As the New Year begins, Kellie Ashcraft is entering her first full year as Director of UniSource Gas. Promoted in 2025, Ashcraft brings more than 30 years of experience in utility customer and field operations to the role through her leadership roles here and at Black Hills Energy in Colorado.
Ashcraft leads teams working in seven UniSource offices in a service territory that stretches between Arizona’s southern and northern borders.
Here, she answered five questions about her role:
What are the main responsibilities of your job?
As Director of UniSource Gas, I oversee natural gas operations in communities throughout the state, covering more than 55,000 square miles. I serve teams based in northern Arizona, while also supporting the Nogales area. It’s a big responsibility, as we provide more than 170,000 customers with energy from 4,800 miles of pipeline.
What are your teams focused on for 2026?
Providing our customers with excellent service is important to us. We also want to partner and engage with our local communities in support of their regional growth plans. Building strong partnerships is critical, as we care about our customers and we are grateful to live and work in the communities we serve.
What are UniSource’s plans for growth?
As a prudent operator, UniSource is engaged in both long and short-term planning initiatives to maintain system resiliency and prepare for future growth.
In 2026, we will be reaching out to residents who live near our existing natural gas infrastructure to gauge their interest in connecting to our system. Over the past year, we have studied area maps and identified where residents and businesses could benefit from our safe, reliable and affordable natural gas service.
In the longer term, we continue to work with local developers who want to include natural gas services in their new projects. We are pleased to help provide energy solutions that help our communities pursue economic development opportunities.
Looking ahead, we are excited about the growth opportunities being explored in some of our communities, including Mohave County, Prescott, Flagstaff, and Winslow. We look forward to partnering with community leaders and developers to address local energy needs.
How are you continuing to support our strong reliability?
Our customers expect safe and reliable service. We are proud of our teams’ efforts to safely maintain our system and provide strong reliability. As a direct result of the hard work of our UniSource gas team, we experienced no major outages in 2025.
We are committed to maintaining our strong reliability, which is why we continually assess our natural gas infrastructure for overall prudent operations. This positions us to support the growth we expect to see in our communities.
What inspires you about your job?
I have a passion for our customers and our utility industry because the work our team does is so impactful. Our customers rely on our critical service day-in and day-out to live, work, and play. I appreciate the opportunity to serve our team and customers in my new role.
