This spring, ACT Power Services joined a new ownership group led by BridgePeak Energy Capital, with co-founder and CEO Kyle Cooper leading the company through the change. Kyle started out in power plant control rooms at Progress Energy and Duke Energy, later ran O&M at Cypress Creek Renewables, and holds a nuclear engineering degree, an MBA and a North Carolina PE license.
We sat down with him to talk about how fast ACT has grown, the systems behind the work, safety, and where the company goes from here.
1. You co-founded ACT in 2020 and have led it through two ownership changes. What kept the company steady?
The people, mostly. Ownership changed twice in four years, but the crews on our sites didn’t. Some of the techs I hired that first year are now leading regions. Customers kept seeing the same faces at the gate and calling the same number when something went wrong.
My job through all of it was making sure whatever was happening above us never landed on the field. Keep the trucks rolling, keep the work quality where it should be, and keep safety first. The last couple of years weren’t easy for anybody in this industry, and I’m proud that our customers never had to wonder whether ACT was going to show up.
2. ACT has grown fast. How do you grow that quickly without losing what made the company work?
You hire slower than you want to. That sounds backwards for a company that’s growing, but the fastest way to wreck an O&M business is to put people on a site before they’re ready. New techs get paired with experienced ones, and nobody gets handed a medium-voltage job just because the schedule says we need a body there.
The other piece is regional leadership. When we were small, I could know every site personally. That’s not possible anymore, so the people closest to the work need to be able to make good decisions without waiting on headquarters.
3. What does a normal day look like for an ACT field tech?
There isn’t really a normal one, which is part of why people like the job. A tech might start the morning walking rows on a scheduled inspection and be chasing an inverter that dropped offline by lunch. Summer is heat and vegetation. Winter is snow and short days.
What doesn’t change is the order of operations. Plan the job, talk through the hazards, do the work right, and close it out properly so the next person knows exactly what happened.
4. You talk a lot about smart systems. What does that actually mean at ACT?
It means a tech shouldn’t have to guess. Our sites feed monitoring data into our control room, and every alarm, repair and preventive task lives in one work order system. Our field forms are digital, so the photos, readings and notes from a job are attached to the work order the same day.
That sounds basic, but plenty of this industry still runs on spreadsheets and phone calls. When the data’s clean, you start seeing patterns. Which inverter model keeps faulting. Which sites are eating up truck rolls. Where we’re spending time that isn’t moving availability.
5. How does that help customers?
Fewer surprises. If an owner calls asking why a site was down Tuesday, we should be able to tell them what alarmed, when we dispatched, what we found, what we replaced and when it came back. Nobody should have to dig through a truck to answer that.
I came up in control rooms, and one thing I learned early is that the faster you find a problem, the cheaper it is to fix. Good systems shrink that window, and that’s energy our customers get back.
6. Every company says safety comes first. What does a real safety culture look like to you?
It looks like a tech stopping a job and nobody asking why. Stop-work authority only means something if people actually use it and don’t get second-guessed afterward.
Our field and safety teams meet before every job, and we track near misses and talk about them openly, because a near miss is a free lesson. I’d much rather hear about something that almost happened than read a report about something that did. Safety is the first thing we cover in leadership meetings, before revenue, before anything else.
7. Battery storage is a growing part of the business. How is ACT approaching it?
Carefully, and with a lot of training. Storage is a different animal from solar. The hazards are different, the manufacturer requirements are different, and the consequences of getting it wrong are a lot bigger.
Owners are pairing more storage with solar every year, and they want one partner who understands both. We want to be that partner. But we’re not going to take on work before our people are ready for it.
8. What’s next for ACT over the next year or two?
Steady growth with stable ownership behind us. BridgePeak and the investor group understand this business and they’re here for the long haul, which lets us plan instead of react.
Practically, that means growing where our customers already need us, building out our storage and high-voltage capabilities, and continuing to invest in the systems we talked about. I’d also like to see more of our leaders come up from the field. Some of the best managers we have started out as techs.
9. What are you most excited about right now?
The people coming into this industry. We’ve got young techs who’ve never known a grid without solar on it, and they’re sharp. They ask good questions and push back on how we’ve always done things, which is exactly what you want.
On the industry side, everything that’s been built over the last five years needs to be maintained for the next twenty-five or thirty. That’s a lot of work, and it’s work that matters.
10. Last one. If you could tell every ACT employee one thing, what would it be?
Thank you, first. The past couple of years asked a lot of people here, and they showed up anyway.
And second, go home the same way you came to work. No job, no schedule and no customer deadline is worth somebody getting hurt. Take care of that, take care of each other, and we’ll keep doing good work for a long time.
