William Dean "Bill" Johnson (born January 9, 1954) is an American attorney and businessman. He is a retired president and CEO of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, as of June 2020.

Early life

Bill Johnson was born on January 9, 1954. He attended Pennsylvania State University, where he played football as an offensive lineman, but did not earn a degree. He later graduated from Duke University summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in history. He also obtained a J.D. degree from the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

in 1982.

Career

After graduating, he served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He later worked as a partner in the

Raleigh, North Carolina Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Southe ...

office of Hunton & Williams. He joined Progress Energy forerunner

Carolina Power & Light Carolina Power & Light (CP&L), later doing business as Progress Energy Inc., was an electrical generation, transmission, and distribution utility based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company was founded on July 13, 1908 as the result of the merge ...

in 1995. He became president of Progress Energy in 2005, and chairman and CEO in 2007. He remained the chairman, president, and CEO of Progress Energy until the company was bought by Duke Energy, in 2012. Per the merger agreement between Progress and Duke, he was slated to become CEO of the new combined company. Within an hour after the merger closed, he was removed as CEO by the new board, the majority of whom were legacy Duke Energy board members. The ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

'' estimated that Johnson received $44 million as severance pay. He next served the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for six years before announcing plans to retire, in November 2018, amid some controversy. At their February 2019 meeting, the TVA board of directors announced their selection of Jeffrey Lyash to replace Johnson, effective April 2019. Lyash came to TVA from Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG). On April 3, 2019, Johnson was announced as the new president and CEO of PG&E Corporation, replacing interim CEO John Simon, and garnering "more than twice the base salary" of his predecessor, Geisha Williams. On April 22, 2020, it was publicly announced that Johnson would be retiring from PG&E.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, William D. Duke University Trinity College of Arts and Sciences alumni Living people 1954 births American chief executives of energy companies 20th-century American businesspeople University of North Carolina School of Law alumni