Indianapolis Power & Light names Ohio utility exec as CEO

An executive at Columbia Gas of Ohio has been named the new president and CEO of Indianapolis Power & Light Co.

Vincent Parisi

Vincent Parisi, vice president of external and customer affairs at Columbia, a unit of Merrillville-based NiSource Inc., will start his new position June 3, IPL parent AES Corp. announced Thursday afternoon.

In his new position, Parisi also will serve as president and CEO of a sister company, Dayton Power & Light Co. He will be based in Indianapolis.

Parisi takes over at a critical time for IPL. The utility has cut more than 100 jobs in the past year during a corporate restructuring to tighten costs.

IPL is under pressure to build business and increase revenue. Its service territory is limited to about 500 square miles in Indianapolis and surrounding areas, and demand for electricity has been slipping. Kilowatt hours of electricity fell about 8 percent between 2014 and 2018, even as revenue climbed about 10 percent during that time.

Parisi will become the fourth CEO of IPL since 2015. He succeeds Craig Jackson, who stepped down in December after just 10 months in the job.

Previous CEOs were Rafael Sanchez, who left last year in a reorganization after two years and is now president of private banking in Indianapolis for Evansville-based Old National Bank; and Kelly Huntington, who left in 2015 after two years and is now a senior vice president at OneAmerica in Indianapolis.

Parisi has 18 years of experience in the utilities industry, serving as senior executive for 16 of those years. Since 2016, he has worked at Columbia, the largest provider of natural gas service in Ohio, with more than 1.4 million customers and nearly 1,000 employees. Columbia, based in Columbus, Ohio, has a service territory that includes most of the state, except for the western and northeastern parts.

He previously served as vice president and general counsel of Gas Natural Inc., a Cleveland-based holding company operating local natural gas utilities serving about 68,000 customers in four states. Before that, he was general counsel and regulatory affairs officer at IGS Energy, an independent retail natural gas and electric supplier based in suburban Columbus, Ohio.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Ohio State University and a law degree from Capital University Law School, both in Columbus.

“I am honored to lead these two forward-thinking companies during a pivotal time in our industry,” Parisi said in a written statement. “As technology continues to advance, IPL and PL&L have applied best practices to energy service, delivering value and a high level of customer service.”

IPL provides electricity to more than 500,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in central Indiana. Dayton Power & Light provides electricity to about 525,000 customers in west central Ohio.