Public power utilities prepare for Tropical Storm Marco, possible hurricane
August 24, 2020
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
August 24, 2020
Public power utilities across several states were preparing for Tropical Storm Marco to make landfall on Aug. 24 and a second tropical storm that was set to enter the Gulf of Mexico by early Tuesday and potentially strengthen into a significant hurricane.
Tropical Storm Marco on Monday, Aug. 24, was “weakening but will track near the northern Gulf Coast into Tuesday, where it will bring locally heavy rainfall and gusty winds to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle,” the Weather Channel reported.
In advance of Marco, the City of Tallahassee, Fla., sent crews to Louisiana to be on hand to help public power utility Lafayette Utilities System (LUS).
LUS noted that Tallahassee was sending four overhead crews ahead of Marco and Laura as part of mutual aid to help LUS “with unprecedented back-to-back storms.”
Through its social media channels, LUS thanked Tallahassee and the Florida Municipal Electric Association (FMEA) for the assistance.
LUS also utilized its social media channels to remind customers that they could download the public power utility’s hurricane handbook to prepare for Marco and Laura.
Meanwhile, public power utilities in Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi were also preparing for any impacts from Marco and Laura.
Second tropical storm could become major hurricane
Tropical Storm Laura on Aug. 24 was generating heavy rainfall in Cuba and the Cayman Islands and was set to enter the Gulf of Mexico by early Tuesday, the Weather Channel reported.
Over the weekend, the storm caused some impacts to Puerto Rico and scattered outages to the US Virgin Islands. As of Monday morning, there were approximately 20,000 customers out in Puerto Rico, down from a peak of approximately 190,000.
Tropical Storm Laura “could strengthen quickly into a major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico with a dangerous threat of storm surge along parts of the Louisiana and Texas coasts, and threats of flooding rain and strong winds extending well inland later in the week,” the Weather Channel said.
CISA Tabletop Exercise Package Assists With Pandemic Recovery And Continuity Planning
July 22, 2020
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
Posted July 22, 2020
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has developed a COVID-19 Recovery CISA Tabletop Exercise Package (CTEP) to assist private sector stakeholders and critical infrastructure owners and operators in assessing short-term, intermediate, and long-term recovery and business continuity plans related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CTEP also provides organizations with the opportunity to discuss how ongoing recovery efforts would be impacted by concurrent response operations to a potential “second wave” of global pandemic infections.
CISA notes that its tabletop exercise packages are designed and developed to provide a customizable virtual exercise for critical infrastructure and private sector partners to review their emergency plans for a multitude of different scenarios.
CTEPs are intended to assist organizations in developing their own tabletop exercises to tailor meet their specific needs, from planning to execution.
CISA’s CTEPs allow users to leverage pre-built exercise templates with realistic scenarios, to build tabletop exercises to assess, develop, and update information sharing processes, emergency plans, programs, policies, and procedures.
The COVID-19 Recovery CTEP includes instructions and templates to help users conduct an exercise within an organization that follows Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program guidance including a Situation Manual.
The manual includes scope, objectives, core capabilities, exercise agenda, the scenario, and discussion questions. It can be tailored by an organization to meet specific needs and objectives.
Additional information about the COVID-19 Recovery CTEP is available here.
APPA, Other Groups Urge Power Workers To Stay Vigilant In Guarding Against COVID-19
July 6, 2020
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
Posted July 6, 2020
A group of power industry trade and union leaders including Joy Ditto, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association, on July 2 urged power industry workers to remain vigilant in guarding against COVID-19 exposure and following the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on personal hygiene, social distancing, and the use of masks or face coverings.
“As we head into this holiday weekend, we are writing to thank you for all you do each day to power our nation and to keep the lights on for the customers and the communities you serve,” Ditto and the others wrote. “We applaud you for your unwavering dedication and your commitment to safety, particularly as we navigate through these challenging and unprecedented times.
Other signatories to the letter were Tom Kuhn, President of Edison Electric Institute, Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Lonnie Stephenson, International President, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and James Slevin, National President, Utility Workers Union of America.
“Today, we all are seeing concerning trends in the spread of the coronavirus around the country, and it is more important than ever that we do not let our guards down, either as individuals or as a critical infrastructure industry,” the power group and union leaders wrote.
“We know that electricity and the energy grid are indispensable, and our nation is relying on your essential work during this pandemic. That is why we are joining together — as labor and electric power industry leaders — to encourage you to stay vigilant and to continue to follow the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on personal hygiene, social distancing, and, most important, the use of masks or face coverings.”
They went on to say that as “we learn more about this virus, the guidance from the CDC and our nation’s health care experts continues to evolve; we now know that staying at least 6 feet apart and, when unable to do so, wearing a mask saves lives. We also know that we cannot fully restart our economy or return to any type of normalcy until we are able to control the spread of this virus.”
Ditto and the others noted that safety is, “and has always been, our industry’s number one priority. We have a tremendous opportunity now to lead by example and to serve as role models for our fellow citizens by expanding the safety culture that we practice in our workplaces to our communities.”
Updated ESCC COVID-19 Resource Guide Addresses Contact Tracing
June 29, 2020
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
Posted June 29, 2020
The Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC) has updated a resource guide it has developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to add new sections that address planning considerations for contact tracing during mutual assistance and the use of contact tracing for workplace reentry.
The guide was updated with the input of the American Public Power Association and public power utilities. This is version 9 of the guide, which was released on June 26.
The guide is a living document developed under the direction of the ESCC. It has been updated and distributed regularly by the ESCC Secretariat, based on input from several “Tiger Teams” of industry leaders who are tracking key issues related to this global health emergency.
Planning considerations for contact tracing during mutual assistance
In the new section of the guide that discusses planning considerations for contact tracing during mutual assistance, the ESCC says that investor-owned electric and/or natural gas companies, electric cooperatives, and public power utilities should implement and utilize contact tracing programs to identify and assist employees who may have been exposed to the virus.
“Organizations should consider how those tracing programs would be utilized during a mutual assistance deployment that includes non-native employees/contractors from other organizations,” the guide goes on to say.
Prior to the mobilization of crews, a requesting organization should provide responding organizations, including contractors, with an overview of how it will conduct contact tracing for any mutual assistance crew member who tests positive, or has been exposed to the virus, while deployed.
These contact tracing plans for mutual assistance deployments should consider addressing the following:
Reporting: What process should a mutual assistance crew member use to report a positive test result, symptoms, or possible exposure to the virus? Will the requesting/responding organization provide access to testing and access to medical care for mutual assistance crew members with symptoms?
Mitigate: How will the requesting/responding organization support the isolation of the impacted crew member? Will that crew member(s) be released and required to return home immediately? Will the entire crew be required to isolate, or will they be released from the mission?
Investigate: Will the impacted mutual assistance crew member be included as part of the requesting organization’s internal contact tracing efforts? Will mutual assistance crews be required to complete additional documentation, such as detailed logs and summaries of locations visited, to facilitate contact tracing investigations? If so, how will this be facilitated, and what is the retention policy for that documentation?
Inform: Will the requesting organization be required to inform local health authorities when a mutual assistance crew member reports positive test result to the virus?
In addition, the guide suggests addressing the question of how other native and non-native crews, base camp support teams, other housing support staging site staff, food service staff, and customers will be informed of the potential exposure.
Reentering the workplace and contact tracing
The latest version of the guide also said that as organizations begin to consider when and how to transition employees from working remotely to reentering the workplace, they also should consider contact tracing programs as a tool to identify and to assist employees who potentially are exposed to COVID-19.
These programs are designed to protect workers, their families, and their communities by slowing or stopping the transmission of the virus.
Along with listing typical steps for contact tracing (report, mitigate, investigate, inform and track and follow up), the guide also offers a detailed set of approaches for contact tracing.
The latest version of the guide is available here.
Public Power Executives Detail How Their Utilities Successfully Prepared And Adapted To Pandemic
June 16, 2020
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
Posted June 16, 2020
Leaders of public power utilities across the U.S. recently detailed how their utilities were prepared to successfully respond and adapt to a myriad of challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
They made their remarks on June 8 during a panel at the American Public Power Association’s Public Power Connect: Virtual Summit & Business Meeting that was moderated by Joy Ditto, President and CEO of APPA.
New York Power Authority President and CEO Gil Quiniones
The New York Power Authority’s experience with the pandemic started in January, said Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of NYPA.
He pointed out that it is not uncommon for NYPA to have employees travel to Asia and Europe doing factory acceptance testing and quality control of the equipment that the Authority purchases from these parts of the world. “Our employees actually gave us a heads up that there was this COVID in Asia and in Europe, so we brought them back right away” and quarantined them.
In February, NYPA refreshed its pandemic plan and its business continuity plans and stood up in the first working day of March its emergency operations center.
“Since then, we’ve made sure that we keep the health and safety of our employees” as a top priority, he said. NYPA pivoted to a work from home posture in early March “and also we made sure that we kept the lights on, that we would keep our generation and transmission going no matter what.”
The Authority paused all of its capital and O&M activities “and hunkered down” to make sure it knew what the situation was going forward before doing anything.
In addition, NYPA made sure that it had enough financial liquidity. In March, the Authority went to the markets and issued $1.2 billion of long-term bonds, of which $800 million were green bonds “to make sure that we can restart and hit the ground running when there’s better visibility,” Quiniones said.
In addition, NYPA sequestered around 85 employees — control room and transmission control operators – for 30 days at a time. “We did that for two months,” he noted.
“We have un-sequestered everyone at this point and we are now returning to work.” He said around 55 percent of NYPA workers are going back to work either full time or part time, while another approximately 44 percent of employees will continue to work from home.
From a broader leadership perspective, he said that “it is important for leaders to personally be the messengers in all matters affecting employees. I think that’s one thing that I learned in this crisis because our employees will remember how they were treated during this moment.”
Manitowoc Public Utilities General Manager Troy Adams
Troy Adams, who recently became general manager of Wisconsin public power utility Manitowoc Public Utilities, discussed the pandemic in the context of his time as general manager of Minnesota public power utility Elk River Municipal Utilities. Adams became general manager of Manitowoc Public Utilities at the start of June.
Regardless of size or location, “the way that public power leaders have handled this pandemic or any other issue is really very similar because our criteria for this decision making always comes back to our value system,” Adams said.
At Elk River, “we had the good fortune of just going through some business continuity planning,” he noted. In February, disaster planning training occurred, which utilized an APPA resource.
This was fortuitous timing, Adams said, “because my leadership team already was in the mindset of dealing with a problem when the pandemic came to us.”
In addition, Elk River Municipal Utilities has been a participant in APPA’s Reliable Public Power Provider (RP3) program.
Elk River Municipal Utilities “would not have been in the position it was in if we hadn’t been an RP3 utility,” he said. “Those best practices and those experiences and the exposure to other things outside of your city limits helped us to evolve into a better utility and we were in a great place to be able to address a pandemic or any other challenge.”
Also, the Minnesota public power utility had established a clear authority to act. When the pandemic hit, Elk River Municipal Utilities didn’t need to wait for board approval to take immediate action and the utility had reserve policies in place and sufficient funds. “We already knew we were in a position to be able to handle anything,” he said.
Meanwhile, Elk River Municipal Utilities prioritized the safety of employees and customers. Essential service and critical functions were areas that the utility had just looked at with its business continuity planning “and we were able to act pretty quickly to pivot and modify our plan to meet the needs for the pandemic.”
With respect to mitigation of risk and limiting COVID-19 exposure, employees that could work remotely did so, while “those that had to come in had to practice best practices and safe social distancing and use all the PPE.”
The utility staggered shifts and created a work environment “where they were better protected and able to minimize their contact with other employees, which helped protect them from maybe contracting anything, but also helped the utility” because if someone got sick, “you don’t have cross contamination or exposure through all your employee base.”
Responding to a question from Ditto on lessons learned from the pandemic, Adams said that “communication was really hard at first and if I had to do it all over again, I would have done more video.” Adams said he heard from employees that video “is a better way to engage them and they feel like you’re taking the time to do something special and communicate differently with them.”
City of Tallahassee Electric and Gas Utility General Manager Rob McGarrah
Rob McGarrah, general manager of the City of Tallahassee, Fla.’s Electric and Gas Utility, noted that early in the year, as the pandemic started to become an issue, “we took our storm plan and started making modifications to it to deal with COVID.”
When concerns were raised that Florida could be hard hit by the pandemic, the public power utility moved into a second stage of a preservation of staff plan.
Among other actions, the utility separated its system operators between the main control center and the backup control center.
In mid-March, the utility took shift workers at the utility’s two main power plants and at the control center and backup control center “and we took half of the team and we sequestered them on site and half the team shelter in place at home and we rotated those folks every week,” McGarrah said.
Since early May, the utility has unwound the sequestration and the sheltering at home, “so all of our field crews are back. Virtually all of our telework folks are still teleworking and I don’t expect that to change until later in the summer at the earliest.”
McGarrah noted that the utility has been hard at work the last few months “to start figuring out how we would manage a large-scale mutual aid event in Tallahassee if we needed to do it under the COVID work rules.”
The utility has been “working with our Florida partners through FMEA [Florida Municipal Electric Association] on how each of us would look at attacking a mutual aid event to make sure we’re all comfortable with how we would do housing, work rules, feeding and all of those things with a large mutual aid event.”
Debra Smith, General Manager/CEO, Seattle City Light
Debra Smith, General Manager and CEO at Seattle City Light, noted that Seattle was ground zero when the pandemic initially hit the U.S. earlier in the year.
In March, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee issued a stay at home order. “We sent our employees home. At that point, many of them were already teleworking,” Smith said. “We went to what we call the continuity of operations plan.”
In terms of the utility’s operational response to the pandemic, Smith noted that 95 percent of Seattle City Light’s office workers have been teleworking for quite some time. The city has officially extended that through September 7. “I would expect that most of my employees will continue to telework through most of this year.”
As of June 17, City Light’s operations employees have returned to normal hours and staffing levels and are working through the backlog of customer service connections and utility maintenance and capital projects that were delayed due to reduced on-site/in-the-field staffing in response to the stay at home order.
Seattle City Light took the lead role in helping to develop the process for the city-wide continuity of operations plan. Smith has also participated in the process of bringing the city’s operations back to full force.
DOE Official Details Agency’s Response to COVID-19 Pandemic
June 9, 2020
by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
Supporting virus research, securing critical infrastructure and stabilizing the energy markets are all key actions that the Department of Energy has taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Menezes, Under Secretary of Energy, said on June 8.
He made his remarks on the first day of the American Public Power Association’s Public Power Connect Virtual Summit and Business Meeting.
With respect to virus research, Menezes noted that “seven of the world class Department of Energy labs are partners in the COVID-19 high performance computing consortium. With DOE and IBM as co-chairs, this extraordinary effort brings together leaders in government, industry and academia to provide access to the world’s most powerful computing resources in support of coronavirus research.”
Along with their consortium-related work, the DOE’s national labs “are making significant strides against the virus in many other ways,” he said.
For example, researchers at Oak Ridge laboratory in Tennessee, scientists use Summit, the world’s fastest, smartest super computer to screen more than 8,000 drug compounds, finding 77 that have potential use in the fight for a cure through vaccines or therapeutics.
Menezes noted that one of the most crucial and ongoing missions of the DOE is securing critical energy infrastructure in ensuring energy resilience during national emergencies.
“During this pandemic, the stakes could not be higher. Hospitals and other frontline healthcare workers depend on an uninterrupted energy supply to run ventilators and other emergency services equipment,” he said.
“That’s why on January 31, we activated our energy response organization and tasked it with assessing, preparing for and providing awareness of issues that may require federal support,” he noted.
Menezes also commented on an executive order signed by President Trump on May 1 that authorizes U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette to work with the Cabinet and energy industry to secure the country’s bulk-power system (BPS).
“The first important action we will take under this executive order is to prohibit future use of BPS equipment which has a nexus with a foreign adversary and the failure of which would pose a risk to our national security and the safety of Americans,” the DOE official said.
“While some concerns have been raised about how the order will affect future infrastructure projects, I say to you today the Department will implement this order in a strategic, transparent, methodical way and we will work with industry throughout the process,” Menezes said, adding that the DOE looks forward to working with Joy Ditto, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association, and the rest of her team at APPA.
As for the third prong of the DOE’s response to the pandemic, Menezes noted that the DOE “took swift and decisive action to stabilize global energy markets.”
Senate panel approves nomination of Menezes
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on June 9 approved the nomination of Menezes to be Deputy Secretary of the DOE.
Menezes was nominated to the Deputy Secretary position in February. Menezes’ nomination now awaits further consideration by the full Senate.