"Snowpocalypse Now" about the January snowstorm in Puget Sound, and why it created worse outages in Puget Sound Energy (for profit) areas that in non-profit and publicly owned utilities. http://www.olympiapowerandlight.com/2012/03/snowpocalypse-now-did-pse-outsourcing-contribute-to-problems/ short url: http://bit.ly/y4FCC0
"Snowpocalypse Again" about why private ownership of utilities and outsourcing is likely to have far worse consequences in the future. http://www.olympiapowerandlight.com/2012/03/snowpocalypse-again-the-long-term-implications-of-outsourcing/ short url: http://bit.ly/xaqejf
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Olympia Power & Light Real local news for Olympia, Washington
Snowpocalypse Now: Did PSE outsourcing contribute to problems? March 7, 2012
By Gar W. Lipow
The snowstorm in late January that left many in Thurston county without power for five or more days has been described as a “perfect storm” when it comes to grid failure. The combination of heavy snow, ice, strong wind and rain produced the ideal conditions for taking down power lines and destroying transformers. And certainly the workers, both local and from throughout the west coast, who spent incredibly long hours exposed to the worst storm the South Sound has seen in decades could not have worked harder. But did Puget Sound Energy’s (PSE) extensive contracting out of core services leave their customers more vulnerable when an emergency arose, and extend the time it took to recover? Parts of Mason County were hit as hard by the storm as any part of Thurston. But 80% of Mason county outages ended within hours. The majority of PSE customers who lost power did not get that power restored for days. One possible difference is tree trimming. Damage from falling trees and branches is the single most common cause of power outages. While PSE and Mason County Public Utility District 3 (PUD 3) spend very similar amounts per vegetation maintenance mile, PSE contracts 100% of their tree trimming to Asplundh Tree Experts. PUD 3 keeps the core of its tree maintenance in house, hiring outside contractors only for the summer and short-term work. PUD 3 Public Information and Government Affairs manager Joel Myer says that in-house workers are part of what has made their tree-trimming program a success.
“Crews who work directly for us day after day all through the year can do a better job because they know the local area and the local vegetation.”
A similar difference can be found in general grid maintenance. PSE contracts out the majority of grid maintenance, while PUD 3 depends on full time employees for core line and grid maintenance, using outside contractors only for emergency and other occasional work. Myer says full time in-house workers contributed to the PUD 3′s ability to get power back on quickly during the storm. “Having our own line-workers who are on the ground every day means when an emergency strikes they know where the lines are, they know where the switches are, they know where the transformers are.” One knowledgeable Olympia source added, “The importance of local workers is that they don’t have to depend on a map in the middle of a snowstorm, or worse depend on a dispatcher who is reading from a map and has never been near the street where the out of town worker is trying to find a switch.”
Myer says that depending mostly upon direct hires builds strong relationships among the PUD 3 workforce. “During the storm, every single Mason PUD 3 employee came in to help. Not just the line crews, and dispatchers and phone staff. People came in to make food and coffee to take out to crews, or bring dry socks to the line-workers.”
And it is not only Mason County that this applies to, nor was it just the January 2012 storm. Lewis County and Greys Harbor PUDs, as well as Seattle Power and Light, all performed better in the recent storm than PSE. Nor is this the first major storm in which PSE underperformed; they were fined for lack of preparedness during the windstorm in December of 2006.
The utilities that recover best from extreme weather conditions leading to major power outages seem to have two related factors in common. They are mostly publicly- or cooperatively-owned rather than for-profit utilities. That non-profit status means they did not follow for-profit utilities down the extreme outsourcing path pioneered by for-profits in the 80s. As publicly- and cooperatively-owned companies, they defined their core functions broadly and kept most of those core functions in-house, rather than putting their most critical work – and key skill sets – in the hands of outside contractors.
Dorothy Bracken, a PSE Customer Communications Manager, says the difference is not as great as it appears. “We have 62 (4-person) crews of full time line-workers employed directly by PSE, and 80 crews of permanently subcontracted maintenance workers, subcontracted exclusively to us. Both line and general maintenance crews work for us year after year, and know the area well.”
Publicly available information from PSE and PUD 3 suggests, however, that PSE employs around one third of the maintenance crew per substation and per customer that PUD 3 does. Even on a per-line-mile basis, PSE’s fulltime staff and permanently subcontracted force is about 20% leaner than PUD 3. Additionally, PSE’s higher number of substations and transformers per line mile makes it a significantly more complicated grid to take care of than PUD 3.
Siegfried Guggenmoos, a leading expert and consultant on utility vegetation management, says that most of the damage from the current storm was due not to poorly trimmed trees, but from trees that should have been removed entirely – mostly trees on privately owned land. According to Guggenmoos, 15% of the damage at most could have been prevented by better tree trimming. To remove a tree on private land – not just trim it – the utility would have to obtain owner permission.
Arithmetically, however, if PSE’s service area had suffered 15% fewer failures, so that there were 15% fewer problems to fix, and also 15% more people available to fix remaining problems, outages could have been ended almost a third sooner. In addition, many private owners of trees that fell on power lines were never asked for permission to remove them.
No matter what PSE had done, the storm would have produced major outages, many of which would have lasted for days. Given the conditions, the workers who tackled damage during the storm and its aftermath performed as close to perfectly as was humanly possible. But PSE employed a lower permanent staff per line-mile, and per substation than some publicly owned and cooperative utilities, which may well be one reason their customers suffered more outages and longer outages than these same non-profit utilities – even in counties like Mason County which suffered comparable storm conditions.
More information available at these sites: http://www.masonpud3.org/about/facts.aspx. http://pse.com/aboutpse/psenewsroom/MediaKit/020_About_PSE.pdf http://shelton.komonews.com/news/weather/712053-mason-pud-3-mopping-storm
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