SDMyers President Joins CEO Forum to Share Vision for 2025 and Beyond

Overview

SDMyers joins power industry leaders for a candid look at reliability, aging assets, and the strategic decisions shaping the grid’s future.

Every organization that depends on uninterrupted power is facing the same reality right now: aging assets, longer transformer lead times, tighter budgets, and a grid under growing pressure. The questions leaders are asking have less to do with any single product and more to do with strategy — how do we protect what we have? Where do we invest? What does reliability actually require in the years ahead?

Those were the questions on the table when SDMyers President Jon Bucciarelli joined the inaugural CEO Forum hosted by Power Systems Technology, a moderated conversation among leaders working to keep the power industry reliable through a period of real change.

About the Forum

Recorded on January 21, 2025, on the Power Systems Technology portal, A Look Ahead: Insights from Leaders on 2025 and Beyond brought together executives from across the power industry for a high-level discussion on the opportunities, challenges, and disruptions shaping the road ahead. It was the first in an ongoing series designed to give the power systems community direct access to the people making strategic decisions about the grid’s future.

Moderated by Alan Ross, CEO and Managing Editor, the panel featured:

• Jon Bucciarelli — SDMyers
• Martin Robinson — IRISS
• Angelo Rizzo — Systems with Intelligence

The conversation moved through the trends reshaping power systems and transformers, and how organizations are adapting their strategies to keep pace. Key insights from the session also appeared in the March issue of Power Systems Technology magazine.

Read or download the full transcript here.

A Trusted Voice on Reliability in a Changing Industry

In this roundtable, Jon shared personal and professional reflections illustrating SDMyers’ enduring impact on the industry. With a career path that includes engineering at General Motors, teaching future engineers, and leading innovation at a bioplastics startup, Jon highlighted how his diverse experience ultimately prepared him to steward SDMyers’ 60+-year legacy of transformer reliability.

Our founder, Stan Myers, was the pioneer in oil processing and transformer reliability. We’ve always focused on educating customers and serving those industrials who are often underserved. With growing power demand and increased grid vulnerability, keeping equipment running safely has never been more important.

Industry Leadership and a Call to Proactive Action

As the conversation turned toward current challenges, Jon emphasized SDMyers’ commitment to education, safety, and system resilience. He addressed the importance of transformer oil testing and NFPA 70B, recently elevated from a recommendation to a standard, noting:

We try to educate folks on the risks associated with electrical maintenance. Unfortunately, a lot of people choose out of fear as opposed to choosing what is right.

On the high costs of power outages, Jon added:

The emergency costs, the generator costs, the loss of production costs are staggering compared to a little bit of prevention. That’s one of the things companies need to adopt — and we really try to work with industrial customers to do that.

Why It Matters

Transformers are among the most critical and hardest-to-replace assets in the power system. When lead times stretch and replacement costs climb, the case for protecting and understanding the assets already in service only grows stronger. That is the reality SDMyers works in every day, and it is the perspective Jon brought to the forum: reliability is not just a technical question; it is a leadership decision about how organizations manage risk, plan capital, and care for the people who depend on power staying on.

Conversations like this one are where the industry works through those decisions together. We were glad to be part of it.

Connect With Us

At SDMyers, we help organizations maximize transformer uptime, resilience, and certainty. If you’re ready to take the next step in ensuring the reliability of your electrical assets, connect with our team today.