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Faces of Ava: Russell Mills, Ava’s New CFO

Jun 17, 2025

Ava’s new Chief Financial Officer Russell Mills has had a long career in California energy, from trading on the California Power Exchange to managing risk for municipal utilities. He brings a clear mission: using finance innovations to make energy more affordable for Ava customers.

Russell Mills Headshot

Russell Mills has had a long career in money—especially in energy money.

His career reflects the modern energy era in California, starting with the birth and death of California’s experiment with competitive power markets. 

He was in the room where it happened, staffing a trading desk at the Power Exchange, the forum where Enron and other marketers took advantage of poorly designed markets to make off with billions of dollars.

He then worked for the state to help manage the crisis, selling billions of dollars in bonds to tame the markets.

Today, years later, he is drawing on those lessons to use the power of public finance to address the growing problem of energy affordability. He started in February as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Ava.

Learning to Love Money

Mills was interested in money from an early age, growing up in Maryland during the tumultuous financial world of the 1970s. America had gone off the gold standard in 1971, switching to currency backed by “full faith and credit,” with the Federal Reserve in charge of monetary policy.  Poor decisions by the Fed, oil price shocks, and other factors spurred “The Great Inflation,” with inflation peaking at 14% per year and home mortgage rates as high as 18.5%.  

“My dad would read the business news on Sundays, tracking the stock prices,” he says. “I would sit over his shoulder and see what he was looking at.”

“Something stuck with me about money, how the supply affects the economy and life,” he says. “There’s something fascinating about it.”

This led Mills to study business and finance in college and grad school. His first jobs were managing investments for banks and insurance companies.

After the deregulation of natural gas and telecommunications in the 1980s, policymakers started to think about doing the same in the electricity sector, one of America’s biggest industries. California was an early mover. Mills was intrigued. 

“I thought, that sounds like a great idea, let’s go out to California,” he recalls. “They were looking for people who understood commodity markets, which I did. It was a burgeoning industry, and looked like it would take hold across the country.”

In the Heat of the Action

The move to competitive power markets was kicked off in 1995 by an order from the California Public Utilities Commission and codified the following year when the legislature unanimously passed AB 1890. The landmark law opened the market to competitive suppliers and reshaped the role of utilities. It encouraged utilities to divest their power plants to independent power producers, with retail rates capped until they did. It also transferred control of transmission lines to the new California Independent System Operator (CAISO). 

Most critically, instead of utility rates being set by state regulators, customers would be free to choose their power supplier, with rates set by the market.

This market would be managed by the California Power Exchange (PX), a private nonprofit organization that discovered prices through day-ahead auctions. To encourage transparency, all power transactions by investor-owned utilities (about 80% of state demand) would go through the Exchange. Utilities were not allowed to sign long-term contracts outside of the Exchange.

The PX is where Mills landed, just in time for competitive markets to kick off in 1998, as a power trader. 

Trouble started the following year, as retail rates suddenly skyrocketed in San Diego. In the summer of 2000, prices on wholesale markets exploded statewide, along with power shortages that led to rolling blackouts. Still subject to retail rate caps, PG&E was forced into bankruptcy.

Coming to light later were the illegal actions of electricity and gas companies in manipulating the market, as documented in the book and movie “Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room.”  A years-long series of lawsuits and settlements by the state attorney general has yielded $7.5 billion of refunds to date.

Mills was in the middle of it. “I was buying power to keep the lights on around the clock,” he says. “I participated in some of the very high prices that had to be paid.”  

“There was no shortage of power plants,” he explains.  “It was more of a financial crisis or credit crisis than an energy crisis.”

Mills had actually interviewed for a job with Enron as he was coming out of Loyola Marymount’s business school, but chose “the light side” instead.

The first victim of PG&E’s bankruptcy was the PX, which ceased buying and selling power in January 2001, laying off dozens of workers, including Mills.

Meanwhile, the state had empowered the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to take over electricity procurement from the utilities and the PX. DWR traditionally managed water and power transactions from the state’s vast water system of dams, reservoirs, and canals, so it had some expertise in power markets.  Mills and other PX staffers moved over to DWR.

At first, DWR spent billions from the state general fund to cover immediate needs. But as it got up to speed, it sold bonds to repay the state and fund long-term contracts. The main bond sale was $11 billion, the largest of its kind in US history.

With the change in focus at DWR, Mills’ work shifted to managing bonds while serving as Chief Finance Officer.

After the Deluge

When the contracts had been signed and the market settled down, the DWR job shifted back to water. But Mills, who calls himself “a power sector guy,” moved over to Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA), the power supplier for public utilities in Southern California, like the municipal utilities in Los Angeles and Riverside. He soon took a job closer to his home near Sacramento, working for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) as Treasurer and Director of Risk Management.

SMUD and SCPPA are similar to Ava in that they are all owned by the public.  But SMUD and SCPPA own assets like power plants, wires, and poles, while Ava is “asset-light”—it does not own the infrastructure.

Owning assets leads to additional responsibilities in risk management, one of Mills’ responsibilities at SMUD. For example, utilities carry insurance policies for transmission lines in wildfire hazard areas, a critical issue since the Camp Fire of 2018, which killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. The fire was sparked by power lines that had been neglected by PG&E, resulting in $13.5 billion in liability payments and forcing PG&E into another bankruptcy.

SMUD’s insurance costs are modest, given its limited number of lines in high-risk areas. But insurance costs are huge for PG&E, reflecting the extremely high risk associated with their lines and past record of causing wildfires.  

“PG&E’s insurance premiums had become very expensive relative to their coverage—like 80 cents on the dollar,” says Mills. “That means the premium costs 80% of the value of the coverage. So PG&E no longer buys insurance; they self-insure by setting aside funds.” PG&E is further covered by a state insurance fund.

The Benefits of Public Ownership

Publicly-owned utilities (POUs) share a number of financial advantages over investor-owned utilities (IOUs), most obviously that they don’t pay dividends to shareholders. They can also save funds by selling bonds that are exempt from taxes, a benefit to the buyer of 30-35%. Buyers are willing to accept a lower return to get the tax benefit, resulting in a lower cost of capital, which lowers POU costs.

Public utilities can also use “prepay” bonds, which pay up front for years of future power delivery, much like getting a mortgage rather than paying rent. Ava has done three rounds of prepay bonds so far, saving $22 million on power purchases.   

The CCA of the Future

Just as at the start of his energy career with the Power Exchange in the late ‘90s, Mills thinks some fundamental questions are being raised in the power sector today.

“Where is the utility business model headed?” he wonders. “Will PG&E become just a poles and wires company, with no direct customers?  Will all customer management be taken over by CCAs and other POUs?”

These evolving opportunities with CCAs are what intrigued Mills and inspired his move from SMUD to Ava.

“You even wonder what happens if the CCA concept gains steam nationwide. If everyone is talking about how unaffordable electricity is, maybe the CCA is the way to deliver lower-cost power.”

“I like the growth in the CCA landscape,” he says. “It’s much like a public utility business model, with lower prices… maybe eventually quite a bit more affordable.”

He hasn’t forgotten lessons from the beginning of his career.  “My mission has been to lower costs through finance. Maybe that’s my PTSD from the power crisis.”