Episode Description
If your company hasn’t tapped into the quantum computing resources here in Tennessee, or if you’re still wondering about how quantum and advanced energy work together, this episode is for you.
Today, we’re speaking with EPB’s CEO, Janet Rehberg. EPB is the Chattanooga area’s local power company in the Tennessee Valley with a history of saying “YES” to new ideas and innovation. Janet started her career as an electrical engineer. After 20 years in the utility industry, she knows utilities have the power to unlock a community’s potential.
In this episode, we talk about:
- How quantum computing could be the competitive advantage you’ve been looking for
- The EPB Quantum Center in Chattanooga, where businesses can explore real-world applications to their most pressing challenges, no matter the industry.
- EPB’s upcoming Quantum in Business Conference, happening October 1st at The Westin in Chattanooga.
Reserve your spot now for Quantum in Business!
Learn more about EPB Quantum and the comprehensive resources for developing and commercializing quantum innovations in networking, computing, sensing and beyond. EPB Quantum also establishes Chattanooga as the first commercially available quantum computing and networking hub in the U.S., fostering a regional quantum ecosystem to create new jobs and attract additional business investment.
Enjoy the show.
To keep up-to-date with the latest episodes, follow TAEBC on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok.
Thank you to everyone who makes this podcast possible, including the generosity of TAEBC members.
Episode Transcript
Cortney Piper
Welcome to Energizing Tennessee, powered by the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council. We’re your number one podcast for news about Tennessee’s advanced energy sector. I’m your host, Cortney Piper.
If your company hasn’t tapped into the quantum computing resources here in Tennessee, or if you’re still wondering about how quantum and advanced energy work together, this episode is for you.
Today we’re speaking with EPB’s CEO, Janet Rehberg. EPB is the Chattanooga area’s local power company in the Tennessee Valley with a history of saying yes to new ideas and innovation. Janet started her career as an electrical engineer. After 20 years of being boots on the ground in the utility industry, she knows that utilities have the power to unlock a community’s potential.
And yes, quantum computing could absolutely be your competitive advantage. Janet is here to tell us all about the EPB Quantum Center in Chattanooga, where businesses can explore real-world applications to their most pressing challenges, no matter the industry.
Plus, Janet tells us more about EPB’s upcoming Quantum and Business Conference that’s happening October 1st at the Westin in Chattanooga. Check out our show notes for the registration link to reserve your spot and enjoy the show.
If you like what you hear, subscribe to our podcast and don’t forget to leave a rating or review. It helps us reach a wider audience to champion Tennessee’s advanced energy sector.
Energizing Tennessee would not be possible without the support of our TAEBC members.
Janet Rehberg, welcome to the show.
Janet Rehberg
Thank you very much, Cortney. I’m excited to be here.
Cortney Piper
And congratulations on assuming your role as EPB’s new CEO, EPB’s first female CEO. We’re so glad to have you on to talk about quantum and advanced energy, and we’re very thankful to have EPB as a TAEBC member.
Janet Rehberg
Well, we appreciate that. And thank you for the congratulations there.
Cortney Piper
Now, before we explore all things quantum and advanced energy, I’d love to know a little bit more about you and your career journey. So, what initially sparked your interest in engineering and all things technology, really?
Janet Rehberg
Yeah, Cortney, it wasn’t one of those things that I, as a child, knew what I wanted to be. As a matter of fact, the opposite of me, my dad, he knew exactly what he wanted to be as a child. He always wanted to be an electrical engineer.
But unfortunately for him, he was drafted into war at a very young age because he was born and raised in Vietnam. So he was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army. And when he had the opportunity to come over to the U.S., he thought, man, land of opportunity, now’s the time for me to make a name for myself.
After having a family, he tried to go back to get his electrical engineering degree. But I remember him telling me that he would watch my mom, his wife, sit at the kitchen table from month to month, and she would cry because she just couldn’t make ends meet on just her minimum-wage income. And so he felt that he, being the man of the family, needed to help support her. So he gave up his dream to be able to support the family.
So, Cortney, when I was going through high school, I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to be, but I knew that there was a dream that my dad couldn’t pursue. And so I chose to be an electrical engineer to really fulfill my dad’s dream for him. So that’s how I joined that path.
Cortney Piper
Oh my gosh, Janet, that is great. So how has your prior experience as an engineer been an asset to you as a utility executive?
Janet Rehberg
I would say it isn’t necessarily being an engineer, but what has been an asset is my curiosity to learn. Being an engineer opened a lot of doors for me to get me into great companies. But being able to try out new things, learn everything that I can in each of the roles that I’m in, and then go above and beyond and try to support other departments and learn more of how they did their work — how can I better support you?
Through my career, I was able to get leverage and move around different areas and get exposed to seeing how the other departments really work or manage some of their projects. And so, as I’m moving up the ranks, some of those basic foundations of learning more than just the typical role that I’m in allowed me to be able to lead with a different lens because I’ve been able to see all the different aspects of the utility space.
What’s interesting about me is that my experience spans over three different types of utilities. So in the utility space, you have three of them. You have investor-owned, which is typically for-profit; you have electric co-ops, which are not-for-profit; and then you have municipalities, which are usually government- or city-owned.
I started at an investor-owned utility, went into electric co-ops, and now I’m with a municipality. So I’m rounding out my entire utility experience with three different types.
Cortney Piper
That is the absolute perfect setup, not only for EPB, but really where the utility industry is going today. That kind of perspective and the cross-collaboration is where we’re seeing a distinct advantage in utilities that embrace that to meet their customers’ needs.
And so, enter quantum computing, Janet. What a great segue. It’s a huge conversation right now. Everybody defines it differently. But how do you define quantum computing and the advantages that it can bring to your customers?
Janet Rehberg
Yeah, so I don’t know how well the audience here knows what quantum computing is. So let me take a step back a little bit and explain the concept. And to those who already know it, I apologize for the very basic explanation here.
When you think about classical computers today, the way that they solve a problem is very sequential. It’s binary, one or zero. So if you think about a maze, you look at one option. That option, you run into a roadblock, you start back over, you try another option. That one doesn’t work, I’ll go back and I’ll try another path until it leads me out of the maze, which is one path at a time, very sequential.
Well, quantum has a property called superposition. And what that does is it can look at all of the solutions, or look at all of the paths at once, and be able to find what is the most optimal solution to get out of that maze.
So if you just compare the maze problem from a classical computer that looks at things one at a time versus a quantum computer that can look at everything in parallel, then you can see how solving complex problems can become much faster, more efficient and, being in the utility space, use less energy.
Cortney Piper
That is the best, most concise definition of quantum computing that I have heard in the last eight months. So that was fantastic.
Now let’s talk more about EPB because EPB has built this international reputation for innovation, from the nation’s first community-wide gig network to today’s work in quantum networking. So, what made EPB decide to invest early in quantum infrastructure?
Janet Rehberg
Our fiber network has brought so much community benefit to our community. And first off, our mission — it’s very interesting. If you ever watch Simon Sinek, who’s one of my favorite speakers and authors, he talks about, “What is the why?”
Most utilities, they talk about, “Oh, we are an electric provider,” or, “We’re a propane provider, gas provider.” But EPB, from the very beginning, our mission is all about enhancing the quality of life for our community. That is our why. And we just happen to be an electric, a fiber network and now a quantum company.
So understanding our why is the big piece, I think, that really sets us as a utility apart from a lot of other utilities.
And so if you look at our fiber network, we had Dr. Ben Tolobo of UTC, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, do an independent study, look back at the last 15 years, and he found that the fiber network brought in $5.3 billion in community benefit and has helped recruit or retain over 10,000 jobs.
But now that we’ve been in that business for about 15 years, our market penetration has sort of saturated. So we thought, what is that next wave of technology that could bring that much benefit to our community, if not more?
Cortney, we actually got started with quantum by accident about 10 years ago. Some people are now just talking about quantum when EPB actually got involved with quantum 10 years ago.
In 2016, there was a Department of Energy pilot, and they wanted to use quantum technology to help secure the grid using technology over a very short distance between two substations, because the energy space has a lot of very critical infrastructure that needs to be very secure.
And so they brought in some partnerships. They had Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, Qubitekk, a startup quantum company, and of course they’re going to need a utility if it’s going to be about the grid. And so, from our long-term relationship with the Department of Energy and our reputation in the industry, they gave us a call.
And our CEO at the time, when he tells the story, he’ll say, “I couldn’t even spell quantum when they called and asked me.” But if DOE wants to do a pilot project, we’re going to partner with them.
Through that partnership, we all won the R&D 100 and the Edison Gold Award. And so that’s when David saw a huge opportunity in quantum.
What he saw at the time was a lot of quantum technology was sort of hidden in laboratories and academia. So he thought, what if we made it more commercially available? Can that, one, accelerate the quantum space? And two, can quantum be that next wave of technology that could bring that much community benefit to our community if we remain as the first mover of technology?
And so that’s how we got involved with quantum, through that Department of Energy pilot project.
David then said, if we’re going to commercialize it, where should we start? And so we decided to venture into the quantum networking side of it because we have the fiber network infrastructure already.
In 2023, we introduced the first commercially available quantum network, and it became accessible to any academia, national lab or even startup quantum company to come and test quantum technology on our quantum network.
Cortney Piper
Wow. What an incredible differentiator for the Chattanooga community and a great asset to provide to your community.
Now, EPB has also been a leader on all things energy and all things advanced energy. So, how do you see quantum complementing EPB’s long-standing investments in grid modernization and energy reliability?
Janet Rehberg
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Two years ago, when I was recruited to come to EPB, I was recruited to be the president of Strategic Initiatives, which basically is looking at all new innovation for EPB, trying to make sure that we keep Chattanooga on that cutting edge.
My philosophy behind vetting new technology isn’t looking at that new shiny object that is out there. My philosophy for my team is we need to look at technology that can support our core service, which is the energy and fiber network side of our business. How does it support and enhance and make it better?
So if you look at quantum networking, it has properties that can secure our network more than today’s technology. So already, quantum networking can build better security for the classical fiber network side of our business.
But the other piece is our energy side. Quantum computing, as I explained earlier with the principle of superposition and how it can do things more efficiently, can address very complex problems today in the energy space that we haven’t been able to solve.
Once quantum computing gets to the phase that it can surpass a classical computer, it can help us solve grid optimization problems that today classical computers can’t solve.
And the other piece of it is, right now, everyone’s been using AI, and AI takes a lot of computational power. So when it takes that much power, it takes a lot of energy.
We think that once AI can be teamed with quantum computing, when it gets to that later phase where it’s powerful enough to surpass a classical computer, AI and quantum computing can also reduce the amount of energy because it can solve things much quicker and more efficiently.
Cortney Piper
And that’s exactly what we think about at the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council when we think about our mission: use energy innovations as a means to economic development and job creation.
And marrying quantum computing and AI and advanced energy is exactly the kind of synergy that we conceived of when we started this organization in 2013. And it’s so fulfilling to see EPB just grab onto that opportunity and go with it.
So, Janet, we are definitely going to have you back on the show to keep us updated on all things quantum and the opportunities it’s providing EPB and your customers.
So we’ll go back to quantum for a little bit. Which industries are likely to see the value of quantum first?
Janet Rehberg
When we were thinking about quantum applications for quantum computing, of course, being in the energy industry, definitely energy was going to be a huge industry that could take advantage of that.
But there are also other industries that most people would think of, whether it’s healthcare, the finance industry, logistics, automotive. But what has really surprised us, Cortney, is that quantum applications can actually benefit almost any industry.
Cortney Piper
Yeah.
Janet Rehberg
And we’ve been getting a lot of different industries that we didn’t even think about approaching us.
I mean, the Tennessee Aquarium has approached us to say, “Hey, we’ve had some interesting optimization problems that we think quantum computing can help.”
We have the entertainment industry. We’re right in the sweet spot, Chattanooga, between Nashville being a music hub and Atlanta being a movie hub. So my former CEO David and I joke that, in our utility experience, we’d never imagined sitting in a room full of movie and music producers. I mean, anywhere from producers for Usher and Ludacris and Tyler Perry.
So it’s very interesting because they have challenges that we didn’t even think about that really would make sense on both the quantum security, quantum networking and quantum optimization side of it.
Cortney Piper
Can you describe some of their challenges in a little bit more detail? Are you allowed to share anything with us?
Janet Rehberg
I’ll share broadly. One of the biggest fears for any content creator, whether it’s music or movie, is getting their content leaked or hacked before it’s ready for production.
So if you can secure that communication channel, then you’re protecting that content before it gets hacked. They want to ensure, how do they secure that? So that’s one piece of it.
And then other options are, when you film, a lot of times you have to send actors or singers to different locations in order to catch some of the scenery. But what if, no matter where you’re at, you can film actors or actresses in two different locations, but it’s synced with no latency so that it feels like everything’s being filmed at the same place?
So reducing that latency or that lag delay. There’s a lot more that they are interested in, but those are just a few examples of how that could help their industry.
Cortney Piper
Wow. So what can businesses and business leaders be doing now to start exploring the power of quantum for their business?
Janet Rehberg
So that’s a really great segue for a plug that I’m going to put in.
Cortney Piper
Yes, please.
Janet Rehberg
EPB is hosting our first Quantum in Business Summit, and it’s on October 1st here in Chattanooga.
When we first ventured into the quantum space, we thought that the clientele that’s going to be most interested in quantum is going to be your academia, your national labs, your startup quantum companies.
But as we’ve ventured deeper into it, we’ve gotten a lot of interest from existing industries. But the problem is they’ll say, “We don’t quite understand it. Is the technology real? And how do we use it?”
So those are the three common questions that we get. That’s why we decided to host a Quantum in Business Summit, which is really just focused on existing industry.
During that summit, we’re going to talk about: What is quantum? Is it still decades away, or is it here? And the next thing is how to think about what kind of use cases your industry is facing today that classical computers can’t ever solve, that you can think about using quantum applications and quantum computing to help you start solving.
And what’s nice about what we offer is our EPB Quantum Center has a commercial network, but it also has a commercial computer that should be operational very, very soon.
So instead of each industry going out there and spending millions of dollars buying your own quantum computer, for a fraction of that cost, you can purchase the hours from our computer to be able to build algorithms or partner with solution providers, whether it’s your academia or national lab, to help you build those algorithms, purchasing some computing hours to be able to solve that.
So that’s where we wanted to play into this ecosystem. It’s going to be really hard to accelerate the quantum space if everyone feels they’re going to have to buy a quantum computer.
So if we have the asset, I think that’s better for those who want to optimize their business, have a good business case, and can, for a normal price they would pay for any type of optimization, purchase those hours to be able to do the business case and solve a problem that they couldn’t solve in the past.
Cortney Piper
Tell me more about the EPB Quantum Center because, like you said, it is this place for businesses to explore real-world applications. So walk me through that process.
I’m a business owner. I’m the Chattanooga Aquarium, and I’m thinking, “Hey, I think this network might be able to help me with something.” Tell me more about the center and how you accept incoming inquiries.
Janet Rehberg
Yeah, it always starts out with a good conversation. So when businesses and industries are interested, they’ll give us a call, especially local ones who know EPB very, very well.
And we will sit down and have a conversation to say, “What are some challenges today that you would love to see solved that haven’t been solved?” And we start to explore.
Sometimes, depending on that industry, it may be a security aspect of it, or it may be an optimization aspect. So if it’s security, then it’s more on the networking side. If it’s optimization, then definitely it’s going to be with the application on the computing side.
So that’s how we help the industry. We identify some of the challenges, and we bring in other partners along the way, whether it’s our academia, national labs or even other startup quantum companies to help with the solution providing.
But we have the asset. We’re an infrastructure company, whether it’s energy, fiber or now quantum. We have that infrastructure to help accelerate based on what their needs are and the problem they’re trying to solve.
Cortney Piper
And again, bringing in that cross-collaboration. So, like you said, if this particular problem requires bringing in academic partners or others, EPB has the ability to do that. So you don’t have to feel like you’re on your own. This is a true asset.
Janet Rehberg
That’s right. We have a great university just right in our backyard, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which has not only a certification program, but I believe they also have master’s and Ph.D. programs that they’re working on for quantum.
And they’ve hired brilliant physicists from across the world that have come to work for them.
And Vanderbilt, which is typically known for the university up in Nashville, they’re actually bringing a physical campus here in Chattanooga. And their goal is to have about 250 faculty, staff and students within the next three to five years in downtown Chattanooga focused just on the quantum side.
And so the traction that we’re having in Chattanooga with quantum is recruiting and building this great ecosystem with great academia.
And speaking about academia, outside of just your universities, the state has actually helped fund a K-12 program called Tennessee Works. Because you’re going to need that pipeline of young students being interested and eventually going to that upper level.
And we’re also in talks with our state university or tech university — Tennessee Tech, or sorry, Chattanooga Tech — to talk about even the two-year degree. So some people can go on and get more graduate-type programs, or if they want to be a technician style in the quantum realm, we want to be able to think about that and offer that opportunity when that’s more available.
Cortney Piper
Energy innovation as a means to economic development and job creation. EPB living out the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council’s mission. I love it.
Janet, before we wrap up, I want to give you a chance to plug the Quantum in Business event October 1st one more time, and anything else that you’d like to leave our listeners with?
Janet Rehberg
Yeah, definitely. I would invite any business or industry.
Really, the McKinsey study has shown from year to year how the quantum space has accelerated. And one of the things that the McKinsey study has said is that the first mover in an existing industry can take the most advantage out of quantum applications.
And I think it’s something in the trillions of dollars of benefit worldwide for that.
So we encourage any industry to think about it now, think about it soon, and be one of the first movers in your industry to use quantum to help optimize your business.
And so that’s why we’re here to host. It’s a free conference. We’re not trying to sell it to anybody for the conference. We just want people to understand: What is quantum, and how does that help benefit your business?
Cortney Piper
Janet Rehberg, CEO of EPB and a tremendous TAEBC member, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Janet Rehberg
Thank you very much, Cortney.
Cortney Piper
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