During the public fifth 5th annual post-season/pre-season briefing, hosted by the California Public Utilities Council, the SCE delivered an outline on Wednesday defining its 2024 plans on how to improve and reduce the number of "Public Safety Power Shutoffs"
Jill Anderson, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, explainded how their new system of data automation has helped tremendously on decreasing the number of PSPS events since they began using it.
Data automation enables an organization to collect, upload, transform, store, process and analyze data utilizing technologies without the need for manual human intervention. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as data ingestion, transformation, validation, cleansing, integration and analysis, data automation helps organizations make the most of their data and makes data-driven decisions faster and easier.
"The total number of PSPS events decreased from 16 in 2019 to 2 in 2024", Anderson said.
“Our new system, which is really essential to make sure we can handle all the different aspects of doing the PSPS successfully, went live in 2022, and we had successful use of it throughout 2022, but as everyone knows, it was a relatively light season for PSPS’s.” Jill Anderson, SCE Executive VP
Anderson did say that October last year, there were multiple factors, like different weather patterns in 2023, that made it difficult for the system to keep up with the notifications.
Principal Manager of Business Resiliency, Tom Brady, said one of the main things SCE wanted to improve on was the company’s response rate, noting that it missed about 80,000 notifications during October 2023.
Brady said a team of about 40 experts were put together last year by SCE in response to the complaints, trying to fill in the gaps in the company’s performance.
“This work is ongoing and it’s full-time and it’s consumed many weekends and evenings to keep on schedule,” Brady said. “We got a lot of work to reprogram our automation, and the end goal is improving our notifications for a better season in 2024, and we’re confident that between the system fixes and the process changes we’ve made, we will get that better result in 2024.”
SC Edison also included a spending fee breakdown in its briefing of last year's related costs to PSPS events, which was separated into four categories:
Fire Science & Advanced Modeling
Enhanced Situational Awareness
PSPS Execution
PSPS Customer Support.
According to Ray Fugere, Director of Wildfire Safety, this year’s expected costs for operation and activities related to PSPS events have mostly increased, including an increase from just under $20,000 to nearly $30,000 in spending toward PSPS execution.
Fugere continued to say that the SCE has installed 114 new weather stations to give the company a total of 1,700 in high fire areas, along with 55 new cameras to help detect fires.
“It’s about one station every 6 miles in our high fire areas. We are also addressing the frequently impacted power circuits in 2024. To do this the SCE plans to increase the reach of covered conductors and that it plans to install 14 new switches to reduce the number of PSPS events.”, Fugere said.
SC Edison is also moving forward with microgrids in more rural areas, which are small battery-powered grids connected to the overall Edison network that can stay on during power outages.
More information can be found on SCE’s website at SCE.com and CPUC’s website at cpuc.ca.gov.
The utility companies have been behind in technology for decades. They can slash some of their high paying employees that do nothing to offset the technology upgrades. batteries are not the answer. They are horrible for the environment for all the green freaks. The grid simply cannot handle the demand, yet the incompetent governor of California, Gavin NEWSCUM is moving toward an all electric state. A colossal failure from all angles.
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