Giraffes, basketballs, and energy markets

When Carrie Simpson graduated from Harvard University back in 2001 with a degree in government, she was scooped up by Enron. Her first employer was the soon-to-be notorious energy and commodities conglomerate that would become synonymous with corporate greed.

Simpson couldn’t have predicted any of that. Now, she’s leading the groundbreaking electricity market expansion at SPP, but at the time, she was just a young graduate in her first full-time job, trying to make her mark.

As a college basketball player with political aspirations, Simpson sustained several injuries (knee, ankle) that cut short her playing time. She soured on a potential government career after going to school with too many people who wanted to be president. So, as fortune would have it, while home in Texas one summer rehabilitating her ankle, another career option revealed itself.

Looking for a summer job, she found, with the assistance of a temp agency, a spot as a data entry analyst with Entergy Corp. in Houston.

A light bulb went off.

“My job was to sit on the trade floor and enter trades,” recalled Simpson. “I was like ‘what are these people doing?’ They were buying and selling power all over the eastern grid. A guy from Pine Bluff was my boss. It was the first time I ever met anyone from Arkansas. He taught me what a megawatt was and that if there is excess power you can sell it to someone else who has a need for power. I discovered a world that I didn’t know existed. It was fascinating to me.”

Later, after being hired at Enron, she found herself on one of the busiest and highest stakes trading floors in the country, facilitating multi-million-dollar energy deals. It was a wild, six-month ride before the company collapsed. But the experience set Simpson, now 46, on the path to her current position as SPP’s vice president of markets. At Enron, she had front row seats to what happens when energy companies do things for the wrong reasons.

At SPP, she’s found her calling, realizing what can be accomplished in the energy industry with the right motives and goals. She’s taken a leadership role in studying, planning, and establishing SPP’s Markets+, a day-ahead market (meaning electricity is bought and sold for the next day’s use) in western states. In a major accomplishment for SPP (and Simpson), the Markets+ tariff and funding plan were approved earlier this year by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) with a go-live date anticipated for 2027.

“We worked with a group of stakeholders unfamiliar with our stakeholder process and how we do things, and they bought in,” Simpson said. “Whether big utilities or trade groups or public interest organizations, some with a history of not trusting each other, they worked together. Our team supported it and brought it to life. I’m very proud of that. Now, we’ve got to go implement the thing.”

Her promotion to vice president of markets, effective April 1, is the latest move in a fascinating professional and personal journey.

Simpson grew up in The Woodlands, Texas, about 30 miles north of Houston.  Her mom was a teacher, and her dad rented construction equipment. In high school, she loved playing soccer and basketball. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to go to college but decided it had to be the best college she could get into and still play sports. A coach at Harvard was impressed watching her in a tournament in Spokane, Wash. Ivy League schools don’t offer scholarships, but after she was accepted, “it wasn’t like I was not going to Harvard. My parents said they’d figure it out.” With the financial aid package Harvard offered, the cost was about what it would be to go to a state school in Texas.

She was injured much of her freshman year when the Harvard women’s basketball team won the Ivy League. She cheered from the bench as her team became the only 16-seed in the women’s NCAA Tournament to beat a 1-seed, Stanford.

The team manager, Georgeann Roye, was Simpson’s college roommate. They remain close friends.

“My room was always super tidy while she, on the other hand, to look at her physical space it was a disaster all the time,” Roye recalled. “I figured out somewhere along the line it was OK. The reason was that in the inside of her head, she had it all together. She had a certain mental even-keel-ness. She was ridiculously competitive.”

At Enron, Simpson learned what competition really was.

“As I’ve reflected back, some of that stuff was so ridiculous,” Simpson recalled. “But I didn’t understand that as a 22-year-old in her first job out of college. I had no context of what normal was. At the time, I was the only female power trader on the trading floor in Houston, and the youngest. Twenty-five years ago, it was very much a boys club. I sort of butted my way in by playing basketball with them and talking sports.  It was really cutthroat. Then, it collapsed.”

The company’s 2001 bankruptcy was the largest at the time. Executives were later convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and insider trading.

“One day, they said if you haven’t been told otherwise, you’re being laid off,” Simpson said. “My boss said, ‘just sit there.’ Then, I got an AOL message that said to meet in the kitchen. He said I wasn’t being fired. They were laying off the rest of the team, but they were keeping four and I was one of them. He said, ‘Go back to your desk and don’t say anything.’ I was terrified.”

Enron sold its trading business to another firm in 2002, but Simpson had seen enough to know she needed to move on. She landed a job as an energy trader at a firm in Connecticut.

“The industry was under so much scrutiny because of Enron. I felt like the energy industry was a bunch of bad guys and I was part of it. So, I quit. I decided to be a teacher and a coach and give back to the world.”

Simpson went back to her high school alma mater, Oak Ridge High School in Conroe, Texas. She received her Texas alternative teaching certificate and taught government and economics and coached softball and basketball. She even got a commercial driving license so she could drive the team bus.

“I took a massive pay cut, but I loved it so much,” she said. “It was so much work but so much fun.”

By 2005, she was on the move again. While attending her college roommate’s wedding in Oklahoma, she met Matt Simpson, a friend of Roye and a library technician at community college nearby. They got along so well that she decided to move to Miami, Okla. and began teaching alongside Roye, who was also a high school teacher. She and Matt married in 2007.

After a while, she was ready to give the energy industry another try. She took a job as a resource planning analyst with the nearby Empire District Electric Co. just across the border in Missouri. She learned more about markets and trading and electric infrastructure as well as wind generation, which was at its infancy then.

“At Enron, it was all about making the all the money you can,” she said. “At Empire, it was about serving the customers with the most economic price. It was a completely different way to think about my job. Empire taught me the industry doesn’t have to be corrupt.”

Then, in 2009, she got her first exposure to working at SPP where she was hired as a markets operations trainer. She eventually moved to market design to develop what would become SPP’s Integrated Marketplace (which combines day-ahead and real-time energy trading). She was later promoted to management positions in markets. Her move to Little Rock was fortuitous for many reasons, including getting her foot in the door at a growing company with a culture she loved but also making numerous long-lasting friendships.

Leslie Sink, Senior Manager of Operations Analysis and Performance Support

“She is so interesting,” said Leslie Sink, senior manager of operations analysis and performance support. “She is really funny and driven. She’s always seen the big picture. Her biggest asset is her ability to build support and engage. She knows the power of many is much greater than the power of one. She has all the earmarks of a true leader.”

“I was always thought she would go far,” said Gay Anthony, recently retired manager of operations analysis and performance support. “She is super passionate about the industry. She can explain things to anyone.”

Gay Anthony, Recently Retired Manager of Operations Analysis and Performance Support

She loved SPP, but she and her husband had always wanted to live in Denver. They love the outdoors, especially the mountains. So, in 2015, she took a position with Invenergy and later with Xcel Energy, holding multiple positions, including director of western markets.

While in the Mile High City, she received a law degree from the University of Denver. She doubts she’ll ever practice law, but the knowledge is immensely helpful as she digests rulings from FERC and various state regulatory orders.

She also joined an energy industry delegation, traveling to Rwanda and the Philippines to help advise those countries on developing power grids. Some officials there wanted to jump right into it. She advised them to slow down. “It’s an evolution,” she cautioned. “If you don’t have the right rules in place, you get it wrong.” On a trip halfway around the world, she found her Enron experience instructive.

Although loving Denver, she always had SPP in the back of her mind.

“When I left SPP, I cried like a baby,” Simpson said. “I was so sad. I really like the work culture here. I felt like I would never have that again. Then, the pandemic came, and remote opportunities were opening up. So, when I had an opportunity to stay in Denver and work at SPP I jumped on it. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll come back to SPP!’”

In 2022, she returned to SPP as director of seams (the power industry term for market borders) and western services development.

With the promotion to vice president, Simpson, her husband, Matt, and their two dachshunds, have moved to Little Rock, the headquarters of SPP to help oversee the implementation of Markets+ and the Integrated Marketplace as well as work more closely with the executive team.

Jim Gonzalez, Senior Director of Seams and Western Services

Jim Gonzalez, senior director of seams and western services, said that working for Simpson is rewarding because she gives her teams freedom and structure and is always challenging assumptions. He compliments her for having the courage to gently nudge him to improve in various areas.

“She’s the glue, the catalyst to get things going,” he said.

When not devising the best ways to design electricity markets, Simpson stays active in sports although she doesn’t play much basketball anymore. She likes to snow ski, bicycle, and for a time participated in triathlons. She was urged by former SPP CEO Barbara Sugg to pick up the grueling running, swimming and biking endurance sport. Last year, she rode her bicycle through the Dolomite Mountains in Italy.

She also tends to her growing collection of desktop giraffe statues. It’s her favorite zoo animal because “they seem sweet, and I love their long necks.” She bought one in Rwanda, another in New York, and others were gifts.

And, she’s writing a book about her tenure at Enron. She considers it more of a hobby and has no definitive publication plans. When she remembers things from her experiences through all the craziness of that time, she writes them down. She hopes her effort can serve as an educational tool to introduce people to the energy industry.

“Knowing what I know now,” she says. “When what you are passionate about is only money, you lose.”