In a span of 14 months during 2004-05, Florida was thrashed by seven hurricanes. Millions of people were left without power—unable to cook their food, cool their homes, or do daily tasks such as pump gas. Four of those storms happened in 2004. It was the first time four hurricanes hit one state in one season since 1886, when it happened to Texas.
NextEra Energy’s subsidiary, Florida Power & Light, scrambled around the clock to manage the state’s crisis. Lewis Hay III (TPR’92) remembers it well. He was CEO of the power company.
As a young boy, he dreamt of running a business. It’s why he earned his MBA at CMU. He went on to hold leadership positions in various industries before settling into NextEra Energy, based in Juno Beach, Fla. He became the corporation’s president and CEO in June 2001 and chairman of the board less than a year later.
Those storms in 2004-05 could have given him second thoughts about his career path. “Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again as quickly as possible is something that was an interesting and challenging experience, but it’s one that I prefer to forget,” he says. But the company and the state persevered, he adds, thanks to everyone working as a team in all areas—from fixing the state’s power transmission and distribution systems to keeping the communities affected by the outages up to date with the latest information.
Hay recently retired with quite a track record. For the past seven years, NextEra Energy has been named No. 1 among electric and gas utilities on Fortune magazine’s annual list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. That kind of leadership also led to Hay recently being named by Power Engineering magazine as one of the power-generation industry’s 25 most influential people during the past 25 years.
—Emmett Zitelli (HNZ’01)
