Erle Nye
Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, TXU Corp.

NEMA presented its prestigious Falk Award to Erle Nye, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of TXU Corp, at its 76th Annual Meeting and Leadership Conference in November 2002.

Nye, who is also chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, is being honored for his career-long contributions to the electrical industry. Dubbed the "energy cowboy" by Forbes magazine, the native Texan has lifted TXU stock one percent this year, at a time when most other energy companies have lost three-fourths of their value. Over the last several years, he has helped TXU grow from a $20 billion regional electric utility into a $40 billion international electric, gas, and telecommunications company with a solid balance sheet.

"Erle Nye has set a high standard for excellence of corporate responsibility and commitment to the industry," says NEMA President Malcolm O'Hagan. "He is a visionary leader who has consistently demonstrated a welcome tendency to doing the right things for his company, the electroindustry, and his community."

An electrical engineer and a lawyer, Nye has worked for TXU (formerly Texas Utilities) and its predecessors his entire adult life.

Under Nye's leadership, the company has grown considerably through acquisition, both here and abroad, but the growth has been measured and sustainable. He has worked to pay down company debt and has carefully shepherded company resources.

Also under Nye's deft leadership, TXU acquired the largest power generation company in the United Kingdom and entered the telecommunications industry with the purchase of Lufkin-Conroe Communications.

Nye was influential in the 1999 legislation that deregulated Texas public utilities and has been called "the father of deregulation legislation in Texas." "At TXU, we knew that competition in our industry was an idea whose time had come," said Nye in an interview with the Texas A&M university relations newspaper. "The regulation under which U.S. public utility providers had traditionally functioned was not the equivalent of competition. We believed a free market would allow better allocation of resources, foster innovation and improvement in operating efficiency, and more reliably reward good industry performance."

Nye is a board member of the Electric Power Research Institute, and a past chairman of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and the Nuclear Energy Institute. He has served as an advisor to the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection and was a member of the U.S. Department of Energy's Electric System Reliability Task Force. In addition, Nye served as chairman of the Board of Regents for the Texas A&M university system.

His civic contributions include serving on the boards of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, North Texas Public Broadcasting, the Salvation Army's Dallas County Advisory Board, the YWCA Metropolitan Dallas Advisory Board, and the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Foundation. Nye received the 2002 Robert G. Storey Award from Southern Methodist University, was inducted into the Junior Achievement Dallas Business Hall of Fame in 2001, and received the 2000 Russell H. Perry Free Enterprise Award, in addition to receiving numerous other awards in earlier years.

Previous winners of the Falk Award include Charles W. Denny, chairman of Square D-Schneider Electric North America; United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky; Percy Barnevik, chairman and chief executive officer of Asea Brown Bovery; astronaut Neil Armstrong; and Didier Pineau-Valencienne, chairman and chief executive officer of Group Schneider.