Women in Commodities 2026: Navigating the Next Era

Arta Brending is a senior human resources executive with nearly two decades of global experience across the energy, trading, and industrial sectors. As Head of Human Resources, North America at Mercuria Energy America, she leads a team supporting employees across the Americas.

Her international experience working with global organizations has shaped her approach to leadership, culture, and talent. She is committed to creating inclusive workplaces and is particularly interested in how AI is transforming work, leadership, and organizational effectiveness.

Roberta Konicki is a senior energy executive with more than 26 years of experience in commodity markets, energy origination, structured finance, and power generation. She currently serves as Managing Director and Head of Origination at Alpha Generation, an ArcLight portfolio company, where she leads all power and natural gas origination activities across a 15,000 MW fleet of generation assets. As growing demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing expansion, and the continued electrification of the economy reshapes U.S. power markets, Roberta is responsible for developing and executing long-term commercial strategies that maximize the value of AlphaGen’s portfolio and support customers’ evolving energy needs.

Throughout her career, Roberta has successfully originated, structured, negotiated, financed, and executed complex transactions across North American power and natural gas markets, creating significant value for leading energy companies including Macquarie Bank, Boston Energy Trading & Marketing, RBS Sempra Commodities, BP Energy, and Duke Energy. Prior to joining Alpha Generation, she spent nearly fourteen years in aggregate at Macquarie Bank, where she held senior leadership positions in origination and structured finance.

In addition to her professional accomplishments, Roberta is actively engaged in community service. She serves on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, supporting the organization’s mission to assist vulnerable populations through programs such as Meals on Wheels for homebound seniors. Roberta holds a Master of Business Administration in Finance from the University of St. Thomas and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Houston.

Helen Kou heads BloombergNEF’s US Power practice based out of San Francisco, California, overseeing a research team that produces insights on data centers, US power markets and power prices.This includes analysis on power market fundamentals, regional market outlooks and regional price forecasts.  Over the past two years her team has focused on data center power demand, developing the data center power demand forecfast for BNEF. Prior to BNEF, she was en energy fellow at the California Energy Commission and earned a Bacherlor of Science in Environmental Economics and a Bacherlor of Science in Environmental Physics and Engineering Sciences from University of California, Berkeley.

Peyton Pawlusiak is a Power Analyst at Trafigura, where she has worked since 2019. She joined Trafigura through its Graduate Program, gaining experience in operations and risk before beginning her analytics career on the Distillate Desk. In 2023, Peyton moved to the Power Desk, where she focuses on the eastern power markets, analyzing market fundamentals and building Trafigura’s physical flow footprint across IESO, ISO-NE, NYISO, PJM, and MISO.

Peyton holds a Bachelor of Arts in Finance from Michigan State University.

Telia Weisman has been with CME Group since March 2013 and currently leads the Buyside and Commercial Client Development & Sales Teams in the Americas.  She joined CME Group after spending 5 years in Citigroup’s Commodity Trading Business marketing OTC and cleared derivatives to Commercial and Buyside clients. Prior to that, she held trading roles in power and natural gas at AES New Energy and Southern California Edison, where in addition to Term Trading, she built and led a Real Time Trading desk. Telia earned an MBA from Yale School of Management and a BA with Honors in Economics from Randolph-Macon Women’s College.  Telia is also mother to a 13-year-old daughter and a passionate volunteer, spending nine years as a Court Appointed Child Advocate.