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-: Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today
from public meeting, a Public Briefing
from Southern California Edison Company,
to update us on its readiness
for the Public Safety Power Shutoff Events
this wildfire season.
Today's briefing from SCE is the second
in a series of three public briefings
we are holding this week.
Yesterday, San Diego Gas and Electric Company
briefed us on their readiness
and we will have Pacific Gas and Electric Company
provide a briefing this Thursday, August 13th at 10:00a.m.
Agendas and information on how to watch and listen
to the remote briefing is available
on the CPUCs Public Safety Power Shutoff website
at www.cpuc.ca.gov/psps.
I am honored to have joining me today
on this virtual diocese
representatives from the California Governor's office
of Emergency Service.
And that is Eric Lamoureux,
and from the office of the California Department
of Forestry and Fire Prevention,
and that is Assistant Chief Daniel Berlant.
As well as my fellow Commissioners,
Commissioner Rechtschaffen and Commissioner Shiroma,
welcome.
In terms of the format for today's briefing,
following opening remarks from the dioce,
SCE Senior Vice President of transmission
and distribution, Phil Harrington,
will provide an overview of CSE's state of preparedness
for PSPS events this wildfire season, we will listen.
We will then move onto the discussion
and Q&A with Commissioners
and panelists on the diocese
followed by public comment.
We are scheduled to conclude the briefing by around 3:30.
For the public comment portion of the day,
which is scheduled to be around 2:50, two, five, zero.
You will wish to make,
and if you wish to make a public comment,
please dial into this number (800) 857-1917
and enter passcode 989 9501 and press star one.
You will be placed into a queue
and the operator will take your name and organization.
There may be a delay from the time you press star one
to the time the operator asks you for your information,
so please be patient and stay on the line.
You will be called upon to speak,
when we get to the public comment period in today's agenda,
which again should be around 2:50, two, five, zero.
And we will provide three minutes for each speaker
and we'll keep my opening remarks brief
so that the majority of our time today
can be used to ensure the public and impacted communities
are able to hear from SCE on their state
of preparedness going into this year's wildfire season.
In a sense, I am sure a number of people listening today
were not able to join us yesterday for the SDG&E briefing.
I do want to address a few items
that I also raised yesterday.
With climate change driven weather events,
our wildfire seasons are starting earlier and ending later,
and they are persistently more severe.
After a dry winter and warm spring this year,
we're likely in store for a long
and difficult wildfire season.
These weather events,
when combined with negligent maintenance
of utilities electrical system can be a disaster.
While the legislature and the CPUC policies
are driving the utilities to significantly plan
for and execute approaches to mitigate
the risk of utility caused wildfires
through better planning, grid hardening
and vegetation management,
one of the tools available to the utilities
to mitigate wildfire risk is to turn off power to customers,
to avoid the potential to start a fire.
While these shut offs are one tool available
to the utilities, protect public safety,
they are a measure of last resort,
and I cannot emphasize enough,
it is absolutely imperative that they shut off if
and when called, are executed safely and thoughtfully.
The importance of doing this is particularly critical
this wildfire season,
as we are also dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic,
which will complicate and exacerbate the PSPS planning
and execution challenges.
And we'll make the stakes of ensuring PSPS is truly used
only as a measure of last resort, that much higher.
The implications of being without power,
the families who are working and learning from home,
to the state's most vulnerable people,
to the critical facility supporting
our state's COVID response,
the implications are not merely questions of inconvenience,
they are questions of, can I pay my rent this month?
Can I feed my family this month?
Can I power my medical equipment?
I need to live.
The impacts on people's lives
and the stakes can not be overstated.
The utilities have the obligation
to manage their grid's responsibility,
and they have the obligation to keep the safety
and wellbeing of their customers as their highest priority,
which is what this Commission expects of them
with each decision they make this wildfire season.
So while we can drive the point that PSPS is absolutely
a measure of last resort,
and is not a sustainable approach
to mitigating wildfire risk,
we must also ensure that if
and when they do decide to call a PSPS event,
they're adequately prepared to execute
and communicate the shut off in a way
that significantly minimizes the scope
and duration of the events.
They must have planned and prepared so that people
are without power for the shortest amount of time
and are communicated with in a way
that provides enough notice and enough detail
for them to make the arrangements they need to make,
to ensure that their families are safe
and that they are prepared
to weather the duration of the event.
This is the minimum,
and this is why we're holding these briefings this week.
The haphazardly implemented PSPS events
of last fall cannot be repeated.
It has been one of my, and my fellow Commissioners,
highest priorities coming out of those events
to ensure the CPUC takes every possible step
to drive the utilities to do better,
to ensure that any power shutoff that is called this year
is initiated and executed
in a way that considers the best interests
of all those impacted.
CPUC staff and the staff at our sister agencies
at Cal OES and CAL FIRE,
they spent countless hours
meeting with utilities and overseeing their efforts
to reduce the use, scope and impact of the PSPS event.
The utilities have made progress,
but what this comes down to is planning
and proper execution.
This week's briefings are focused on PSPS readiness
because we need to be sure that when the events are called,
the utilities can bring all of the elements together
in a way that reflects our highest priorities,
the safety and wellbeing of Californians.
We are in August, with a pandemic
that is not going away anytime soon,
SCE has already called a PSPS event,
whether events are only going to become more severe,
we are in precisely the moment to understand
and hear from SCE today.
Are you ready?
With that, I will say that I'm very much looking forward
to hearing from SCE today,
I will now turn to my representatives
from Cal OES and CAL FIRE,
if you have any opening remarks to share, Eric Lamoureux.
-: Thank you President Batjer,
it's a pleasure to be here today
representing Director Mark Ghilarducci,
who's unfortunately not able to join us
as he's tackling many of the COVID challenges
that we're helping to guide at the state level
with the Governor's office.
It's a pleasure to be here today,
Cal OES have had opportunity to work with our partners
at the PUC and CAL FIRE over the last several months
to participate in both operations, claiming meetings
as well as executive group meetings.
Those opportunities to work with the IOUs,
to understand the steps they're taking,
to reduce the scope of events in 2020,
and then the duration of those events.
At Cal OES, we've been working with the IOUs
to help them to standardize their systems
and procedures that are utilized,
support and provide support with training,
and generally we're cautiously optimistic
that we can see events in 2020 that are smaller in scale
and shorter in duration,
that's our hope.
That's what we're hearing from the utilities.
And so we'll certainly withhold judgment
and see how the events play out,
but we are cautiously optimistic.
However, and it's a pleasure today to hear from our partners
in Southern California Edison, but we do have concerns.
We have concerns operationally in 2019
with what felt like a perpetual PSPS cycle
that we saw ourselves in with Southern California Edison.
And it feels to some degree
that we are entering a similar cycle this year,
where it appears that they we're using
a Utility Safety Power Shutoff,
as opposed to a Public Safety Power Shutoff tool,
a tool that appears to be more focused
on reducing the scope of liability,
as opposed to exercising and utilizing the same data
that we are using the Emergency Management
and Fire Services to make sure that our events are aligned.
The data just isn't thinking up
with what we're seeing during events, there are wind events,
but these events are not events that appear to be situations
where we're gonna see a catastrophic wildfire potential.
And so that is something that Director Ghilarducci
and our team feels strongly about
that we need to continue to work, to refine that effort,
to ensure that the data that Edison is using is in sync
with that data that is used by our fire and weather team
on the state side.
As I said, we're hopeful that we're gonna see events in 2020
that do not cause the same longterm impact.
At the end of the day,
that's the responsibility of emergency managers
at the state and local government level
to deal with the consequences.
And I know that our IOU partners has been helpful
in addressing those consequences,
but we need to get to the point where we are utilizing
this tool to the most precise extent possible.
So again, it's a pleasure to be here today,
look forward to the presentation
and thank you President Batjer.
-: Thank you, Eric very much,
Assistant Chief Berlant.
-: Yeah, well, good afternoon President Batjer,
Commissioners, Daniel Berlant,
the Assistant Deputy Director with CAL FIRE
and the chief of our Wildfire Planning Engineering Division
sitting in today for Director Thom Porter.
And obviously one of our main intends of our mission
is to mitigate wildfires and to prevent them.
And so we've been working very closely with the CPUC
as well as the utilities in the development
of the wildfire mitigation plans
and this being a component of it,
this is definitely a good focus for all of us to discuss.
Obviously our efforts are aimed
to reduce utility spark wildfires
and to mitigate the destruction
from these preventable fires.
And just to kind of give you a little scope
of where we are this year,
already, we have responded to over 6,000 wildfires
that have burned over 225,000 acres
in just the first half of the year.
And of course, it's the fall months
where we typically experienced the largest
and most damaging of those wildfires.
Looking out into our forecast
over the next couple of months,
unfortunately it continues to show an above normal
wildfire potential for much of Southern California
throughout the basin.
And so with a below normal rain fall,
and then even the potential of above normal offshore winds
come October and November,
I think that these planning measures are critical.
So we are appreciative of the opportunity to be here
and as always continue to be a partner
with not only our sister agencies,
but also with the utilities as we work to mitigate
and reduce if not eliminate
the types of preventable wildfire.
So thank you very much president for the opportunity.
-: Okay, thank you, chairman.
Thank you everyone.
And good afternoon Commissioners and our partners
at Cal OES, CAL FIRE, public safety agencies.
Again, I'm Phil Harrington,
Senior Vice President of transmission and distribution
for Southern California Edison.
I'm joined here today by Marc Ulrich
our vice president for Customer Service Operations,
and Erik Takayesu our vice president
of Transmission Substations operations.
And he absolutely many of our PSPS planning initiatives,
so he'll have some contributions today.
First of all, thank you for holding this public briefing
and allowing SCE the opportunity to share
the major PSPS enhancements we've made
based on the lessons learned from last year's PSPS events.
Now we provided a presentation
and I will occasionally reference
as we move through our conversation today,
of course, questions will be handled at the end,
but they're welcome throughout the presentation as well.
Our approach to our PSPS enhancements is driven primarily
by two of our core values at SCE,
and these are values we hold very dearly,
safety and continuous improvement.
Now, we've heard the remarks from CAL FIRE
as we had anticipated this year.
2020 has already been an active fire season.
If we look at Apple fire and Riverside, Stagecoach,
Incurrence, the Texas fire LA County,
it's so burning in our service territory.
So last month we saw the vegetation steadily dry out
across the region,
and by August 1st, the dead fuels
throughout many interior areas were near record dry levels
for this time of year.
Now, in addition to moisture values,
we did a living vegetation from the origin levels
that favor larger and longer duration fires.
And this was evidenced by the size
and behavior of the Apple Fire,
which started in the last day of July.
So while the vegetation is not historically dry levels,
it's much stronger than it was this time last year.
So on with the dry vegetation,
we're expecting above normal temperatures
throughout the fall,
and along with that more frequent Santa Ana Winds.
So SCE has already conducted three PSPS events this year,
and one of the three events involved
de-energizing 17 customers,
that will also point out that if you compare
where we were last year,
we had essentially been in the PSPS event
from the 4th of July weekend
to the early part of August continuously.
And that's a reflection of some of the changes we made
and we'll come to those in a little bit.
This is a backdrop to the conversation we're having today.
And while we anticipate an active fire season,
the PSPS enhancements I'll cover in this presentation
have made us much better equipped
and prepared to support our customers through PSPS events.
And before we go too much further,
on behalf of Southern California Edison,
I wanna thank the first responders
who've been working around the clock, containing fires,
as well as our dedicated employees at SCE,
have also been responding to these fires,
have been taking great care
to ensure our customers
have the assistance they need during these events.
Now, could we move to the next slide, please?
We'll go ahead and get started.
We in SCE recognized the PSPS is a disruptive hardship,
even more so the added complexity brought on
by COVID-19 pandemic.
And this pandemic has put an unprecedented strain
on public resources and highlighted the importance
of a robust electric infrastructure
to the welfare of our state.
We acknowledge and respect the desirable local governments
and officials to protect our communities
at this very, very difficult time.
We really appreciate the need to address
the COVID revenue act insurance.
Our employees, our families live in, to go to school,
and they're otherwise part of the fabric
of the communities in which we serve.
We've taken action to implement measures
to reduce the infection of possible de-energization
and a lot of the ongoing shelter in place.
And when necessary,
I wanna underscore and when necessary,
to the safety and welfare of the public,
which is our top priority,
we will employ PSPS responsibly,
and drawing on the collective expertise to the SCE team
and our partners at Cal OES, CAL FIRE,
the County and City Emergency Management
to use upon which we rely for input.
And the PSPS events that transpires last year
reinforced the value of efforts are on the grid
to the key pillar of SCE wildfire mitigation plan.
Now was the great improvements we've made since last year,
under the same weather conditions as 2019,
we expect to see a 30% reduction
in the number of customers affected by future PSPS events.
And that equates to approximately 40,000 fewer customers.
And of those 40,000 customers,
about half of those customers will not be expected
to experience a PSPS again,
unless it's due to an extraordinarily rare circumstance.
Now, in addition to these big improvements today,
we are highlight the major enhancements
to our PSPS protocols,
which includes our customer and stakeholder engagement plans
based on the significant lessons learned
from the 2019 PSPS events.
Can we advance to the next slide, please.
So as you know, we have had many, many opportunities
to discuss this.
Last October, part of our service territory
faced many days of elevated wildfire dry conditions,
marked by severe winds, low humidity, and dry fuels.
And during these periods, we exercised our PSPS protocols
to protect the public from the risk
that our electric equipment will start a fire.
We shared this before, but as a reminder,
for the 5 million customer accounts in our service area,
approximately 100,000, around 2%,
were impacted on our most severe PSPS event 2019.
And 2% may seem like a small number,
but this number represents more than just customer accounts.
These are people, their households, their livelihoods,
where they go to work, where they go to school,
where they live.
And that said, line patrols conducted after those shutoffs,
so I'm more than 40 instances
of damage or blowing in vegetation
resulting from these severe conditions.
And those examples could have sparked a catastrophic fire,
but they didn't,
'cause we powered down, preemptively patrolled the line
to ensure they were safe for turning the power back on.
Then most recently, after the PSPS event
on August 2nd this year,
our post controls found wind damage,
actually a broken tap line at the insulator on a pole,
in a tier two high fire risk area.
And that line has been de-energized.
So in other words,
we potentially prevented amunition there.
This year's events in the October and 2019 events,
nowadays the presented de-energization is an important,
necessary, is difficult tool to protect public safety.
Now, of course, last year's events also revealed lessons
that have helped us to refine and improve our process.
The first lesson confirm we're on the right track
when it comes to deployment and system hardening technology,
which is cover conductor in sectionalizing devices.
The second, we identified better opportunities
to support our PSPS operations and decision making
by improving our weather forecasting analytic capabilities
and establishing a dedicated PSPS incident management team
to support these events in the future.
Now much more importantly,
we learned more about what our customers need
during PSPS events,
related to communications, information and customer care,
especially among our most vulnerable customers.
And while we're committed
to putting in place operational improvements,
especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,
we're just as focused on improving the customer experience
throughout the PSPS event cycle.
Lastly, we recognize the desire for more transparency
around our decision making process
in our post event reporting.
Particularly around how we weigh the risk versus benefits
of shutting off power.
And we've mentioned, next slide, please.
I'd like to spend just a moment
on our PSPS decision making process.
-: This is Commissioner Rechtschaffen,
Can I just,
I'm very glad to hear you say about transparency,
'cause I know that's been a concern of our staff,
so I want to hear more about that,
but if I could just go back to your discussion
about the lessons learned from 2019
and just go over a couple of things.
As I try to do the Math,
you said you expect the 30% reduction
in the number of customers affected, 20,000 fewer customers.
So if conditions were the same as there were in 2019,
so does that mean roughly there are 80,000 customers
who would be at risk now if there were events
comparable to 2019, more or less.
-: That is correct Commissioner.
I will say this however,
that many of the improvements we've made
and we'll come to these in a moment,
having to do at least with our predictive capabilities.
It's one of the reasons why we have stood up
fewer PSPS events so far this year.
What results, and I would say fewer notifications
of an event that ultimately does not occur.
That will also say there's a number of factors
and we'll cover those in some detail
that are very difficult to predict.
So it doesn't mean 80,000 would necessarily have those,
but what we've been able to do
with some of the, I would say infrastructure changes
to those circuits, isolating courses of them
that are not in a high fire risk area,
really take them out of play completely for a PSPS event.
There's other things we've done
that make that 80,000 less likely to have an event,
some spans of the conductor had been covered.
In addition to that,
the additional maintenance we've done,
I'll talk about this very briefly later,
in terms of our inspections has given us a much better sense
of the conditions of our circuits,
which is an input to making it PSPS decision.
So additional eyes on the circuits,
additional weather devices that we've deployed
to make our information, real time information better.
In all reality, the remaining 80,000
also generally less likely under the same events
to have a PSPS.
-: Okay, that answers the question.
Thank you, although we may have worse conditions
than last year,
so the 2019 comparison may not be totally apt
because of the dryness and the potential Santa Ana event,
but that's a very helpful explanation.
And then the second question I have,
and I don't know if you have an answer to this,
but we're always interested in measures
that have the most bang for the buck.
You suspect a 30% reduction
in the number of customers affected.
Do you have analysis of what you attributed that to?
How much from sectionalization, better weather forecasting,
cover conductors, do you have even rough ideas of that
or is that too hard to evaluate?
-: We do, I don't have all that at my fingertips.
The bulk of it is due to the sectionalization
and something we call switching playbooks,
which are very effective, we'll come to that in a moment,
but essentially one of the things you can do
is reconsider your circuitry before events.
Previously in events, we were essentially assessing
the circuits in real time,
and what we've done now is create
exactly what is in the playbook.
It says, these are the different configurations
you can operate under,
and that's been a large portion.
And some of these, they overlap,
so which came first, the sectionalization or the playbook,
and there's some other things to tease it out.
And it's something we can provide
some additional insight into
if you would find that helpful Commissioner.
-: Thank you very much.
-: Yeah.
We're actually on slide four, so we're showing seven here,
we can go back a couple please.
I'll go ahead and get started in the conversation
when we back up the slides.
Again, we're talking right now
about decision making process,
and as I mentioned, de-energization is a complex process
and it's one we do not take lightly.
Many factors go into the decision,
I'll highlight this in just a moment.
Of course, weather is one of the biggest factors,
red flag warnings from the National Weather Service,
our ongoing assessments or our in house meteorologists
and fire scientists
who use very high resolution weather models
and data from our weather stations
and the publicly available data we have.
Some of our forecasting is very granular
as opposed to, I say broader focused forecasting.
Sometimes that is accounting for the difference
in views of whether there's a situation
that suggest that PSPS should occur.
We also look at our Fire Potential Index,
and this is a tool that uses a weather forecast
and fuel conditions to assess wildfire risks.
And of course wind speeds.
Particularly when they're expecting to receive
the National Weather Service Wind Advisory Levels,
these pretty much assess when
you expect to see a lot of blowing vegetation
or when they exceed the top 1%
of a historical wind speed in a given area.
In addition to these inputs,
we're looking at inputs from underground observers
and the high fire which we are able to send out
to moderate conditions in real time.
And we only do that when it's safe
and during extreme fire weather conditions,
and we're generally able to deploy those staff.
Now, we've also established very strong partnerships
with senior officials
from the County State Emergency Management agencies,
the local state and fire authorities,
and other first responder agencies.
Our fire management personnel work very closely
with all fire agencies and SCE service territory
to ensure shared situational awareness
and greater collaboration during incidents.
And in the event itself,
we begin out restore public safety powerless
around three days prior to the PSPS event.
And we're looking at weather coming ends,
sometimes over seven days in advance
and on occasion we'll be reaching out to partners,
but again, we want to balance notification
when we see it coming
versus making a notification when there's a good chance
the condition alleviates, it doesn't show up.
And we continue to communicate with these important partners
throughout the event,
including regularly scheduled calls
with County operational areas.
And the combination of local coordination,
forecast data and pre patrols, live field observation
allows us to reach out to customers
who are at risk potential de-energization
around 48 hours in advance.
And because these situations are very dynamic
and every incident is unique,
we take each of these factors and other factors.
It's well over over a dozen factors we look at
and more depending on the particular situation
and a consideration before we make a decision
to de-energize a section.
Can we move a slide by please.
Now, PSPS de-energization again is only implemented
when the forecast and conditions actually occur,
and we see no other options available
to mitigate the fire weather danger.
And this year, to accelerate and concentrate our effort
on enhancing our PSPS operations, proving our accuracy,
the effectiveness of our program,
minimizing the impact for our customers and communities,
we established a PSPS readiness Incident Management Team
or IMT, complete with incident commanders
and full staff to support that effort.
Now, this team included people from all across the company
and customer service, in this resiliency,
local public affairs, operations, transmission distribution,
information technology, and frankly just
about every other discipline across the company
who could support our effort
to focus on 2020 wildfire season preparedness.
This includes implementing
a number of operational enhancements
as I mentioned some of them earlier,
to reduce the scope and frequency of PSPS events
and help minimize the impacts for our customers.
Some of the teams would accomplishments include,
this is just a broad one cut,
created an integrated decision-making dashboard
to support activations, reducing power BI,
consolidating our tools.
We installed over 350 weather stations,
bring our total right now to over 900.
We think we'll have around a thousand
by the end of the year.
Now we also developed,
because we wanna make sure we're consistently applying
these programs and consistently documenting
what we're doing,
an end event and a post event QA/QC program.
And we also developed at virtual
and in-person IMT activation protocol.
We also identified and contracted
with 40 Community Resource Centers, CRCs.
And we automated our customer
and public safety partner notification platforms,
just enhanced our accuracy and speed
that we could deliver notifications,
this was a game changer.
We also made significant upgrades to our sce.com
and implemented enhanced public alert tools
like zip code alerts, and also use of the Nextdoor App,
which we're leveraging.
May of 2020, we transitioned from the readiness IMT,
recognizing we are now entering the summertime,
to a dedicated PSPS IMT.
And we're following the National Incident Command System
to ensure a consistency across the organization
when executing PSPS,
which will ultimately reduce the impact to customers.
What we want to make sure
is that a single alert incident commander,
basically similar and incident commander
face with similar data, information and ground level truth,
we'll make a similar decision around a PSPS event.
Already we've conducted five PSPS exercises
in which we simulated the PSPS event,
and we use the Microsoft teams platform.
And we tested the tools we have developed,
the ones I mentioned that consolidated dashboards
to enhance our situational awareness in PSPS operations
during these events.
Now two of the five events were open to external observers
and more than a hundred external observers
participated in the last exercise we had this July.
And during the pandemic,
we've actually had the live test this things,
and we use our virtual platform
to manage the three PSPS events that we've stood up.
And we don't expect to be able to do this for large events,
I think it's similar to a utility.
So it's yesterday I expect to have,
that's what we do completely remotely, hybrids,
and then one with a much heavier touch
in the emergency operation center.
And that's all due to COVID.
Another major enhancement,
it is our circuit sectionalizing capabilities.
This will continue to be a really important tool
to reduce the scope and frequency of de-energizations.
Now, for the past two years,
we've accelerated the installation of switching devices.
This has been kind of the hallmark
of what Edison's System Designs,
including like 1400 switches that we installed
that also helps sectionalize,
and these are remote controlled, not the fuses,
but are remote controlled devices
on circus to isolate segments.
And we've used those to go to sets.
And this last event where de-energized 17 customers,
we initially notify 500 potential customers,
but we're able, alternately sectionalize the circuit
to get it down to 17.
Can we advance to the next slide please, slide six.
With those operational enhancements covered,
I'd like to focus now on how we've improved
our customer communication system
to improve the information readily available
and provide easier access.
After the 2019 PSPS events,
we reviewed our customer care plans
by surveying actual customers
who experienced PSPS instances.
And we ask them what their pain points were.
That certainly helped us to prioritize our improvements.
First, expand our alerts for non-SCE account holders
and non-SEC account customers,
which is renters, tenants, family, and relatives,
not registered to receive outage alerts based on zip codes.
Regarding our website, sce.com,
candidly, we had difficulty keeping that system up
here in certain times due to all the traffic
generated by customer interests in October.
The sce.com performance has been significantly upgraded,
provide increased site capacity
and reliability for PSPS content.
The site's now capable of revival serving
greater than 5 million PSPS specific pages per hour.
That's up from a capability of around 200,000 before,
so we've seen a 25 fold increase in capacity there.
We also heard from stakeholders that are circuit based maps
with difficult to understand.
The sce.com has been upgraded
to provide customer friendly outage information,
which includes interactive mapping,
enabled street level zoom capabilities,
the upended to index, which I think we all have,
we have a samples of the maps
that are available to the public.
It also goes available to our agency partners.
Using the interactive maps on our website,
customers can zoom in to see speak level information,
including areas under consideration for de-energization,
including the periods of concern for a start and end time.
We also highlight de-energized circuits
with an estimated restoration date and time
and the locations of community crude vehicles
and community resource centers and the address date
and hours that the facilities will be operational.
That customers will also have access
to dynamic near realtime information
for the potential hand access PSPS event.
Additionally, we're working
with our 211 information service entities
across our service area
to better support effective customers
who may dial in for assistance during a PSPS event.
Now, in addition to improving customer communications,
we also concentrate our efforts
on expanding our customer programs and services,
especially for our most vulnerable populations.
Among the most vulnerable customers during de-energization
are those reliant on medical devices
for life sustaining purposes
and who cannot afford certain critical items
that support their resiliency.
And we're offering a full subsidy
for battery backups solutions to all.
-: This is Genevieve, are you on the next slide,
which says providing valued programs and services?
-: Oh, I think we need to prevent the conflict,
Can you go to the next slide please?
Genevieve: Yeah, okay, thank you.
-: Okay, here we are,
thank you Genevieve.
Again, sorry, the intent of the program is to provide
a backup battery facility, 24 hours of resiliency,
we began offering the subsidy in early July of 2020.
Customers rely on Well Water Company
to receive a rebate of up to $500 towards backup generation
and customers that need a portable power battery
can receive a $50 rebate.
Now, in addition, we've taken a targeted approach
to augment our services for customers
who've been impacted by power shut off.
For example, we're creating resiliency zones
in which backup power will be provided
to essential services in certain rural areas.
It's like a gas station, maybe a convenience store
or a school, the location that the community needs
to support their resiliency.
And we're also exploring the capability and feasibility
that is still on temporary back up generation.
An underground portions of selected de-energized circuits
that've experienced PSPS events.
These are bigger blocks.
But we've also developed 1,100 circuits
specific customer care plans,
re circuiting our high fire risk area.
These plans are going to provide an overview
of the customer profiles on a circuit,
including how many are identified as critical care
or business essential services.
We'll also be able to see which programs the customers
are eligible for and which programs
and services they participate in.
We're also providing preparedness
and resiliency planning support
for critical infrastructure providers.
Can we advance to the next slide please.
-: So Phil, let me ask a few questions right here.
Yesterday, we heard from San Diego Gas and Electric,
that medical rate customers
who experienced the PSPS last year,
they had a little over 1200 customers were earmarked
to receive the lease on battery backup unit.
And you have here that you're looking to deploy (mumbles)
So you're looking to,
do you have some similar metrics,
I recall we all had oversight board meeting
with your representative,
gave us some metrics and I'm not recalling what they are.
-: Okay.
(mumbling)
Certainly, certainly Commissioner.
Yeah, we are targeting again 2,500
and these are income qualified critical care customers.
And we focus on really the set that we expect
we'll need these that are in both intersecting programs.
I'd like to ask our vice president of customer service,
operations support operations, Marc Ulrich
to jump in with some more metrics.
I believe you were at that workshop, Marc.
Marc: Thanks Phil, can you hear me?
-: We hear you.
-: Thank you, Commissioner Shiroma.
We had listened to San Diego's yesterday.
Similar to them, we intend to cover all customers
that are in a high fire risk area
that are eligible for this.
And that means they have two criteria.
One is they're a critical care customer,
and the second is their income qualified or low income.
The last time we pulled a report,
it was slightly less than 2,500 customers.
That population moves over time,
but we intend to cover all customers in that category.
-: Commissioner Rechtschaffen, just a follow up question.
Actually, a couple of them.
Were you able in your exercises that you conducted,
were you able to test to see if you are communicating
with your medical baseline customers?
Were they part of your tasks?
And if so, how did that work
and do you have some lessons learned?
And then I want to ask another followup question.
Marc: Phil, I can take that if you like.
This as Marc Ulrich again.
Yes, for our medical baseline population,
we separated into two populations.
One is medical baseline where you have any medical equipment
and that helps with rate by giving you more kilowatt hours
at a lower rate.
The second is which customers are critical care medical
baseline customers, where they have living issues,
if their equipment's without power for more than two hours.
So in our notifications,
we give out notifications to all the medical baseline
customers in our circuits during an event
and before the event.
We also make sure that for their critical care portion
of the population, that we have positive contact with them,
what that means is that we can confirm
that they have received a notification
in the form that they prefer,
whether it's a landline,
they pushed a button that said, yes, one,
hit one for you've received this and you understand.
And that gives us confirmation on the landline,
on the text, we have them reply back
that they've received it,
or they click on a button in the email,
and that gives us positive confirmation
that they've received that notice.
If they do not receive that notice,
then we do outbound calling with a human.
And if we don't get contact with them,
then we send a field service rep to knock on the door.
-: Okay, thank you.
One follow up question.
You may have heard it yesterday,
and my fellow Commissioners and I have talked
about this more than once.
We're very concerned about the customers
that are behind the master meter
and how they get notification
and how the timing of that notification.
That would be people who are in mobile home parks,
people who live in Section Eight housing apartments,
for example, folks that you don't necessarily know
are your customers, but indeed they are your customers.
How are you identifying them?
Including those who have medical needs.
And how are you communicating with them?
Marc: Excellent question.
This is a major concern for us also at Edison.
So we have 500 master meter accounts
that are mobile home parks, where there are sub tenants
that are not direct customer accounts.
Of those 500, we know that there are 1700 customers
behind those master meters.
And all the medical baseline and critical care customers
behind the master meter are now getting direct messages,
using the contact information from their applications.
So that was a problem last year in 2019,
it was a very big concern for us.
We do send a letter
and we work with all the master accounts each year.
They're legally obligated to pass along our information
about, we give them kits about
and have them post publicly in their facilities
information about PSPS,
information about our medical baseline program,
information about customer care, et cetera.
So that was one change we made.
The other was the now master meter
can give to the subtenants, their account number and name,
and they can call directly to set up direct communication,
so they do not need to rely
on the master meter account holder.
And then finally we use total alerts,
which allows anyone to sign up for alerts.
-: Okay, good.
So does that 1700, that seems like a very low number
to me, but I don't wanna quibble with your data,
but I'm assuming you're continuing to work on that
population in preparation.
Marc: Yeah, that population is very important to us.
There's a larger set of population
that are medical baseline,
but the equipment that they have is not life threatening.
And so they're also important to us,
but not as important as the customers
who have medical equipment, that's life based.
-: So let me just get this straight with you,
get an understanding.
You are supplying subsidized, backup battery,
I mean, you you're basically providing subsidies.
You're not actually providing any type of small batteries
or any type of kits.
We've gone from Edison yesterday that they actually are.
Marc: Yeah, actually it was San Diego yesterday,
Edison's today, but we are actually doing exactly
the same thing as San Diego,
we were providing a physical battery and a solar panel
to charge the battery, completely free to the customer,
they do not have to pay and get reimbursed.
This is not a rebate program,
it's a battery backup program
and it's designed to power their equipment
for at least 24 hours.
And one slight difference is
ours comes with a three year warranty
instead of a one year warranty.
-: All right, good.
All right, thank you for clarifying.
I think Mr. Rechstchaffen has a question.
-: Right (mumbles).
Just to follow up on your response to the President Batjer
and Commissioner Shiroma's,
in the instances where you're providing
the physical battery and the solar panel,
what about someone who's renting?
How are they getting, what's the solutions for them?
Marc: The solution is still the same
because the battery backup and the solar panel
do not have to connect into the home.
It can connect directly to the medical equipment.
That way we did not want a hamstring a renter
from being able to adjust their electrical systems
in their homes.
-: Okay, and if I am not to parse this to find
but as I understand what Danielle Gas and Electric
told us yesterday, it's a little bit different than yours
because they said that they are providing daddy batteries,
which sounds like it's comparable to what you're doing.
Batteries says hookup directly to appliances
or medical equipment rather than to an electric system
of the house, but they said that at 1,250 medical baseline
customers, that they were providing all of them
with these portable batteries,
whereas what I heard you say is you're providing this
to 2,500 medical baseline customers
who are one, income qualified,
and two who are defined as critical care,
would you, I heard you say,
who can't be without power for more than two hours,
because otherwise it would life threatening.
So yours is a smaller universe and then there's,
if I'm understanding what they said yesterday,
what you said today, and if that's the case,
do you have a figure of the total number
of medical baseline customers
who are within the PSPS period that you've identified,
including the ones who would not be covered
by your battery subsidy program?
Marc: Yes.
You have Commissioner Rechtschaffen,
you have our statistics correct,
and our program correct.
So here, the way you decided it is exactly correct.
I don't recall whether San Diego's was also income qualified
or not, I thought it was, but I may be wrong on that.
But the total population of medical baseline customers
that we have in the high fire risk areas
is a much larger than just 2,500.
We have roughly 20,000 medical baseline customers
in high fire risk areas.
But some of those,
some of the equipment that the other medical baseline
customers have are not life threatening equipment.
And this is judged by a selection that the customer chooses,
it's not Edison.
-: Okay, have you for these 2,500 customers,
do they already have the equipment right now?
Have you already deployed this?
Marc: We have deployed, and we have roughly,
I believe about a hundred or so
that are either installed today or going to be installed.
Our supply chain was slightly delayed,
partly because we wanted to negotiate
longer warranty periods than just 12 months.
And so we anticipate getting the shipment for about,
we have about 250 to 500 batteries on hand
that we're installing now.
And about 2000 should come in September
in about three weeks.
-: Thank you.
-: President Batjer, I had one more question.
And this being similar to the questions I asked
San Diego Gas and Electric.
So when I see you provide up to $500 rebate
for water pumping,
and I just wanted to know in terms of energizing food banks
and any kinds of additional efforts
to ensure that folks have clean drinking water.
Can you describe any additional efforts?
-: President Batjer, I'll jump in
and Marc, you please recall the question
on the food bags from STG,
that is an area where we need to continue to do more work,
one of the areas we spend a lot of time
and up until this PSPS season is working
with County agencies and our emergency partners.
And in events, we also are working with them
to look at what the critical loads are on a system.
So we would certainly look to work with those entities,
food banks, and other similar facilities
in events and if backup power required,
we've worked with them
to define solutions as far as pre identifying
those at this point in time, Marc,
I think we have a little bit of work to do there,
but why don't you jump in and share what we've done so far?
Marc: Yeah, that's correct Phil,
this is an area we need to improve.
We do see the concern you have,
we have seen anecdotally some of our food banks
have gone from two facilities to four facility
to six facilities,
and so they're growing and spreading since the pandemic.
And some of the things we have done is
we've looked at, are they on the right rate?
Can they get a cheaper rate?
Is there a way to make sure that
they are all availing themselves
of all the programs we have.
But one thing we have not done is plotted out
and treated them separately from other business customers
and treated them like essential customers.
So hearing your guys' questions yesterday,
we've been thinking about it already,
but now it's give us confirmation,
it's an additional area we need to look into.
-: Marc, since we are in this area of questioning,
I know you still have several slides to go through.
However, one of the questions we asked San Diego yesterday,
asking you again today is in terms of critical sites
that we didn't have to consider last year,
of course we have to now consider COVID-19 testing sites
and testing sites are not all, as we all know,
always medical facilities,
which you probably already have
on your critical facility web,
they could be at fairgrounds
and other places throughout your service territory.
Are you considering backup power for them as well?
-: We are chairman,
and I will say that this is a fluid area as you note,
some of these facilities are popping up very quickly.
We have worked quite a bit with county directors
to identify as many of these locations as we possibly could.
I had a time Marc's team
and our local public affairs team has also been engaged
in the field to identify as many of these facilities
as we can and work with them
to understand their resiliency needs,
and in the event that there is a PSPS event,
to help them with arranging backup generation.
Now there's been some additional outreach
with the hospital association that Marc's team has done.
So I will say it's something we've been very conscious of,
we worked with the Pomona Fairground recently,
not too long ago at least,
where they set up a COVID testing center.
It's part of our program to reach out to
as many of these as we can
and get as much insight as we can.
I do expect that will also be an end event action item
that our teams will be dealing with
when we set up a PSPS IMT,
something our teams will be working with,
the emergency managers in the jurisdictions
that we are expecting a PSPS.
But we have done quite a few things
in the last several months.
Marc, you gotten any gaps there?
I may have missed something.
Marc: Yeah, you didn't miss anything, Phil, good job.
The only other thing I would add is
it's not just PSPS related,
that we're concerned for the COVID popup testing sites
and Pomona Fairgrounds
and example that was a maintenance outage
that was gonna be done.
And that was a particular concern for us,
so we rearrange the maintenance outage
and helped provide and help them procure a generation
so that the outside could continue on,
but otherwise you got it all straight, so.
-: Yeah, chairman we've been having the opportunity
to work much closely with our local governments,
with a stay at home orders.
And so we've been really up to our whole program,
in terms of outage coordination,
which has given us more insight into specific loads,
loads that we might not have been as focused on,
but for COVID-19, and so that I think has helped us.
And it's as Marc knows really align with our PSPS efforts.
Daniel: Phil, this is Daniel Berlant from CAL FIRE,
quick question for you,
at how closely are you guys working
with the telecommunication providers
to ensure that they have the necessary data
on where the PSPS circuits are gonna be shut off
and just can you talk about that collaboration?
-: I can, and we have conducted outreach both locally
and at the national level.
We have spent time with the telecoms
to help them understand some of our circuits
and what our circus look like.
We also have a program when we are in an event also
to engage with the critical services, telecommunications
and water agencies, as well,
to explain to them what our circuit playbooks look like,
what that could mean for the event,
and what could ultimately be de-energized.
So we have spent a good amount of time with telecoms,
water agencies and others.
I think more work continues to need to be done there,
I don't wanna suggest we're anywhere near complete
with that effort,
but it is a place we've been spending time
to make sure that they understand
and we understand their needs
and the resiliency implications.
Recognizing that there are obligations there
for their own resilience, but we wanna help them
and want them to understand our system
and what a PSPS looks like.
And there may be cases frankly,
where their backup generation may not work as intended,
and we wanna understand that,
and in an incident be prepared
if we have the resources to support them
if their back of generation doesn't work.
-: As a follow on to that question, if I may,
one of the concerns that was voiced to us by AT&T,
in particular, but other Telcos,
that they were not given adequate time,
not adequately alerted by you all.
And I'm sure, I hope during this past year,
you all have worked out that communications with them.
-: Yeah, chairman we have improved all of our communications,
including that one, the Telcos,
and we intend to continue to do that.
One thing that has arisen
and it's something we continue to work on
is the nature of some PSPS events come relatively rapidly,
we have seen a couple of events
that have appeared not with a three day roll off,
but with a 24 hour or less roll up,
it's just the nature of some events,
but regardless, we will work diligently with them,
and that I feel is in much better shape
than it was before.
Eric, I think you've been doing some work in that regard
and Marc, is there anything you wanna add?
Didn't you do think this is an important topic
that we've addressed and we need to make sure that
we're responsive here.
Marc: Eric, I can jump in real quick
and then hand it to you?
I know that for the last three years, 2018, 19 and 20,
we've had three day workshops with our telecom partners,
as Phil said, it's important
that they own their own resiliency,
but they really need us to be a partner in it.
So we'll continue to have those three day workshops.
We also each year confirm who is the right contacts,
for 24 hour a day partners,
we need to know who they want us to contact with.
So our business customer division confirms that each year
and we refresh that information.
And then, we send these notifications in multiple forms
to the contacts too.
So if there's a contact problem, I think it was in the past,
I'm hoping we won't see another one in the future
because it's hard for them to be resilient without our help.
-: I appreciate that very much, I agree with you.
I hope it's resolved.
-: President Batjer, this is Eric,
if I could ask a couple of questions.
First to go back to COVID,
appreciate the work you guys are doing
in terms of identifying facilities
to President Batjer's point,
not just our traditional healthcare facilities,
but the other operations.
I know several months ago,
as we got started on that COVID emergency response,
we provided a list at that time
of a number of alternate care sites.
These are sites that oftentimes are not located
adjacent to a hospital,
but we're setting them up in gymnasiums,
at colleges and schools at other locations,
we've provided that list previously to all three IOUs.
I will take for action for us to update that list
and provide it back out.
But one of the things, especially on testing sites,
there's an active RGIS site that's updated in real time,
that shows every testing site in the state of California.
That's on the Governorscovid.ca.gov website.
So I would encourage your teams to access that,
and you can begin mapping against your polygons
where those sites occur.
And if we need to have an offline conversation
to provide some of those data layers, happy to do that.
But Phil, I wanted to go back to
you're talking about generation,
relative to keeping key community centers up.
And obviously as you know well,
the ability for us to keep critical operations,
grocery stores, gas stations, and key resources live
and up, within an outage area.
It wasn't clear to me from your comments,
if you guys have since 2019 done that
and can have that generation in place
or that's something you are looking at doing
that we won't be able to realize the benefits until 2021.
-: Yeah, it's a good question, it's a little bit of both.
The big blocks that we mentioned,
looking at getting whole communities up.
At this point, we're still evaluating whether we can do,
and it requires extremely large generation sources.
And so we have environmental issues,
we have to balance with that.
So we're still looking at a mechanism
to at least find some segments of those circuits
that we can essentially reconfigure
to allow us to test generation there.
What we have done however,
we procured around the 15 megawatts of backup generation
that we can deploy in events
to the extent that they are needed in different places
and the resiliency centers that I did mention,
we are in the process of configuring some facilities,
so some will be done by 2020 I expect.
I expect more of just to be available in 2020.
I wanna give Erik Takayesu an opportunity to jump in here.
Erik's been spending a lot of time
with this aspect of our program, Erik.
Erik: Thank you, Phil.
And thank you Deputy Director on MRO.
Just a couple of things I wanna mention
that Phil didn't cover, I think he covered it quite well.
We have been developing a generator strategy,
but one of the things that we have been working on,
to what degree do we have clean,
environmentally adequate units available?
So the 15 are actually 17 megawatts that Phil referred to
as well, we've been able to procure,
we also have an additional 17 and a half megawatts
on retainer that FR needs surpassed that,
we wouldn't be able to respond accordingly.
But one thing I would like to highlight,
and I think it's an important issue,
when we get it to an event,
is the collaboration and the coordination
because they may, at times,
we don't know how many units may be required
identifying and prioritizing those
with the County Emergency Management,
that'd be critical.
So we're able to ensure that we are adjusting
the most critical needs in the most expedient way.
-: I hear you, I'm sorry.
-: Oh, sorry, excuse me.
If I may just follow up, question to Erik,
could you repeat perhaps I didn't hear correctly,
did you say 17 megawatts of clean energy for backup?
Erik: Yeah, those are the cleanest units
that are available technically
and they typically fall into the smaller units.
So you won't see it as availability
of those in the larger unit, like in the one megawatt range,
these happens to be mostly in the 300KW, 500KW
and that's also the same sizes of generation
that we have on retainer as well.
Marc: But Erik, let me,
this is Marc Ulrich, President Batjer, when he says clean,
he means the best available control technology,
he does not mean solar with batteries.
-: I was just going to follow up with that comment,
so thanks for the clarification.
I probably understood that he didn't mean solar
with backup batteries, but I wasn't sure what he meant.
So thank you, appreciate it.
Marc: And then Director Lamoreaux,
this is Marc Ulrich again,
the idea that you came up with,
the resiliency zones is one we are absolutely pursuing.
We are now in the stage where we have seven different pilots
that we're looking at,
where we're trying to figure out
what's the best way to do, select the services,
and as you said,
this is in an area where there'll be de-energization,
how can we energize a grocery store, a pharmacy,
a gas station, certain services
that our customers still need?
And so we we'll continue to work that,
I hope we do get some in 2020.
I know we've been soliciting input,
one of the things we're also doing
is for local governments to help us select,
as you can imagine,
we don't wanna be in the middle of a lawsuit
where one grocery store sued us
because we picked a different grocery store,
but we'll get through some of those minor hurdles.
-: You know what, I appreciate that,
but I also appreciate that
you've already executed the first PSPS of 2020.
We're approaching 12 months from your largest event in 2019,
and it sounds like there's a lot of good planning,
but we're 10 months since,
I hope that we can see some tangible results
in the way of being able to create
some resiliency services in 2020,
so that we can reduce those consequences
that we're dealing with,
especially in your service territory,
where someone's going to be out of power in Inyo County
or Mono County, and have a significant way to travel
in order to get out of that de-energized zone
to a place where there's a grocery store
with the power on and a gas station that's up.
So, thank you.
-: Thank you, Director Lamoureux.
We absolutely take the point, we are pushing this one hard.
And in fact, the locations that you signed
are largely the places where we are assigning
these resiliency zones to be constructed,
so we're with you, we're pushing this hard
and I appreciate the extra motivation to get this moving.
Thank you.
-: So, Phil, this Marybel.
I think you have just a couple more,
probably only one more slide.
So why don't we let you get through that?
I think we all have a few more questions
and of course, then we'll turn to the public comment period.
But why don't we let you finish the last,
that last half of it,
the one slide and then your final slide.
And then I know you have the maps too.
-: The maps are for everyone to join the president,
but yeah, the good news is we've largely covered a lot
of things that we were going to talk about right now,
which is great.
I did wanna point out that we are working closely
with our AFN communities, local and statewide agencies
to amplify our offerings to the ASN,
access and functional of these customers
as PSPS events unfold,
now, we work in collaboration
with the other California Investor Owned utilities
to help launch the AFN Statewide Advisory Council,
I know everyone's familiar with that group,
and it's again intended
so that we can better understand needs,
to the access and functional needs populations,
and partner on creating solutions
that we'll really better serve that community.
One thing we've added,
I don't know if this is unique or not,
but we think it's absolutely important.
We've added a dedicated AFN specialist
to our PSPS Incident Management team
who will manage those partnerships
and customer needs during events.
So when we stand up an IMT,
we will have somebody whose focus is the AFN community
to be there, advising the incident commander
and the team on needs and what we can do to support them.
Now, we've also increased our partnerships
with the Independent Living Centers, ILCs
across our service area, focused on outreach and awareness.
And through these partnerships,
we're deliberately focused on increasing medical baseline
awareness and enrollments.
By the way, I would say with the additional outreach
that we did also associated with our recent outage work,
I think the Commission is aware of that.
We just saw controls and engagement,
we have with local communities,
which required us to engage with more of a heavy touch
with our customers.
We also use that opportunity to explore with customers
if they needed to be registered in one of those forums.
So we use that as an opportunity to help us out.
I'm looking through here,
one thing we haven't touched on,
I'll hit it very quickly is our PSPS COVID-19 preparations,
we hit on some of them,
but we've adjusted our plans to provide in-person services
where we can with the proper precautions,
expanding our whole community resource centers,
And that was one way, more centers, less crowding there,
and adjusting the protocols for social distancing
for customers and our employees
and supporters when they there are there.
We've also enhanced our virtual services,
webpage has provided info and more directions customers
to key resources.
We've moved forward, a lot of coordination
with our County and State Emergency Management Officials,
and we've prioritized healthcare outreach and facilities,
and touched on that a little bit.
So I just wanna say this is an area
where we have spent a lot of time, rightly and importantly,
because we think it's absolutely critical
that we hear the feedback from our customers,
from our communities, from our agency partners
to help us really do better here.
So maybe we can hit the last slide
and then we're ready for questions.
So again, we've got some of the highlights here
of our activity.
I just wanna say we are absolutely focused on really
improving all phases of the wildfire mitigation.
I've listed some statistics here.
It's an infrastructure hardening,
it seems situational awareness,
I think what I really wanna leave everyone with
is the absolute commitment from me,
from Southern California Edison,
that we are absolutely committed to get this right.
And we in a better place than we were last year,
we learned something with every single PSPS event
and we will continue to do so.
None are the same,
everyone has learnings that we can benefit from.
We're committed to improving this,
we're committed to getting this right.
This is absolutely important that we do that.
I think based on the work we've done,
the lessons we've learned, our engagement with you,
customers or cities or first responders,
we are confronting this next fire season with new tools,
new technologies, and what I feel are much better approaches
to managing disruptions to our customers.
When our concern for public safety
requires us to power down,
we don't take this lightly.
I hope that is not the impression that anybody has.
This is about public safety.
It is what keeps all of us up at night,
It is how do we keep our community safe, full stop.
That's what it amounts to for us.
So I really wanna thank you
for the opportunity to be here.
We know how important this is to you,
everybody on this call, the community to be served.
We are committed, absolutely listening to learning,
and we will always focus on improving.
So thank you, President Batjer,
thank you Commission, thank you everyone.
And I'm really looking forward,
we're looking forward to answering your
and the community additional questions that you may have.
-: Okay, I know we all have some additional questions,
real quickly on the Community Resource Expansion.
Can you tell us what hours you're going
to be conducting operations as a community resource?
And there's an exactly what are the things
that you're going to be offering?
What services will you be offering?
And I do appreciate that you're doing social distancing
and being mindful of all of the practices of COVID-19,
but wanna know what you've done
to expand the actual services of the CRCs.
-: Sure, I'll take a start,
and then Eric and Marc can jump in as well.
As far as hours are concerned,
we are complying as where we can with the extended hours
that the Commission has directed us to do
to make perfect sense, longer hours, much more useful.
Some of the CRCs is one of the reasons
we stand in our footprints.
CRCs just have not made their facilities available
to us for the full hours that we would like them to have.
So, again, right now we've got 40 CRCs contracting today,
22 of them already have the 8:00 a.m to 10:00 p.m hours.
That's great, we're gonna continue to work
and expand that, we provide go bags, which contains snacks.
They contain charging devices,
we also will provide Ais, Additional Information,
we put this in a bag.
This is information that our customers may find useful.
Again, one of the most important things you provide at a CRC
or Community Crew Vehicles is information about the events,
and so that's absolutely something
that we think is important.
It's even in the events that we just had recently,
as small as they work,
we had a number of folks showing up
to our Community Crew Vehicle locations.
Marc and Eric,
is there anything that I missed
that's significant that we can share?
Marc: This is Marc,
yeah, so you got most all that absolutely correct there.
One thing, for any new CRC
that we're contracting with today,
they will meet the hours, the 8:00a.m to 10:00 p.m hours.
But as Phil said,
we have 22 that have converted that we already had
in our contract that we have agreed
to keep the eight to 10 hours.
But that means we have roughly 18 or so
that are still pending.
And some of them have told us that
they will not be able to meet our hours.
So we're at a struggle of what to do with those CRCs.
The other thing is we are continually exploring.
I was incident commander last weekend,
when we had the de-energization of the 17 customers,
they were without power for about 24 hours
'cause the wind conditions had not subsided,
but we saw a six hour window where it was going to subside,
and we thought we could reenergize them for a little bit,
but the wind was gonna come back up shortly after.
The winds came in early
and we were not able to re-energize them.
And so we actually sent a field service rep to the homes
to drop off, go bags and AIs to these 17 customers.
It's not something that I think we could really do at scale,
but we're exploring all types of opportunities
to be able to do that.
Of the 17, only three customers were home at the time.
They were very appreciative of our approach,
but we were trying to make that service
a little bit more local to the de-energized customers.
So we're continuing to explore, but as Phil said,
I think he got all the contents and the go bag correct,
as well as the hours of operation and occurrence status.
And I'm not sure if Eric, you wanted to add anything?
Eric: He might've said this before,
and I apologize if he did,
but of the 40 CRCs we have contracted to date,
22 of them have 8:00 a.m to 10:00 p.m hours.
-: Right, I sure hope that you're able
to get the expanded hours and the rest of those,
'cause that's just only half your CRCs.
And appreciate you working hard on that,
but as we all know, we're in the fire season now,
I don't want to belabor the point,
but I know your more rural areas
as Eric Lamoreaux mentioned earlier,
when you get out into Mono County and Inyo,
you're really talking about a long way to travel for folks.
So I'm hoping you've taken into consideration
where you're placing the CRCs.
And if you can't find brick and mortar
that you're attempting of some sort
that you're providing CRC within in a reasonable distance,
we've have had quite a few of the rural counties mention
to us how difficult it was for people to drive, limited gas,
worried about their fuel usage, driving miles
and miles to get to the the charging station, for example.
-: Yeah, President Batjer,
just to add on, I think Marc you may have mentioned this,
but if not, I completely agree for one thing,
we are really focused on located these as close to the areas
where we expect the PSPS events to be occurring as possible.
It is one area where we are leveraging
our Community Crew Vehicles,
it's one of the reasons we felt that was important,
especially given our service area.
A large distance to cover,
and pre-positioning those four events
as an augmentation to the CCRs.
So they have a lot of the capabilities,
we do hand out the go bags
and they have charging capability,
and of course the information is shared
at those locations as well when the vehicle shows up.
-: I have one more question that I wanna ask,
and then I'm going to turn back
to my fellow diocese members.
And that is, I know we didn't get to really looking
at your maps,
but one of the things that the telecommunications companies
have indicated to us during a PSPS event,
oftentimes their services are degraded.
So if you are pointing your customers to your website,
to look at maps and evacuation information
and fire information, et cetera,
are you also looking at how you can provide your,
how you can have your website provide low bandwidth versions
of those types of things, that information
that is a higher data requirement?
-: Absolutely president, we have really designed it
with a mobile first philosophy in mind.
There's no streaming videos,
there's no high content downloads,
maybe a little bit different than it was before.
So I think, we have really designed this in mind
with being able to use a mobile device
and not being reliant on a computer.
So that's definitely part of the program.
And we did fix some of these when we saw these issues.
But again, I think the mobile service design,
it goes into the foundation
of how we're planning our website and the information
that we're sharing with our customers.
-: Okay, thanks.
I'll let my fellow Commissioners and Eric and Daniel.
Yes, Commissioner Shiroma.
-: Thank you, president Batjer.
Wanted to follow up on where your slide you referred to
coordination with tribal governments (mumbles).
Tell us a little bit more about
what does that entail in terms of coordinating closely
with tribal governments
within your utility territory and these zones?
-: Yeah, thank you Commissioner.
We have used tribal governments,
in fact, we had the same kind of outreach
with tribal governments, as we do with all of our counties,
we have representatives assigned to them.
And so as far as outreach is concerned,
reaching out regarding CRCs so far,
they've not asked for any,
or not take us up on the offer to cook one
on their other territory.
But we have established contacts
across our entire service area.
It is part of our customer service
and Local Public Affairs program,
so we have made contact and continue to do that
as part of our wildfire resiliency run out.
So I think Marc,
you might have some of the customer service aspects of that.
Is there anything you would care to share there or Eric?
Marc: Yeah Phil, this is Marc, you're correct.
Local public affairs has a dedicated individuals
in there certain areas
as well as the business customer division does
to make sure that we're coordinated
with our tribal governments.
Also during a PSPS event,
we hold two daily briefings in County coordination calls,
and they're invited the general public is not,
but our partner agencies are invited,
including the tribal governments.
-: Thank you.
-: Yes, Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
-: Can I just follow up on Commissioner Shiroma's question,
and your response was
none of the tribes have requested CRCs,
include your tribe,
I know Edison has its dedicated tribal liaison, right?
-: We have a number of folks Commissioner.
I'm sorry, Marc, you were trying to get it.
Marc: Nope, that's it.
We don't have a single individual that does all tribes.
We have individuals in certain regions
that handle different tribes.
-: Well, I would be interested in following up offline
with whoever the pertinent tribal liaisons are in the areas
the tribal areas that have been affected by PSPS
is to find out about their potential interest in CRCs,
and if they adequately communicated it,
there is a desire for them in any tribal territory.
-: Yeah, we certainly can mention it,
we'd be happy to facilitate that.
We'll take that as an action item.
-: Thank you, I take it that the pilots
for the resiliency zones,
none of them are in tribal areas at this point.
-: No, they are not.
That's correct.
We did also provided,
we had a kind of PSPS workshop for tribes,
so actually on our wildfire mitigation plan very recently,
I think that was within the last month or two.
We hold workshops much like we do
with our other agency partners.
-: Daniel, I saw your hand come up.
-: Thank you president,
and Phil, it's good to finally now get to see you
as I'm now joined here.
So couple questions for you,
first, what if anything, are you guys doing this year
as far as providing notifications to state agencies
and emergency departments?
-: So we have a really refined a lot of the contacts
we were making with state agencies.
I can say one of our lessons learned is
candidly, some of the contact information wasn't right.
I don't wanna finesse that too much,
and working with the agencies also,
so we understand who the right people are,
whether it's CAL FIRE or Cal OES, or other sub agencies
that need to be communicated with.
So we have really worked hard
to make sure we've got that right.
I do want to see this off,
'cause this was an area of focused for Erik Takayesu
and the PSPS readiness team.
Erik, am I missing something there?
That's we do contact, I know, County emergency managers,
fire, a lot of other officials, daily during events?
By the way, I think Marc mentioned the twice daily calls,
so when we have an event,
we have a call with county agencies and state agencies
where the incident commander debriefs the events
essentially in real time.
And one thing I'll also add is we invite our agency partners
to come to the EOC, we stopped for now in COVID,
but that invitation stands to have
representatives participate with us in the PSPS event.
So that's something we really encourage it,
I think that makes the communication flow even better
and helps in understanding of how we're making decisions.
Sorry, I got right when you're try to jump in there Eric,
is there anything you'd like to add?
Erik: I think you pretty much said
exactly what I would've said.
So you covered it well,
the only thing I would add is I know that
our director of business resiliency is also met,
preemptively with each of the county executive managers
to discuss the COVID intersection with PSPS
and any concerns that may have been raised, yeah.
-: Thank you, Eric.
-: Great, appreciate that,
and obviously, I mean,
I hope it goes without being said that
if there's work at the state agencies,
we can do to help ensure that that coordination
and that connection is there.
That that is communicated
from your end to our end, immediately
so that we can make those connections,
so appreciate that.
So one more last question for you,
heading into this kind of peak fire season.
What do you see for SoCalGas as being the biggest concern
and what are you guys doing to address it?
-: The biggest challenge I see right now is
it will be the big events, right?
So managing multiple events
that are occurring across our service area,
where lighting resources will be challenged,
where our own resources may be challenged.
Those are the events I think we are
most concerned about happening.
The things we have done about it,
it's one of the elements of the PSPS readiness team.
There are several layers to this,
maybe even taking a step back,
all the infrastructure harding,
everything we have done is to preclude the need
for a PSPS event, so I want to underscore that
for everyone here.
This is not something we seek,
this is truly, it's the thing at the end of the line,
when we feel our system and weather conditions
are such that we feel public safety
really is best served by de-energization,
so we're at that point now.
So assume that they have many events going on
on a service line area, lots of areas.
We've done drills, and we're continuing to do drills.
We have enhanced our tools,
and if you haven't been able to see a demonstration
then our team would love to walk you through this,
the dashboards we're using now have automated this,
the playbooks we put in place,
so I would say pre preparation has been really key for us.
If I look back to the big events of last year,
some of the things we were doing in event,
I mentioned circuit place, switching playbooks.
We had a room of dedicated people
looking at what we could do with any given circuit.
And that would take sometimes hours to figure out
how we could reconfigure any individual circuit.
But we have literally a book
that has these are all the ways
you can re configured a circuit.
That's all done in advance, so when a big event happens,
we're able to respond quickly
and efficiently deploy our resources.
So everything we've done has been mindful
of rapid ramp up to a larger events,
quickly scaling to be able to do the events,
and frankly, I'd also say the improvements we've made
to our weather forecasting and technology and tools
have led us to a place where we think
our forecasting is much better.
So we'll be able, I'd say to dial in if you will,
be more precise with our PSPS,
for the same level of risk reduction, fewer notifications,
all of these things help with scalability.
And the last thing is we created a dedicated PSPS team.
So we have full timers now that are solely focused on PSPS.
When there's blue sky events,
they're working to make the process better.
It's their full time job,
it's not just a PMO or an IMT, which we do have,
we stand those up,
we have full timers, there're really dozens of full-timers
focused on PSPS operations, notifications
and community engagement,
to be able to handle the big events seamlessly.
So big events, I think that's one of my concerns
and we've really focused on many levels,
many tiers to address that.
So I appreciate the question.
Erik, you've been leading some of the efforts there,
anything else you would add to that mix before we move on?
Erik: Yeah, thank you.
-: Thank you for the question by the way.
Erik: Yeah, I think the,
so I agree with wholeheartedly
and that is about both scale and complexity.
And the biggest challenge
that I think I see is when multiple large events
also come together simultaneously.
So it increases both scale and complexity
as if we having to deal with significant wildfires
at the same time.
And if there are other natural events that
enabled us to have to respond in a much larger way,
I do believe and we've exercised
and it's those points of JoVE that we've conducted,
we're about as ready as we can be.
The pre design or pre engineering of a PSPS plan
are pretty much about understanding what can be preemptively
done prior to an event actually coming in,
when we see it coming and then having a efficient execution,
leveraging all of the technologies,
and I think we're gonna do our best
to manage as many of these events as we can,
in a COVID safe way to manage them remotely.
But if push comes to shove,
and we get into a much larger event,
we have also defined our emergency operations center
to be able to accommodate more staff
in a very COVID safe manner.
-: Okay, Eric Lamoreaux,
you've been trying to ask a question, I believe.
-: I have, thank you president.
I've got a couple quick comments I wanna make.
And then I've got a question I'd like,
had a similar response to.
One, on the telecom piece from earlier,
appreciated the comments from Edison
that the telecoms have a responsibility
for their resiliency.
Agreed.
The communication to them is critically important
for that downstream consequence.
What we need to know from the telecoms sooner than later,
when we've got an outage, what is that outage?
What does that impact look like in terms of the customers
that might normally be taking advantage of that power?
So the sooner that they can understand
where the outage is occurring,
then they could get back to us
on what that impact looks like.
So appreciate the work on that.
You mentioned having access and functional needs rep
on your IMT,
we certainly appreciate that.
I think it's important that
that individual serves on your team,
but that also is culturally something
that's integrated into all that you do.
And I know that as an organization, you understand that,
but it's important that AFN
and addressing the needs of the access
and functional community,
isn't something we think about just during that moment,
but it's something that's integrated into our process.
And then, would like to know offline,
what specifically you do to coordinate
with our Southern California Geographic Area
Coordination center, when you weren't proposing into that.
I know that you've got a robust set of tools
that you're using,
and you are doing very precise considerations
for PSPS events, but I'd like to understand better offline,
what specifically that coordination
with the GAC in Southern California looks like.
And then if you could answer for me here
and appreciate the time on the restoration of your events,
what are the mutual aid capabilities that you have to bring
personnel or other resources in to expedite
that restoration following an event,
what are you prepared to do this year?
-: Oh, thank you deputy.
We, as far as restoration,
again, it would all flow from what level of damage
or how many circuits were de-energized
and require inspections.
We've actually built a series of
a key contract support parties to leverage additional
resources as necessary,
to help us with food inspections, if required.
So again, when we have an event, the circus de-energize,
we are looking to have our qualified electrical workers
inspect those lines, identify damage,
obviously we don't want to reenergize into a bad situation.
So, to do that, we first use our own crews.
Next, we step it up to a layer of contractor crews,
are also qualified electrical workers.
To the extent that the event was very big,
we would be prepared to reach out to our mutual aid system,
either through PGD, SDGE and other Western utilities.
We have supported each other,
I should point out during some of the bigger fires,
we have each sent our own crews up to a restoration
after major events, to the extent we needed to do that,
we'd be prepared to do that,
if that would significantly expedite our restoration times.
So far, given the time it takes to get those crews on board,
usually it's within our own teams first,
and then augmented by contractor teams,
that get us the quickest response.
I'm not sure deputy, if that answers your question?
-: Well, it does.
I would caution the reliance on mutual aid from PGE
and San Diego Gas and Electric,
especially if we find ourselves in October,
an event like we had last October,
where everybody is in the middle of PSPS,
those resources are likely not going to be available to you.
I know PGE was challenged to get resources in
from out of State last year as well,
so continuing to work on refining,
what that expanded capability looks like,
I think is important.
-: Yeah, I thank you deputy,
I also understand that our CEO,
Kevin Payne and Head of Business Resiliency,
met with the Western utilities as well.
'Cause we agree it's most likely
that is something's hitting the California utilities,
many of us at the same time.
So we probably would be leveraging other folks in the West
first to pull additional resources if we need to.
-: Okay, we're way over time, and we have public,
I'm assuming we have members of the public
waiting in the queue.
I really wanna thank Phil, you and your team
for your presentation today.
And I know I have more questions,
I think my fellow Commissioners do as well,
but we really need to move on now
to opening the lines to the public.
So for the public who is waiting,
I just want to remind you to dial (800) 857-1917
and answer 989 9501 and press star one,
and you'll be placed in the queue.
Wait for the operator to call your name,
be patient, stay on the line.
And each caller today will have three minutes
to speak to us and ask questions.
You will hear a bell sound when your time's up.
So with that, I'm going to turn to the operator
and operator,
can you notice now how many people are on the line?
Operator: Thank you,
at this time, no one has queued up,
once again, if you have a comment, please press star,
then one, unmute your phone and record your name clearly
when prompted, if you would like to withdraw your comments,
press star, then two, one moment.
-: Wait a few moments to see if people join in,
a bit over time, I hope we didn't lose anyone.
Operator, is anybody joined?
Operator: The first question comes from Melissa
Kristine, your line is open.
Melissa: Thank you, this is Melissa Kristine
from the Center for Accessible Technology.
I have a number of questions, and so in my time,
I'd like to sort of put them forward briefly
and hopefully many as possible can be answered.
And I'm referencing the slide presentation that was given.
First of all, the slides don't speak at all
to efforts by SCE to identify people with access
and functional needs outside of not just medical baseline,
but your limited definition of critical care.
I'd like to understand what SCE is doing
to better understand and identify its population
of access and functional needs customers
who are not enrolled in the medical baseline program,
which is something that was required
by the phase two decision.
Then on the slides directly,
side four on decision points,
doesn't include any considerations of risks to communities
that would be de-energized.
And I would like to understand how that's being factored
into the decision making.
It only looks at risks of wildfire,
which is of course important,
but nothing on the community side.
Turning to slide five, on reduction of impact.
Your slide doesn't include any consideration
of customers whose medical needs
are not immediately life threatening.
And you confirmed that you're only providing support
for customers who are critical care,
but a number of issues that aren't life-threatening
within two hours can cause ongoing health,
safety or mobility impacts
if a customer is without power
for an extended amount of time,
for example, someone will lose mobility
if they can't charge their power wheelchair,
and someone with sleep apnea
who can't use their CPAP machine
is unlikely to go into immediate distress,
but their overall health might be compromised.
On slide six, for communications.
I'd like to understand what SCE has considered
in terms of web accessibility
and meeting web access standards.
The sample maps that are in the appendix
have obvious issues with color contrast,
and would be a very limited value
to someone with low vision trying to look at them.
Similarly, it's unclear what information
is gonna be available in language,
particularly for those customers who speak languages
that aren't directly supported.
And my final slide about backup generation,
I know there were a number of questions
about this from the panel,
but I'd like to understand better how it's being publicized
and how the utility expects to really get the devices
that it's seeking to deploy in place this year,
when the batteries aren't even set
to arrive until September.
I'd appreciate as much a response to these questions
as I can in the time available, thank you very much.
-: Thanks Melissa very much for your questions,
I'm very happy that you covered
the phase two PSPS guidelines decision.
It was a question I was going to ask as well,
but I was worried about running out of time.
So I hope that Edison can answer those questions.
Thanks, Melissa.
Melissa: We'll reiterate any of those questions
'cause I know I covered a lot of ground there.
-: Okay, I'm going to parse these up,
but that might be the most efficient way to do it,
so we're not playing tag team here.
I will note that we commented on
our access essential need customers and made reference to,
again, one adding specialist
on the PSPS incident management team.
And I know there's a lot more to it than that, of course,
and then participating in the Statewide Advisory Council
to help us understand,
and we're working a number different levels
to help understand the needs of our AFN customers,
and also frankly, the scope of our AFN customers.
I'll ask Marc in a moment to elaborate on that.
You'll have some more detail to share.
I do wanna comment before I turn this over to he and Eric,
to answer some of these questions about the consideration
of impact to the community.
You're right, we only cited a few of the conditions
that go into our consideration of a PSPS event,
I wanna make sure that I don't leave you
with the impression that we are not laser-focused
on community safety and public safety
when we execute a PSPS,
it is why the outreach to our County OES,
our State OES, our fire agency partners,
our city and County government representatives,
and the people that we send
to their incident command centers,
and we do staff those with our own people,
during events to make sure we understand
the conditions on the ground.
There are a number of other considerations,
the impact on traffic lights, ingress and egress,
critical needs for firefighters during an event.
These are all things that go into,
and its why the question of a formulaic answer
to a PSPS is so difficult
because there are so many conditions.
And it's why we build this Incident Command System,
and it's why we have a very robust ICS system
with instant commanders.
And again, I fully trained and fully engaged a workforce
that is evaluating these conditions,
but more importantly,
working with our communities to understand the trade offs
that are happening in the event.
Our goal is to increase and enhance public safety
when we do a PSPS event.
We understand that there are trade offs.
Some of these answers are not simple,
but we are absolutely considering the impact of a PSPS.
The fact that garage door openers don't work in PSPS events,
that may a gated communities,
may have difficulty with egress ingress.
These are all things that are going
through the incident commander's minds
as we go through these decision making processes.
So it is very complicated but we do consider those things.
And it's why there's no formulaic response to the PSPS.
Now, I'd like to T the community,
sort of the ASN or elaborate on the ASN,
and the non life threatening customers.
Marc, you may be able to elaborate on that
and the other questions on backup generation
and communications 'cause I think those all
hit the customer dimension
that your team has been focused on.
And Eric, please fill in if there's other things
that you think need to be addressed
to adequately answer the questions.
Marc: Yes sir, thank you, Phil, and thank you,
Melissa Kristine is one of our AFN Advisory Board Members.
She is always making sure that we are thinking about
not just the majority of the population
and how to handle them,
but also folks that are not as populous.
So the first question that I got,
I tried to get all of them
and I'll try to do this rapid fire to get them answered,
identify AFN outreach.
The phase two PSPS decision requires that the IOUs use data
that is one of three households that self identify
to receive in person visits,
receive utility comms in a non standard format,
or self identifying as a person with disability.
First thing with that, we think that's a good start,
we're not sure that's enough,
so we're going above and beyond that,
anyone that identifies to our of our reps,
that they are have access and functional needs support,
we profile those customers now
and start to market to them
and provide information to them about other programs.
So as you observed,
I did say that with the battery backup systems
is for income qualified and critical care customers,
that does not mean we're leaving the non-critical medical
equipment, such as wheelchairs or CPAP machines behind.
We do have a rebate program
where these customers can get battery backups,
clean battery backup systems,
and we will provide a rebate for them.
So the difference between the program is,
in one regard in,
in the first one where they're low income critical care,
we pay for everything a hundred percent upfront,
in the second one,
we're not paying up front
where a customer has to put out money first,
and then we give them rebates for the battery
for their medical equipment,
which will be not non life threatening medical equipment.
In fact, that program is available to any customer
in high fire risk area that needs a battery backup.
So the things that we are doing to identify
additional AFN customers,
and remember the definition of AFN is really large.
As Edison looked at the definition of AFN customers,
roughly 70, a little bit higher than 70%
of all of our customers fit in the AFN definition.
So there's only 30% of our customers that do not.
So we have lots of customers that are in this definition,
but what we're trying to do is make sure we get the right
resources to the right level of customers.
And that's why we do differentiate a little bit.
So we do outreach to customers each year on our programs,
both for care, fairer medical baseline, and critical care,
and so every customer in our service targets those.
We also have dear neighbor letters
that we send to our customers,
every customer will get a dear neighbor letter
whether in a high fire risk or not.
And those programs and opportunities will be identified
for them and will request that they identify to us
if they believe they have a disability
in the home medical device
or any other particular characteristic
that might make them more vulnerable
during events like this.
And then this is how we develop our circuit,
by circuit level customer care plans,
with this type of information.
In addition, we also use Axiom data,
which is third party data
that helps us try to identify areas of information
about customers that we don't already have.
And that also helps us identify
not just the needs for a medical,
but also limited English speaking
and other characteristics like that too,
which can make someone more vulnerable during these events.
So I got, I think to one of the other questions was about
sce.com and language preference.
Today, we or historically we have been doing
language communications and website translations
in seven different languages.
We are moving for wildfire communications
and PSPS communications to 15 languages.
We've been working with my cop both last year and this year
to even get indigenous languages converted in addition.
The comments about folks who have visual limitations
in the website, we are continually looking at every video,
having closed caption, even in other languages.
And in addition to any other functionality
that is WCAG,
compliant WCAG is access guidelines
for customers with disabilities.
And I missed her second question
and I missed her fifth question.
So I'll give it to Eric in case I missed anything.
Or back to Phil.
Erik: I think he answered all that,
I don't have anything else to add.
Melissa: This is Melissa again,
you covered a lot of the questions,
which I very much appreciate.
On the web accessibility,
there's one thing that I pointed out in particular,
are the sample maps that are attached in your appendix,
which have very low color contrast.
And very specifically will not be easy
for someone with low vision to navigate,
so I appreciate your note that you're working to comply
with the WCAG guidelines,
but I think that there are problems with the maps,
at least as far as it made it into your PowerPoint.
And then my other question that didn't really get an answer
is about publicizing your backup generation
and deploying it,
particularly when you said that the batteries
aren't even going to arrive until September
and how you expect to install them in time
for the highest risk period for shut off event.
Marc: Okay, Phil, do you want me to tackle that?
-: Yeah, I do.
Just one, one note about the de-generation we mentioned,
we've spoken about a couple of different generations,
we mentioned the 17 megawatts that's larger scale,
that's not individual residents.
I know Melissa you weren't referring to that,
just to make sure that's a different bucket of generations.
So yeah Marc, why don't you go ahead
to de-generator program please?
Marc: Oh yeah, I'll do that.
And I'll start actually with a sample maps and the contrast,
Melissa, I think that's great feedback,
and we'll take that and see what we can do to improve that
and see how we can make sure it continues
to meet the WCAG requirements.
On the generation, the backup batteries,
as I said earlier, we had roughly 250 batteries already.
The reason that they're not coming in September was twofold.
One was we negotiated an extended warranty,
a three year warranty as opposed to one,
but the second was quite honestly,
our manufacturers got impacted by COVID
in March, April and May, and their production was shut down.
So that's about three weeks from now
that we believe we'll get those batteries
for other critical care customers.
And installation, we hope to get down
before the big wildfire season,
the final 2000 or so customers.
Think that's it.
-: Okay.
Operator I could you please check the line,
we're getting close to our limited time.
All right.
Operator: Thank you, the next speaker is Den Ja Yung.
Your line is open.
Den: Hi, I'm a dependent Canyon resident
and I have two simple questions.
We're a high fire threat district,
we're rural, about 10,000 people and we have no cell towers.
So like paradise, we also have limited access,
like three roads for evacuation.
With no cell towers, we lose power.
Most of us rely on WiFi cell service.
So unlike needing something to be life sustaining,
because it's a breathing machine,
we need to know when to evacuate and which road to take.
And so communications loss can be life threatening.
So I get that you have eight
of these Community Crew Vehicles,
and it would be really nice to know if one of them could
maybe be earmarked for Topanaga,
to bring a cell service perhaps via a satellite tower.
So that's kind of question number one,
can you maybe put that on your to do list?
And number two is one thing that strikes me is,
last year at Woolsey,
Topanga lost all power for 30 hours and it wasn't a PSPS,
but it was because somewhere down the line,
some big thing burned down.
So whether it's PSPS or whether it's because of a fire
during the evacuation period,
we had no way to hear that if you didn't have like some
of us have Tesla backup batteries, but a lot don't.
If you could also institute the thought
that if an area loses power,
they also might need the CCV,
even if it isn't an official PSPS, that's it.
-: Thank you very much.
-: Yes, thank you very much.
I'll respond to that,
by the way I appreciate the suggestions.
I'm very familiar, obviously with Topanga Canyon
and some of the unique features there
that they can deliver challenges.
The events outside of PSPS that you've referenced,
and I do look all those.
Obviously, that's one reason that our system hardening
is so important,
I'm gonna come back to that as one of the mechanisms
that prevents a loss of infrastructure
that causes a loss of power that is not PSPS related.
So, and most of the infrastructure in there
has been rebuilt,
or it has a candidate for a cover conductor,
but hasn't already been done so far.
As far as the additional resources,
I think this is something that our team will take back
and make sure that we're discussing with telcos in terms of,
do we have backup generation there?
I do understand the point of losing communication.
As far as the capability of the Community Crew Vehicles,
I personally hadn't thought of that as an application
for them, but it's something that
we'll ask the team to take a look at.
And I really want to thank you for the feedback today.
Den: Thank you.
-: Okay.
I think we have time for one more caller.
Operator, do we have anybody on the line?
Operator: We do, the last comment comes from John Mahler.
Your line is open.
John: Thank you.
I'm also a former member of the Topanga City County Council,
and I share some of the same sediments of your prior caller,
but I have two slightly different questions.
One with respect to these CRCs that you've identified
and contracted with to date,
you say that you have 40 of them at this time
for the entire Edison service area,
which seems to be a vastly under a smaller number
than necessary to address any significant PSPS event.
Even if it's a localized item.
For instance, from the center of Topanga,
to either of the closest CRCs that are identified,
it would be roughly 33 miles,
but someone would have to travel
just to go to charge a battery.
What is being done, if anything
to identify additional CRCs that are closer
to where PSPS are likely to take place?
And the Santa Monica Mountains areas is clearly an area
which over the years is an area that is likely
to have many PSPS events.
And secondly, with respect to Community Crew Vehicles,
if you only have eight of them again,
to supplement the CRCs,
where are they going to be pre-positioned?
How are the pre-positioning locations to be communicated
during a time where there is limited cell availability
for anyone to be able to hear and respond
or to know where those limited resources are?
Those are my questions.
-: Okay, thank you very much John.
I tell you what, I'll start very quickly
with a couple of answers.
And then I think Marc then will have some information
on the CRCs.
On Community Crew vehicles,
the pre-positioning obviously depends on our forecast
of the event.
So, based on what we see coming in,
it will dictate our pre-positioning.
We will move those in advance and in placement,
sometimes days in advance,
depending on how quick could we see the events unfolding.
And by the way, the absence of a CRC
will be one of the things that influences
the placement of those.
On a broad level, I will say, and by the way,
thank you also for your continued partnership.
I know we've Edison has worked with Topanga quite bit
and wanna thank you for the continued partnership
and feedback 'cause this is the only way
we're gonna get better.
But CRC is at 40, we're gonna continue to expand that,
we're expanding as rapidly
as we feel we can get these pulled into the system.
We've targeted areas we think are most important.
Again, to have the CRC is available,
Marc you're in the middle of that ramp up program,
by adjusting your wheelhouse,
so why don't you address that one
a little bit more specifically, please?
Marc: Sure, I'll give about 30 seconds or a minute here.
So just to give you a flavor
of what the CRCs looked like these,
and some cases they're like Sears, a couple of hotels,
but in addition to that,
we're talking about boys and girls clubs, community centers,
we're talking about disability community centers
and other things like that.
We don't have a lot of control over them.
We have been doing negotiations
with over 200 Community Resource Centers all over the place.
We're still negotiating with a hundred of them
and we're trying to place them as much as possible
near areas that are remote, like Topanga Canyon.
But we also are with regard to CCV placement,
our Community Crew Vehicles.
We also are conscious not to place vehicles
or other Community Resource Centers
that would not be able to serve the community
if they got overtaken by a wildfire or did not have power.
So lots of the CRCs, not only do you have to negotiate
that they will be open for you,
you have to negotiate they'll be open for you
for the full hours, eight to 10.
And are they also willing to explore?
Putting in transfer switches
so that we could provide generation and backup power
so that it's very complicated to get these in the right spot
because you don't wanna put them on the same circuit,
you just de-energize,
or you're gonna have to have a backup plan for generation.
So that prolongs the negotiations with the CRCs.
But Mr. Mahler, thank you for your feedback.
We will continue to build out our CRCs
as well as our Community Crew Vehicles.
John: One followup if I might,
one thing that you might take into consideration
and explore is hooking up with either LA County or Caltrans,
both of which have facilities that tend to be proximate
to a variety of places which are in high fire areas
and their facilities ought to be available
for Community Crew Vehicles, if not for CRCs themselves.
Marc: Yes, and we are doing that,
not just with LA County,
but all the counties in our territory.
And like you said, we have been using in this last event,
we use the CCB in the parking lot of one of the CRCs,
was not able to open.
So it became a popup CRC, if you will.
And we are looking to expand the CCV vehicles
so that we can put a resource wherever we need,
I'm sorry, we're a little bit overtime.
-: That's okay, and Mr Mahler,
thank you so much for the input.
John: You're welcome, thank you.
-: Thanks for calling in, appreciate it.
Operator, is there anybody else on the line?
Operator: At the time, I'm showing no further comment.
-: Okay, thank you operator.
No more public on the line,
the public comment period is now closed.
Once again, I wanna thank Mr. Harrington
and your team from Edison
for such a thorough briefing today.
Thank you for allowing us to go a little bit over time
appreciate that,
and let's just hope
that we have a lot fewer PSPS events this year.
And maybe even none.
Thank you very much for your participation to the public.
And thank you, Eric and Daniel for your participation
with my fellow Commissioners,
appreciate your time very, very much.
Thank you all.
Have a very safe and healthy rest of your day.
-: Thank you President Batjer,
thank you all Commissioners,
thank you all.
-: Thank you.