Were it not for this, Kim Greene would most likely not be chair, president and CEO of Southern Company Gas today.
It was 1991, and Greene was newly married and looking for a job. At the time, she had just completed her master's degree in biomedical engineering, and her dream position was with medical device companies Zimmer Biomet or DePuy Synthes, both of which happened to be based in Warsaw, Indiana. But the town didn’t offer much opportunity for her husband, a pilot, so she agreed to live and work in Birmingham, Alabama, for six months.
She reached out to the biggest companies hiring in the field of engineering: the city’s gas company, a construction company and Southern Company.
Her interviewer at Southern asked her point-blank: “Why in the world would you want to work here?”
She didn’t have a great answer, admitted Greene—cobbling together a response about clean air work being done and how she would still be doing engineering to benefit the human body. “It was a stretch,” she said, “but they hired me.”
That first professional job in Southern Company Services’ engineering organization set the stage for Greene’s now 31-year energy career. “I was fortunate to work with a group of engineers in my first role who were brilliant and inclusive of me,” she said. “I had tough assignments, I had a great team that made me feel valued and I also clearly saw this company’s commitment to our communities.
“This balance of feeling really valued at work and doing what I thought was challenging and satisfying work—as well as the opportunity to participate and be encouraged to participate in the community—held me to Southern long past those six months.”
Greene has continued to mirror that culture throughout her career, which took her to Tennessee Valley Authority, then back to Southern Company. Now she’s adding another role—2022 chair of the American Gas Association, where she plans to continue her focus on community by supporting the industry’s commitment to net zero and telling the important and often overlooked story of natural gas’s vital role in the nation’s energy economy.
Even though Greene might once have imagined that she would be bettering people’s lives another way, by designing biomedical implants, energy is also baked in her genes: Her father worked in economic development for TVA in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Beginning her career at Southern with a team that recognized her value led to her taking leadership roles early, including joining the board of a nonprofit in her first year. She continued to challenge herself, moving from engineering into commercial operations, then finance.
Seventeen years passed by in the blink of an eye. Then Greene was courted by TVA and ended up accepting the role of chief financial officer. Her mother was ill at the time, and the job allowed her to go home to Knoxville to spend precious time with both her parents while growing in her career, moving from CFO to group president, strategy and external relations, then chief generation officer, overseeing more than 30,000 megawatts of coal, gas and hydro generation, including operations, engineering, fuel supply, environmental, research and development, and power trading.
After about five years at TVA, Southern Company Chair, President and CEO Tom Fanning reached out, saying, “It’s time for you to come home.”
“I had gone home to my childhood home,” Greene said of her time at TVA, “[but] Southern is absolutely my professional home.”
Coming back in 2013, Greene jumped into the role of president and CEO of Southern Company Services. In 2014, she was named chief operating officer and executive vice president at Southern Company, responsible for system operations.
Then, in June 2018, she was named chair, president and CEO of Southern Company Gas, where she oversees the safe delivery of natural gas to more than 4.3 million utility customers in Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee and Virginia, along with other energyrelated businesses.
All those experiences, including the pivotal interview with Southern that changed the entire path of her career, were “a great lesson—that there is a big, beautiful world out there,” Greene said. “I learned a lot about the value of being open to new ideas and not assuming we have all the answers. It [also] taught me about leadership, the importance of servant leadership, that I’m here to help these employees and this business unit and this company meet its mission. It is not at all, ever, about me.”
Greene became known as someone who would make prudent decisions in the name of safety. For example, during her time as Southern COO, safety incidents were on a plateau. In response, Greene researched to see what could be done to further improve the company’s safety performance and culture. This included speaking to her former university thesis adviser, who had since created a master’s program in safety engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
As a result, Greene refocused Southern’s safety program onto critical risks and how to mitigate them, rather than the total recordable incident rate—something unheard of at the time. “By measuring and compensating the total number of injuries, we were overly focusing on the small things and not focusing enough on the big things—the risks that exist that could seriously injure or kill someone.” Now, after several years of changing the philosophy to focus on serious injury and fatality prevention, “the total recordable injury rate is higher than it’s been in over a decade, but I feel our company is safer than ever. If you talk about what safety leadership looks like, I think it’s about being courageous, making sure that you’re always putting people first, that you are listening [and] that you are exemplifying a culture of caring for the individual.”
That attitude of caring and putting others first also wraps into the culture of inclusion that Greene is helping to build. “Inclusion is absolutely critical,” she said. “If I had not felt included in that first job [at Southern], I might not have stayed in this industry.”
Greene has always been passionate about the issue, but as in many other industries, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 opened frank conversations about inclusion, or the lack thereof. Greene says people she had worked with for years began to share honest stories she had never heard. “It really helped me recognize that while I appreciated and valued diversity,” she said, “there is more that I can do, and more that all of us can do to listen more, learn more and lead more boldly, and that we were going to have to have more conversations, particularly around race, and sometimes religion and politics—all topics most of us have been trained not to talk about at the office.”
Her realization initiated a new process at Southern Company Gas called Fueling Equity that is focused on supporting inclusiveness in employees, the workplace, recruiting and external communities. Coinciding with that process are new employee forums, webinars on race and inclusion, and a dedicated conversation portal where employees can post personal stories. “Some might call it a different kind of safety,” Greene said, “like a psychological safety, allowing more of our colleagues to be able to come to work and feel comfortable and valued.”
A recent Pulse survey has shown good results, revealing that Southern Company Gas employees have a 92% overall Engagement Index, a 5% improvement from 2018, expressing their satisfaction with and pride in working for Southern Company Gas.
Greene’s frank willingness to embrace continuous learning and innovation dovetails into Southern’s culture. “We have had a focused R&D organization for over 50 years, and that idea of continuous improvement and always looking for better ways to do something permeates our business. We are always trying to think about new ways of doing things,” she shared.
For example, Southern Company Gas was an early adopter of drone technology for pipeline inspections. Greene also led an initiative to not only shorten appointment time windows but also employ a commonly used technology—text messaging—to inform customers about appointments, when a technician is on the way and more. The tool also helped provide information to customers about support resources in paying their bills during the pandemic. Then, during the height of the pandemic, Southern Company Gas customer service representatives were enabled to send “care packages” filled with food and household essentials to customers they determined were in need.
“Innovation runs the gamut, whether it’s technology, whether it’s process, whether it’s communication with our customers, or communication about our product or a message,” Greene said. “Here’s what I believe: We need to be a part of shaping the future, not being shaped by the future. And at the end of the day, that is really what drives my vision around innovation.”
In 2018, Southern Company was also one of the first U.S. utilities to set a goal to reduce carbon emissions by 50% from 2007 levels by 2030 for both its electric and gas operations. Since then, it has made its goal even more ambitious: Net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Renewable natural gas is one avenue, and Southern Company Gas has launched a subsidiary, Southern Company Gas Renewables, to develop RNG to cost-effectively sell to customers.
In February 2021, Southern Company and Southern Company Gas launched a $15 million R&D initiative, HyBlend, to address technical barriers in blending hydrogen into natural gas infrastructure and to study the blend’s life-cycle emissions. This would potentially enable the natural gas industry to transport an emissions-free source of energy to customers’ doors. “It’s still early, but it does look as though there are opportunities for us to blend hydrogen, maybe as much as up to 20%, into our existing natural gas infrastructure and send it to people’s homes and businesses and utilize the same metering infrastructure and the same appliances they have,” she said. “We’re still working to test that.”
The work is key, said Greene, since the debate around climate change “has been essentially settled.” But while she believes hydrogen is important to the nation’s clean energy future, she emphasized that more than just hydrogen is needed: “I strongly believe in an all-of-the-above strategy. Yes, we need renewables; yes, we need electricity; yes, we need natural gas.”
She points to the 2019 polar vortex that plunged many cities into the negative double digits, including Naperville, Illinois, home to Southern Company Gas subsidiary Nicor Gas. The natural gas system performed “flawlessly,” Greene said, “and that system designed and operated by an exceptional team kept 2.2 million customers safe and warm. Lives are on the line if our infrastructure isn’t operating correctly, but it did. And if you just look at the amount of energy we supplied during the peak period, it’s equivalent to almost four times the amount of peak energy that comes from the electric system in the territory.”
Greene also points to recent legislation in Illinois that is allowing Nicor Gas to construct a new pipeline from Chicago to Pembroke Township, often referred to as a “forgotten” community, with a goal of attracting manufacturing and other development to the low-income area and helping to improve quality of life for its residents.
“I feel very confident we have a path to net zero for our business, and that net zero means that we’re going to continue using geologic natural gas,” Greene said. “Practically, we have to find a way to ensure that we’re meeting our climate targets but still allowing our customers to benefit from clean, safe, reliable and affordable natural gas.”
The industry’s commitment to net zero is just one initiative Greene plans to pursue during her tenure as AGA chair, “ensuring that our eye is on the ball and that we’re all doing everything we can to get to these targets,” she said.
During her three years as an AGA board member, she has already played a pivotal role in improving pipeline safety, co-chairing the 2019 task force recommending that all AGA members implement Pipeline Safety Management Systems, or API RP 1173, within three years. Then, following the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline in May this year, Greene advocated for board passage of a resolution supporting reasonable cybersecurity regulations.
She plans to continue that kind of transparency as board chair, particularly in education and messaging surrounding natural gas. The story of natural gas—as the backbone of the nation’s energy economy, as an affordable and reliable fuel source, as a driver of economic development—is a vivid one that must be told by different and persuasive voices. “We’ve got to think about how we communicate differently, and we’ve got to educate people. Because I fear that we let people remain uneducated and allow policy changes to happen before they understand the consequences,” she said.
“We just cannot move forward without natural gas, and I just don’t think people really understand how important it is to our economy, how important it is to manufacturing, how important it is to business. That’s the story I want to tell.”
On The Move
When Kim Greene is not in her office at Southern Company Gas, located in a red granite high-rise in midtown Atlanta, you might find her and her family—husband, Ted, and daughters, Kendall and Cassady — traveling, often in an RV, listening to her favorite 1970s-era music as they drive.
She has covered all 50 states and parts of Canada and most national parks. Internationally, she has visited every continent except for Antarctica. “That’s on the bucket list,” she said.
If Greene were anyone else, she might say that traveling is how she decompresses from work. But while travel is a passion, “I truly love what I do,” she said. “Yes, there are challenges, but I enjoy it. I’m an engineer, so I’m tackling challenges and solving problems. I have always been energized by work.”