Chicago-based Exelon Corp. made a sweeping realignment of its management ranks Friday, naming Anne Pramaggiore the first female chief executive of its ComEd unit.
She will take over for Frank Clark, ComEd’s current chairman and CEO, who at 66 is planning to retire after 46 years with Illinois’ largest utility.
The moves come in anticipation of Exelon’s merger with Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, a $7.9 billion stock deal that is expected to close early next year.
Pramaggiore will report to Denis O’Brien, who is now executive vice president of Exelon and CEO of Exelon’s Peco energy unit.
The company said O’Brien will become senior executive vice president of Exelon Corp. and CEO of Exelon Utilities. He will report to Christopher Crane, who will move from chief operating officer to Exelon CEO when, as previously announced, longtime Chief Executive John Rowe steps down upon completion of the Constellation deal.
Also reporting to O’Brien under the new structure will be Craig Adams, who will move from COO to CEO of Peco, and Ken DeFontes, CEO of Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.
The elevation of Pramaggiore is hardly a surprise. In her current role as COO of ComEd, she has already been running day-to-day operations of the $6.1 billion utility, which delivers electricity to 3.8 million customers in Northern Illinois.
In the last year, Pramaggiore has taken center stage in Springfield, as the utility attempts to get controversial legislation signed into law that would build a sophisticated smart-grid infrastructure and alter a 100-year-old regulatory system. She was also the face of ComEd this summer as the company scrambled to fix widespread power outages that left hundreds of thousands of customers without power and spurred an investigation by the Illinois Commerce Commission.
