Pros
Pay is decent. Job very stable. Does have a pension plan but honestly not worth a lot of money - a decent 401k somewhere else would be just as good. Work is interesting, often challenging. Lots of freedom to explore various technical solutions, and implement them. Lots of variety in work. Lots of responsibility in your specific area of expertise.
Cons
Benefit package sucks. Deductible so high you basically only have insurance for a catastrophic event. Pay lower than similar utilities. They constantly tell you that your pay and benefits are "comparable" - like if they say it enough you'll start to believe it. No chance for advancement/promotion based on merit - it is only about putting in the time(10,15 years). Will not happen before that no matter what. Duties/compensation vary significantly from area to area...some people doing much more than others with the same title/position/compensation. No correlation between compensation and workload/responsibilities. Does not matter how much you do or how well you do it - if you do nothing you'll maybe get 0.3-0.5% lower raise than someone who is exceptional. Basically no reward for hard work/success. Union employees are pampered, non union treated like galley slaves. I've seriously seen union guys spend the entire day surfing the net; non union spend the day working as hard as they can(working through lunch/no breaks) - yet the union guys are paid more. Upper management seems to only care about the value of the stock bonus they are getting. They shift budgets around constantly, often deferring much needed maintenance, solely to pad the books so they can keep the stock price up. Very much a mentality of anyone is replaceable. Several times very skilled people have left and they simply pile their workload on their overworked coworkers who just haven't left yet. I knew of an operations manager who left one of the power plants. Took quite a while to replace him - in part because the CEO had to approve refilling the position! Really? How many layers of management do you need? I think there at least 5 or 6 layers above me. Upper management seems to have no understanding of how electricity is actually made/distributed; they are just a bunch of accountants. Lots of half-truths. Management is constantly stressed/freaking out about the latest whatever. Many of the old employees seem to have spent their entire life at Xcel - and don't know anything else. Makes them blind to many of the internal problems. They don't know that things could be better - and so nothing changes for the better. Hugely bloated company. Many of the support organizations have forgotten their true purpose(support) and instead create so many internal processes that it makes it nearly impossible to get something done when working with them(especially the contract/sourcing group). The IT group is stuck 15 years in the past. Often have to convert files from other companies so you can open them in your antiquated software. Decent hardware but so full of company spy/control/bloatware that you waste a lot of time just waiting for the computer systems to respond. Supposedly going to be upgrading in the next year or so. Constant pressure to make everything a capital project. Will pour huge amounts of cash into anything that is "capital" but freak out about the smallest non-capital expenditure. Waste obscene amounts of money at times, then freak out about fixing small things.