Management Matters: Monthly Digest of Insights Shared by Your Peers in the Energy Central Utility Management Group – March 18, 2021

Welcome to the Utility Management Group roundup, Management Matters. As always, your fellow group members are paying close attention to utility management trends and sharing their insights. This month’s selection includes information about operational technology performance metrics and issues related to the recent Texas freeze. Be sure to like and comment on your favorite posts. Happy reading!

Resilience as a Service Improves Utility Funding for Outage Prevention

Daniel Talero

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/o/Guidehouse/resilience-service-improves-utility-funding-outage-prevention

Here, Daniel Talero, Research Analyst at Guidehouse Insights observes that the resilience challenge — made clear by the recent Texas freeze — includes a new opportunity for utilities and partner vendors: Resilience as a Service (RaaS). He notes that RaaS has been piloted at the transmission and distribution level but could be expanded to include building retrofits. One example is the possibility of Florida utilities using RaaS to sell undergrounding lines and AMI to commercial and industrial users. The concept could be applied in the residential sector as well.

Texas and the Missing Markets

Charles Bayless

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/c/um/texas-and-missing-markets

In this piece, Charles Bayless, Retired CEO at Tucson Electric Power points out that one of the fundamental factors contributing to the recent Texas blackout was a nonexistent reliability market. He explains that, in an energy market, reliability is an externality — that is, a factor for which there is no cost or benefit. With no market for reliability, there were no regulations requiring energy producers to take actions like winterize their units or have liquid fuel on site. Charles proposes possible solutions to this issue: Texans must adopt reliability regulations or set up a reliability market.

“We Are Closed, We Have No Power.” An Electrifying Personal Account of the 2021 #TexasFreeze and the Electricity Crisis That Followed.

Tam Kemabonta

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/c/um/%E2%80%9Cwe-are-closed-we-have-no-power%E2%80%9D-electrifying-personal-account-2021-texasfreeze

As a Texas resident, Tam Kemabonta, Research Director at TEPRI and new Energy Central member, experienced the recent Texas freeze first-hand. In this article, he describes many inconveniences, including having to sleep in the cold and cook on a grill, and having limited wireless access. He also discusses his response as an energy professional, asking questions about the role of ERCOT and what went wrong. Here, he explores those questions and proposes topics for industry stakeholders to consider when developing solutions moving forward.

Measuring Cyber Security Success in the Electricity Subsector

Christine Hertzog

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/o/EPRI/measuring-cyber-security-success-electricity-subsector

In this post, Christine Hertzog, Principal Technical Leader, Cyber Security Strategic Initiative at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) explains that utilities need an objective set of metrics to help deliver smarter and more proactive decisions to secure mission-critical operations. She notes that EPRI’s cybersecurity R&D team has created calculations to describe operational technology (OT) performance trends, which utilities are now piloting. Christine expects this effort to be just the first phase in an industry-wide effort that involves all stakeholders, starting with an EPRI-hosted working group called CyberNabu.  

Thanks again for reading this edition of Management Matters! The authors listed above are eager to hear your thoughts and questions, so don’t hesitate to engage them. And if you want your content to be featured in this spot in future issues, be sure to publish your posts within the Utility Management Community.

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