Wojtek
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two related articles up this time in a local alternate fortnightly:.
>
> "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
>
> =================================
>
>
> 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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-- Wojtek http://wsokol.blogspot.com/