New CEO Travis Million: generation plan will help reduce cost of power for members, 'drive those rates down.’
Golden Valley Electric Association chief executive John Burns will retire next month, and the co-op’s board has selected chief operating officer Travis Million as the new CEO.
Million says he intends to pick up where his predecessor left off in navigating Golden Valley’s transition to more cost-efficient and environmentally friendly ways of generating and transmitting electricity.
After eight years of service as Golden Valley’s legal counsel and four years as president and CEO, Burns is calling it quits.
“I’m going to enjoy the beautiful summer days and spend time with my wife and grandkids,” he said.
The 65-year-old Burns announced his retirement last week, but he told the co-op’s board of directors last year that he intended to leave after his four-year contract expires.
“I had told the board many, many months ago that I didn’t have any intention of renewing it,” he said.
Tom DeLong, the chair of the co-op’s board, says the directors appreciated that advance notice.
“This gave us some time to look around to see who might fit the bill to take over for Golden Valley,” he said.
DeLong says he and other directors hold Burns in high esteem for the work he did in his eight years as corporate and general counsel that preceded his last four years as president and CEO. So DeLong says the board set out to find someone who could replace him – and before long, they settled on Travis Million, the co-op’s chief operating officer.
“Travis is really going to be a great fit for Golden Valley,” he said. “He’s very tuned-in to utilities. A little bit different than John – he comes in with a different skill set.”
Golden Valley hired Million in September as the co-op’s first COO, overseeing important functions like power supply, operations and engineering. He served in that same position for Glennallen-based Copper Valley Electric Association before being elevated to chief executive of that co-op in 2020. He says the GVEA management team that Burns assembled will help him tackle the challenges he’s inherited as the new C-E-O.
“It’s been an absolute pleasure to come up and work with John, under his leadership,” Million said. “I can tell you he has truly built a phenomenal team at Golden Valley.”
He says he’ll be relying on that team to help hold down the price of electricity, which he considers the co-op’s biggest challenge. Burns agrees and says that’s why Golden Valley’s board adopted a Strategic Generation Plan two years ago. The plan calls for generating more power with wind, along with more storage capacity, and less power with fossil fuels. The board updated the plan last year and and modified it in February.
“We’ve got to set forward on a course that allows us to diversify our generation,” Burns said, “make sure that we have stable, reliable generation sources that ultimately, and we can lower the price of electricity in the long run.”
Burns, DeLong and Million all agree that the Legislature’s approval of House Bill 307 should help utilities control fossil-fuel price volatility by improving the Railbelt grid and making new electrical generation projects more affordable. Million says it also dovetails well with the co-op’s generation plan.
“That’s ideally what the Strategic Generation Plan is. Really the main focus is to try and drive those rates down.”
The Golden Valley board will consider a resolution at its May 28th meeting to officially hire Million as the co-op’s new CEO. Burns’ retirement will become effective on June 7th.
