Manager, Load Forecasting

The Manager, Load Forecasting is a key leadership role within the Forecasting and Analytics team in the Planning and Regulatory Support organisation.

This role leads the team responsible for Southern Company’s official short- and long-term energy, peak demand, and revenue forecasts for the retail electric operating companies, including organic load growth and large-load segments.

The position serves as the Director of Forecasting and Analytics’ primary forecasting deputy, ensuring that forecasting methods, assumptions, outputs, documentation, and explanations are analytically sound, transparent, repeatable, and defensible for planning, financial, executive, and regulatory uses.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the Annual Forecasting and Planning Cadence: Lead completion of official energy, peak demand, and revenue forecasts for Southern Company and its retail electric operating companies.
• Govern Forecasting Methodologies, Models, Tools, and Assumptions: Oversee development, improvement, documentation, benchmarking, validation, and implementation of forecasting models, statistical methods, tools, and assumptions.
• Serve as the Director’s Forecasting Designated Backup in Regulatory Proceedings: Support the Director of Forecasting and Analytics as the primary backup on forecasting matters in regulatory proceedings.
• Create Forecasting Insights for Enterprise Decision-Making: Synthesize complex load, customer, economic, weather, large-load, technology, and business driver information into clear planning implications.
• Coordinate with Sales and Economic Analysis on Monthly and Quarterly Cadences: Partner with the Sales and Economic Analysis Manager to ensure monthly and quarterly sales monitoring, economic analysis, and variance explanations are consistent with the official annual forecast, model structure, and planning assumptions.
• Lead Scenario, Sensitivity, and Emerging Load Analysis: Lead analytical approaches for uncertainty related to large loads, data centre and industrial growth, economic changes, electrification, distributed energy resources, customer-sited generation, load flexibility, weather trends, and changing customer usage patterns.
• Develop Team Leads, Technical Talent, and Succession Readiness: Lead team leads and highly technical forecasting professionals through clear expectations, coaching, delegation, accountability, and development planning.
• Manage the Forecasting Work Portfolio and Cross-System Delivery: Prioritise competing work requests, align resources to deadlines, negotiate deliverable scope when needed, and maintain quality under planning and regulatory time constraints.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Analytics, Finance, Engineering, Mathematics, Decision Sciences, Data Science, or a complementary discipline required.
• Master’s degree, Ph.D., or other advanced technical or business degree preferred.
• Minimum 7 years of experience in utility planning, forecasting, analytics, economics, finance, regulatory support, engineering, consulting, or related functions is required.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical professionals, senior analysts, team leads, or cross-functional analytical workstreams.
• Strong understanding of forecasting, statistics, econometrics, customer usage analysis, economic drivers, planning processes, or comparable analytical disciplines.
• Utility experience strongly preferred, including exposure to load forecasting, integrated resource planning, financial planning, rate cases, regulatory filings, load research, pricing, demand-side management, large-load analysis, or system planning.

Skills and Attributes:

• Strong analytical and statistical judgment, including the ability to distinguish signal from noise and convert uncertain information into practical planning frameworks.
• Excellent written, oral, and visual communication skills, with the ability to explain complex forecasting concepts to executives, technical experts, regulatory audiences, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to influence without direct authority across operating companies, functional teams, and enterprise planning processes.
• Strong project, portfolio, and deadline management skills, including the ability to prioritise competing work and protect team capacity.
• Demonstrated people-development capability, including coaching, delegation, feedback, accountability, succession planning, and development of future leaders.
• Working knowledge of forecasting, econometric, statistical, data analytics, or visualisation applications such as EViews, SAS, Python, R, SQL, Power BI, Excel, or comparable tools.