some people are forecasting.
What drew you to electrical engineering as an undergraduate and how did your Lehigh engineering education serve you in your career?
When it came time to decide which field of engineering to pursue, somebody told me, “If you can do electrical engineering, you can do anything.” So that was the challenge I took. Being an electrical engineer gave me credibility with the engineers and technical staff when I became CEO of FPL Group. My background in engineering provided the framework and systematic approach for analyzing and solving problems in business that I relied on it throughout my career. At Lehigh, I learned to be disciplined and use my time efficiently. That honed some muscles that I used for the rest of my career.