Phil West Heads Customer Service and Energy Delivery for City Light
Seattle City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco recently announced the arrival of a new Customer Service and Energy Delivery Officer at City Light. Phil West started with the utility on January 4.

“Phil West brings extensive customer service and operations experience that will benefit City Light and its customer-owners as we strive to offer the best customer service experience of any utility in the nation,” Carrasco said. “In fact, during his tenure at Sacramento Municipal Utility (SMUD), they achieved the number one ranking for utilities by J.D. Power, Inc. I am delighted to have Phil join our team.”

West came to City Light from the Utility District where he served as director of customer services. At City Light he will be responsible for leading the utility’s many infrastructure improvement projects, implementing the outage management system which is scheduled to go live prior to the 2010 winter storm season, continuing the utility’s work on asset management, and improving the streetlight repair response time as well as transitioning streetlights to LED technology.

“It is a great opportunity for me to join Seattle City Light and its long history of innovation, environmental stewardship, and energy conservation,” West said. “Electric utilities across the country face many challenges in today’s carbon-constrained world, and I look forward to helping City Light continue to achieve its goals of providing reliable, low-cost environmentally sensitive power for our customers.”

West joined SMUD in 1998 and managed various functions including asset management and work method improvements, outage management implementation, technology improvements to enhance operations, customer service and field services, and network system design.

Recently, West was responsible for managing the design, construction, maintenance, and operation of SMUD’s electrical distribution center. He oversaw an operations and maintenance budget of $66 million, a capital budget of $100 million, and managed 700 employees.

Previously, West was with Pacific Bell/Southwestern Bell, where he had responsibility in market development, account services, and strategic business planning. West has a master’s degree in finance and a bachelor’s degree in marketing from California State University.

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