Operator: Welcome
to the California Public Utilities Commission
on this date, Tuesday, August the third, 2021.
President Batjer, you may begin.
-: Thank you very much operator and hello everyone.
Thank you for joining us today for the public briefing
from Southern California Edison company
to update us on its readiness
for public safety power shutoff events this wildfire season.
Today's briefing from SCE is the second in a series
of four public briefings we're holding this week.
Having heard
from San Diego Gas and Electric Company yesterday.
Later today, we will hear
from Pacific Gas and Electric company
and tomorrow we will hear
from Bear Valley Electric, Liberty Utilities
and PacifiCorp.
I'm honored to have joining me today
on the virtual dais representatives
from the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services,
the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
and the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety.
Mark Ghilarducci from OES will be joining us shortly
and we have Chief Berlant who is here with us
from Cal Fire and we have Caroline Thomas Jacobs
from the Office of Energy and Infrastructure Safety,
as well as I'm joined by my fellow Commissioners,
Commissioner Rechtschaffen, Commissioner Guzman Aceves,
Commissioner Shiroma and Commissioner Houck.
So welcome to all of you.
In terms of format, the format for today's briefing.
Following opening remarks from the dais
SCE's Executive Vice President for Operations,
Steve Powell will provide an overview of SCE's state
of preparedness for PSPS events this wildfire season,
we will then move on to discussion and Q&A
with the Commissioners and panelists on the dais
followed by public comment.
We are scheduled to conclude by 12 noon.
For the public comment portion of the day, which will begin
at 11:05 approximately if you wish to make a public comment,
please dial into 1-800-857-1917.
Enter pass code 72183884#
Let me repeat that.
I think I missed a digit.
Enter pass code 7218384# and press *1.
You'll be placed into a queue
and the operator will take your name and organization.
There will be a delay from the time you press *1
to the time the operator asks 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
and we will provide two minutes for each speaker.
Let me repeat that.
We will provide two minutes for each speaker.
I will keep my opening remarks brief so that the majority
of our time today can be used to ensure the public is able
to hear from SCE on their state of preparedness
but I hope you will indulge me
as I cover a few topics of importance.
The acceleration of climate change
has caused our wildfire season to start earlier
and end later.
2020 into early 2021 was a very long fire season
and Californians experienced a significant number
of power shutoffs by their utilities.
Up until mid January the majority utilities were continuing
to call power shutoff events.
Notably SCE called its most recent power shutoff event
on June 14th this year, last month, month and a half
though no customers were ultimately de-energized.
This year there have been already over 5,600 fires
that have burned nearly half a million acres
and damaged or destroyed over 320 structures in California
and it is only the beginning of August.
We are in the midst of a long and difficult wildfire season.
While the legislature, our sister agencies
and the CPUC are driving the utilities to plan for
and execute approaches to reduce the risk of utility caused
by wildfires through better weather forecasting,
grid hardening and vegetation management,
one of the tools that is available to the utilities is
to shut off power to customers.
The consequences of being without power
to families who are working and learning from home
to the state's most vulnerable people,
to the critical facilities supporting our communities
are not merely questions of inconvenience,
they are vital questions of safety, security,
productivity and comfort.
The impacts on people's lives
of having their power shut off cannot be overstated,
which is why PSPS must always be a measure of last resort.
SCE and other utilities have the obligation
to manage their grids responsibly
and they have the obligation to keep the safety
and well-being of their customers as their highest priority.
SCE's haphazardly implemented PSPS events
of last fall cannot be repeated.
Edison's initiated 16 PSPS events
between May and December of 2020.
The majority of the events were in November and December,
including during two major holidays
and I want to emphasize one was Thanksgiving morning.
Coming out of this we ordered a corrective action plan
for Edison to address its various problems with a level
of transparency around PSPS decision-making,
inadequate notification to impacted customers,
poor coordination and communication with state
and local governments, shortcomings in identifying
and notifying the medical baseline
and access and functional needs customers
and deficient PSPS post-event reporting to the Commission.
A notification, only 20%
of the customers Edison gave advanced notices to
during the 2020 wildfire season were affected
by the PSPS event.
While we want to have as few customers de-energized
as possible, there's something wrong
with this planning approach.
If you are consistently putting large numbers of customers
on notice and nothing happens.
There were also too many instances
of no notice de-energization.
The one I mentioned about Thanksgiving morning being one.
It was noticed, but it was notice
for a very different time than it actually occurred.
When SCE turned off the power
without giving customers prior notice,
this means customers are unable to plan
and prepare being without power.
CPUC staff and the staff at our sister agencies,
Cal OES, Cal Fire
and OEIS have spent countless hours meeting
with SCE this year,
ensuring they're meeting their commitments
under their PSPS corrective action plan,
in addition to the two public meetings
earlier this year, specifically on how SCE will improve
its execution of PSPS events this year.
Given the issues we saw last year,
today, I am particularly interested to hear
from SCE about their progress
in improving customer notification with special focus
on vulnerable customers
and access and functional needs communities.
Specifically how will Edison ensure
that numerous customers don't receive notifications
that a PSPS will occur if they won't ultimately lose power.
The Commission also continues
to have serious concerns with the pace
at which Edison has been deploying backup power
to help vulnerable customers cope with PSPS events
and expect to see SCE to explain their efforts
to ramp up that program.
I also expect SCE to address
more broadly how they will mitigate impacts
of power shutoffs on people who rely on electricity
to maintain necessary life functions,
including for durable medical equipment
and assistive technology.
This is the second year
we have required these public briefings.
With more maturity, I'm expecting more detail,
thoughtfulness and accountability in Edison's presentation.
We need specifics on where you have improved,
where you are lagging,
where you are focusing your resources and priorities.
As I've said many times before,
the utilities will be judged by their outcomes
not by their plans.
I will now turn to our representatives from Cal OES
and Cal Fire and OEIS if you have any opening remarks
that you might have.
So first I will turn, I've not seen Mark Ghilarducci on yet
but first I will turn to Chief Berlant
and then to Caroline, if you have any opening remarks.
-: Yeah, thank you.
Good morning, President Batjer and gang.
Thank you again for including Cal Fire in these briefings.
It's very helpful for us.
Obviously, the impacts of PSPS
really do have a ripple effect on the fire service
and on our ability to respond.
The 2020 wildfire season is obviously off to a busy start.
As you mentioned already, having PSPSs
in Southern California in June or at least potential ones,
I think really solidifies the change
in the earlier fire seasons that you mentioned.
I somewhat feel like I'm repeating myself these days
from what I said last year, but here we are, again,
already experiencing more wildfires for this time
of year than we did the previous year
and we already know what the 2020 fire season turned out
to be, an incredibly destructive one.
This year, nearly 89% of California is under extreme
and exceptional drought conditions
and that is absolutely playing in
into our overall fire conditions.
I just note that already this year we've responded
to just under 6,000 wildfires across California
that have burned over 500,000 acres.
This is an increase from even last year
for the same time period, more wildfires, more acres burned
and so I think this discussion today, very important.
I look forward to hearing the improvements
that SoCal Edison has made into its PSPS decision making
as well as the progress that you've made
into your required vegetation management
and the infrastructure hardening.
These two steps that should be the primary focus
to get us out of the need for PSPS.
So President Batjer,
again, appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning
and looking forward to the presentation.
-: [President Batjer] Thank you very much chief
and Director Thomas Jacobs, please,
if you have any opening remarks.
-: Yeah, thank you, President Batjer.
I really appreciate the opportunity to be here
with you all and hear from Edison.
I certainly concur with all the remarks that both you
and Chief Berlant have opened with.
Our particular focus is really honing in
on how Edison is improving their decision-making
and accuracy with making the decision to call PSPS
as you mentioned.
Deeply concerned with last year with the number of sort
of false positives and false negatives
in terms of the events because it's disruptive for customers
on both sides of that equation.
And again, appreciate having the chance to be here
and hear their progress and ask questions.
Appreciate it, thank you.
Back to you.
-: Thank you very much Caroline.
I'll now turn to my fellow Commissioners and I can't see all
of you in how my screen is displaying so please speak up
if you have any opening remarks this morning.
-: This is Commissioner Houck,
just briefly again, I wanna thank you President Batjer
for your leadership on this important issue
and our staff, Executive Director Rachel Peterson
Lee Palmer and Anthony Noll and their team
for coordinating this and our sister agencies for joining.
I'm looking forward to listening and learning
from Southern California Edison
regarding this year's events.
I do have a conflict at 10 o'clock,
so I will be leaving for a portion of the workshop at 10
but will be back for 11.
So I just wanted to let everybody know that
and again, look forward to hearing the information today.
-: Great, that's super.
Any other Commissioners at this time
and Director Ghilarducci of the Governor's Office
of Emergency Services has joined us.
Mark, would you like to make any quick opening remarks?
-: Sure, great.
Can you hear me okay? -: Yeah, we can Mark
and we can see you as well. -: All right, great.
Well, good morning everyone.
Thanks for the opportunity to again, be with you
and to the CPUC and President Batjer
for pulling these briefings together.
I think they're very valuable for everyone
and allows us to at least continue to the discussion
on how we can continue to make this a safer state.
I'll start off by just saying that in general, we have seen
that there has been improvement in performances
from the IOUs from the 2019 PSPS season
and the 2020 PSPS events.
There have been improvements with regards to,
I always call them incremental improvements that,
despite worsening weather conditions
and the greater quantities of wildfires,
I think people are continuing to
and IOUs are continuing to work to make progress.
Communications has improved.
Generally, IOUs have been actively engaged with IOES
and the State Warning Center to improve their compliance
to the notification process
and we do appreciate the collaboration and input
from the IOUs in improving and refining the PSPS process
as challenging as it is in recent revisions
of the PSPS standard operating guide.
However, and it's important that we continue
to address these challenges despite the engagement
with Southern California Edison and the work
that they are doing, there does continue
to be some significant challenges and inconsistencies
in the ability to provide the detailed,
timely notification of power outages.
Specifically that includes transparency
of PSPS decision-making process.
We have seen confusion, inconsistency, inaccuracies
over the course of the last year.
Execution with the notification process itself,
coordination and communication with state
and local governments and identification notification
of medical baseline
and access and functional needs customers
and really the quality of the PSPS post-event reports.
This briefing with SCE provides us another opportunity
to get together and continue to discuss how we can continue
to refine and improve and how to get it straight.
This can no longer just be a discussion full of promises
but really how we can come together
to really put some real meat on the bones
and be able to address this.
It's also important to note that PSPS events continue
to need to be an action of last resort, not first resort
and so the work that the utility is doing all of these,
what I call non, these mitigative actions,
non PSPS actual actions of coordination and communication,
being able to effectively work with the state
and local partners,
be able to communicate effectively with the public
and partner with them are very, very, very important.
So again, we stand ready to continue to work
with the utilities and the Southern California Edison 24/7
to ensure that the notifications are timely and thorough
and continue to wanna work with the utility to make sure
that they're best they can be in this particular space.
Again I wanna thank the utility for their efforts
and again, President Batjer and the CPUC
for today's opportunity, thanks.
-: Thank you very much Director Ghilarducci.
Appreciate those very helpful remarks
and I do now want to turn to SCE for their presentation
and we will be hearing from Steve Powell,
executive vice president of operations at SCE.
Mr. Powell, I think you can tell
by our opening remarks, we are all very much looking forward
to a very informative update from last year's presentation
from Edison.
So thank you very much for being here today
and we look forward to your presentation.
Please go ahead Mr. Powell.
-: Thank you very much.
President Batjer, Commissioners, Shiroma, Houck,
Rechtschaffen and Guzman Aceves,
Director Thomas Jacobs, Director Ghilarducci
and Chief Berlant and really to our customers
and community members, good morning
and thank you for having us here today.
So as President Batjer mentioned, I'm Steve Powell,
executive vice president of operations
at Southern California Edison.
Joining me today are a few
of our dedicated PSPS readiness leaders that have been
in the bi-weekly and monthly update meetings
to the Commission.
Ranbir Sekhon, director of PSPS readiness,
Terry Ohanian, director of expedited grid hardening
and Jessica Lim,
our principal manager of customer programs and services.
It will be no surprise to anyone to hear
that we don't have good news to report
from our fire scientists and meteorologists
on the fire season.
Along with drought conditions we're facing near or
at record dry fuel and elevated risk of wildfire
and Chief Berlant mentioned a significant amount
of fires already in the season.
Our first priority as a company is to keep our communities
and our residents safe.
Public safety power shutoffs continue to be a tool
that we must use sparingly when hazardous conditions exist
as we make our grid more resilient to the increasing threat
from climate driven wildfires.
Our commitment is to execute PSPS more effectively
while also reducing its frequency.
We've made a lot of improvements already
and we'll be ready for peak season.
When we came before you for the PSPS hearing on January 26th
the level of frustration and anger was really hard to hear.
Customers told us that we are cavalier in our execution,
you here told us that we were tactless
in the way we approached it and showed a lack
of concern for our customer's needs.
We left them in the dark on holidays
and while they were home during the pandemic.
Since then we've doubled down, tripled down
on our preparation.
We are hardening our grids to reduce PSPS.
When we have to shut off power we're improving the accuracy,
the transparency and the informativeness
of our notifications and our communications.
We'll improve our performance, not incrementally
but dramatically this season.
Via biweekly updates to staff
and through the today's presentation I hope you can see
that we're on track to improve our PSPS response
for our customers and partners.
And to be clear, we hear you,
being on track is not the ultimate goal either.
As we discussed in January, we're looking at results.
There's no A for effort here.
If you can flip to the next slide, please.
We started with the items you highlighted in your letter
on January 19th and created five broad categories
of actions to address them.
The categories really mirror our key objectives.
To reduce PSPS, to execute PSPS events more effectively
by improving transparency and improving our notifications,
to mitigate the impacts of PSPS through customer programs,
to improve our outreach to partners and customers
and finally to improve
and standardize our post-event reporting.
The action plan that we speak of itself runs,
it's 60 pages, includes over 130 separate deliverables
and we're 78% complete with that
with just a couple of months, six to eight weeks
before the peak season begins for us.
Let's go ahead and flip to the next slide.
Let me start with our grid resiliency efforts.
Grid hardening and circuit segmentation are critical
to reducing our use of PSPS.
We've been able to remove 81,000 customers
from scope to date.
That means that those 81,000 customers won't be considered
for PSPS this season
and we're also significantly reducing PSPS frequency,
duration and scope on what we term,
frequently impacted circuits.
Here, I wanna highlight our covered conductor work.
Covered conductor is our most important mitigation.
It's 1/8 the cost of undergrounding.
It can be deployed much more quickly,
so it makes a difference now.
It'll make a difference for us and our customers this year.
It's been rigorously tested and benchmarked.
In our service area we have
not had a single CPUC reportable ignition
from contact with objects or wired wire contacts
on our fully covered segments.
Those are the two biggest drivers that we have
for ignitions and this allows us
to significantly reduce the impact of PSPS.
Covered conductor also remain one
of the most effective strategies to reducing the need
for PSPS events.
This year we focused a big portion
of our covered conductor installation efforts
on the 72 most frequently impacted circuits
from the past few years.
Using last year's weather as a predictor
with covered conductor
and other mitigation, customer outage time
due to PSPS should be reduced by 70% for those that are
on the frequently impacted circuits.
Terry Ohanian will go into more detail
on our grid resiliency measures in a few minutes.
Moving to event execution,
perhaps the comments we heard from the public speakers
in January and from customers through surveys
and focus groups was
about how our notification process had failed them.
Our notifications were inaccurate, untimely, robotic
and in a comment we can't unhear
when we notified customers to prepare for re-energization,
we quote, "Sounded like Star Trek."
So we rewrote our notifications,
added more actionable content and rethought the cadence.
The biggest lift in this area,
however, will not be seen directly by customers.
We've had to install a new automated system
that will integrate all of our PSPS data
so we can improve our performance.
Customer should see the results in improved accuracy
and timeliness in the notification information
that we share with them.
We've also taken steps to increase the precision
of our pre-event weather forecasting,
which will reduce over notification as well
as under notification in the prevent phase.
Our goal is always
to only de-energize those customers we have to shut off
for safety while keeping power on
for as many customers as possible.
Yes, how are the efforts we keep
to keep our customers energized
like switching customers off of impacted circuits
and de-energizing the circuit segment instead
of the whole circuit level will continue to contribute
to more customers being notified
than actually de-energized,
although with these improved weather forecasts
and other things, other steps we've taken, we believe
that we've shrunk that gap significantly.
Ranbir Sekhon will describe these efforts a little further.
We heard loud and clear in January that we need to do more
to mitigate the impact of PSPS on our customers.
In particular, we were directed to increase results
from our backup battery efforts.
We're pleased to share
that we've expanded our critical care backup program
to include all eligible medical baseline customers
and are on track by early October
to provide more than 5,000 batteries benefiting roughly 40%
of the eligible population.
We've also increased eligibility
for in-person notification program for at-risk customers
bi-fold, inviting medical baseline customers
into the program.
Jessica Lim will share more on these and other efforts
and provide the specifics that you're asking for
especially our efforts
around the access and functional needs community.
We're building on the directive to improve our outreach
to communities we've hosted forums with communities
and (indistinct) that have been impacted by PSPS.
We've held multiple meetings and workshops with local,
tribal and state government officials,
public safety leaders, critical infrastructure partners
and other key partners that we have worked with.
These discussions have helped shape one
of our most significant improvements
for our partners to date
the go live of our public safety partner portal last month.
All users will have access to expanded planning information
and maps and emergency management partners will have access
to names and addresses of critical care customers
to help support their planning and outreach during outages.
Our last action plan area is
to improve our post event reporting and we're working
with the Commission and the other IOUs to align
on a standardized template moving forward.
While this is a narrow action it aligns
with the broader focus on ensuring that all
of our communications are clear, transparent
and readily available.
Before I hand off the mic, I wanna bring your attention
to the photo on the top left corner of Terry Gordon.
He is the journeyman lineman installing covered conductor
in the previous slide, as well as here.
For Terry who lives and works in a high fire risk area
and for the rest of our team members,
this is personal work.
Many SCE employees live in high fire risk areas
and we all have families and friends that have been impacted
by these PSPS events and we can switch neighbors
to less impacted circuits when we have to make the decision
to de-energize or when we provide public safety partners
with emergency information.
We undertake all of this work knowing the customers
and communities that are affected
and we wanna do better this year and we're going to.
This is why the team
that I'm representing here today is deeply committed
to these goals.
First and foremost, always keeping our community safe.
Second, reducing the need for PSPS
and third, when we have to shut off the power,
improving our performance so
that our customers are better informed and supported
during these PSPS events.
And before I hand it off
to my colleagues I wanna reiterate one point
that I made upfront.
Today we're talking about the activities,
we're talking about the things we've done over the last four
to six months but we'll be measured
and measuring ourselves based on our results.
We can't predict or control the weather
but we can respond to it in a way that our customers deserve
Now, my colleagues will give a deeper dive
in each of these five key areas of our action plan.
So if there's no questions right now.
I'll say, we'll go ahead and hand it over to Terry Ohanian.
Terry Ohanian: Good morning.
Thank you, Steve
and as Steve just mentioned, this is about results for us
and customers in our high fire risk areas,
they should be seeing those results this year.
In fact, assuming the same weather and fuel conditions
as last year, a significant number
of previously impacted customers should not be seeing PSPS
at all this year.
To make the biggest positive impact on our customers
in 2021, we focused our efforts
on prioritizing grid hardening for circuits
that experience the most PSPS events.
So for us, that was four or more PSPS de-energizations
from 2019 through January of this year.
This resulted in a list of 72 frequently impacted circuits.
We refer to them internally here at FICs.
This became our work scope for expedited grid hardening.
One of the standard electric service outage metrics
that we use is customer minutes of interruption or CMI.
These 72 circuits collectively experienced
nearly 160 million customer minutes of interruption
in 2020 associated with PSPS.
To address this,
we developed four primary mitigation strategies this year
that together we believe will reduce this CMI by 70%.
The first and most critical component,
Steve mentioned this earlier,
we intend to install over 700 miles of covered conductor.
Covered conductor gives us the ability
to raise wind speed threshold to a level
that often prevents shutoff
or if an event does breach the higher thresholds,
the PSPS outage will be shorter in duration.
Covered conductor also has reliability benefits year around.
In many of these communities,
we hear from residents all the time,
the wind blows year around.
So the nice thing about covered conductor is that
it also eliminates many of these unplanned outages
that result from objects, could be mylar balloons,
any manner of things that can come in contact
with our wires.
It'll eliminate these unplanned events as well.
Our progress to date,
so I mentioned the 70% reduction target,
that's what we're striving for.
Thus far we achieved about 30% reduction in CMI already
and so we feel we are well on our way to getting
to the 70% reduction target.
We're planning to complete the bulk of our construction work
in the August and September timeframe
and this is really in order to have all the measures
in place no later than October 1.
That's when we
typically see the peak PSPS activity season begin.
So we've been having bi-weekly progress meetings
and as we've discussed in these meetings
with Commission staff, we've had a number
of construction challenges that emerge.
It's not atypical for this to happen.
We've encountered endangered species along our circuitry,
discovered that wetlands permits are required,
customer access issues and all types of agency permits
and associated restrictions.
Most recently we've had COVID quarantines with some
of our crews so this is what created a little bit
of a resource challenge for us.
And also contract helicopter resources have become scarce.
They've been redeployed to help fight the many fires burning
in the west as we've mentioned earlier.
What's important to note here is that
in cases where we do experience challenges,
we do not give up.
We work hard to clear those challenges
but we also regroup as a team to explore other options,
things that will enable us to preserve some
or most of the customer minutes of interruption benefits.
These are typically temporary solutions.
They might involve the use of a generator,
might have more complex switching programs
associated with them.
If there's a portion of line that we can't cover,
maybe we can put that generator on the other side
of the line, if that portion is covered.
So we are trying to do all we can.
The goal is to do what we can to reduce the need
for PSPS this fall.
I wanna move from covered conductor to some
of the other resiliency tools that we use.
-: Sorry -: Oh yes.
Sorry, go ahead
-: I wanna ask a quick question here.
Clarification question, thank you.
So it says 70%, estimated reduction in PSPS outage,
but it says duration.
Do you mean that the PSPS maybe shorter
or do you mean that it's prevented altogether?
-: Yeah, it actually combines the number
of events and the duration of the event.
So it's really a duration metric.
It's customer minutes of interruption.
If you don't have an event then it contributes nothing
to the duration, so that's actually the most benefit
that you can achieve but when you sum up all of the minutes
that each customer individually experience,
that's what we consider
to be customer minutes of interruption
and so the reduction, that 70% is off that aggregate total.
So we had in total
about 160 million customer minutes of interruption
and we believe we are gonna reduce that number by 70%.
-: And is that on the 72 circuits
or is that that territory wide?
-: That's on the 72 frequently impacted circuits, correct.
And just, I wanna point out, they're not all the same
and with some circuits we were able
to achieve what we believe to be a full mitigation
of 100% reduction in duration,
meaning we have some number last year and we expect
with the tools that we're putting in place
that we wouldn't have had an event
if those mitigation were in place last year.
In other cases, they're incremental improvements
but it is on the frequently impacted circuits,
the 72 circuits.
-: Terry can you just,
Marybel Batjer, can you, I'm sorry.
Commissioner Shiroma were you finished with that question?
-: Yes, thank you President Batjer.
-: Thank you.
I was wondering if you could just give us,
of where these circuits are because we've heard
in our public comments
and I believe you were an attendance, (indistinct)
often heard this or representatives of Edison were,
that there were some areas, for example,
I'll just give you an example, Simi Valley being among them
and there were some other communities too,
testified before us more than once actually.
Are those circuits among the 72?
Could you just give us a geographical sense
of where these circuits are?
-: Yeah, so there is quite a number of circuits in and around
and near the Simi Valley area where the winds tend
to be quite strong.
I mean, obviously these are areas that are prone to PSPS
and so along sort of the 14 Freeway corridor there,
it involves Simi Valley.
Well, that's actually further north
but you've got Santa Clarita.
You've got the community of Acton, Agua Dulce
but also in the eastern portions of our territory,
it's what we call our desert region,
near the 15, 215 freeway corridors,
the winds are pretty heavy in these areas as well.
So most of it tends to be in sort of the northern portions
of our territory and the eastern portions of our territory
and the northern portions include areas like,
Malibu, all the way up north
to the Simi Valley area you mentioned and then
up around the Acton, Agua Dulce area,
and then you go, (indistinct)
near our desert communities as well.
-: Okay, thank you. (indistinct)
-: Oh, sorry.
If you wouldn't mind I just want
to add a little more context
around the impact of covered conductor on events
and so on the page you're very focused on 70% reduction
in total minutes of interruption for customers
but it doesn't just reduce the duration of events,
we also will have fewer events
that impacts fewer customers and so that 70% focused
on those customer minutes of interruption
but similarly we'd also likely have
approximately 60% fewer customers
that would experience a PSPS event if you were to look back
at the weather pattern from last year,
as well as nearly a 50% reduction,
just the total number of events.
So there's different ways to cut that information
but it does, it'll be fewer customers impacted per event.
It will be fewer events
and then the overall customer minutes
of interruption will be shorter due to lower duration.
So just by context of the impact on the circuits,
based on weather that we would've seen last year,
if the weather were to repeat.
-: And I can add that you see,
you mentioned the Simi Valley area, (indistinct)
we have a circuit there called the Tapo
and this circuit last year
experienced four PSPS de-energization events.
All 1,370 customers experienced at least one
of those four events.
There was a combined 2.8 million customer minutes
of interruption, so that's our duration metric.
The mitigation plan involves covered conductor,
and exception, some other things,
so 12 miles covered conductor.
If the weather and fuel conditions in 2021 are the same
as 2020 then the raised thresholds
from the covered conductor,
the exception we obtained and the updated switching plans
that we have would result in zero PSPS events.
So we're working hard to try to get,
try to reduce as much as we can,
to do all we can come fall to completely eliminate where
it's possible or significantly reduce the number of events,
customers impacted and the duration of events.
-: Terry, this is Caroline, additional question.
How many circuits outside of the 72?
So what's the delta that's left that is not being,
the threshold is not changing.
You don't have any (indistinct) associated with that.
-: Yeah, just
because they're not a frequently impacted circuit
doesn't mean we aren't working on them.
We just didn't put this additional emphasis
to find all we can.
I mean, part of this was to ensure that we made
as big an impact for those customers
that experienced the most impact
but we're also installing covered conductor
on other circuitry outside of the FICs
and so there's definitely a considerable effort to do that.
I don't have the circuit count.
I can roughly say from a CMI perspective,
60% of the CMI is on the FICs, 40% is on the non-FICs
but many of these non-FICs did not,
they didn't meet that threshold of four
or more PSPS de-energization events,
so they weren't quite as impacted
but we are working on them.
Like I said, just maybe not to the extent that we are
with the FICs, with the frequently impacted circuits.
-: Yeah, President Batjer, this is Daniel.
Can I ask a quick question here?
-: Yeah, please, go.
-: Soon to stop. (indistinct)
Terry, the 70% for estimated reduction,
does it take into account what you guys have noted
as far as 200 out of the 700 miles that you're looking
to harden is in a low to medium confidence
of being completed by the target date?
-: Yeah, so it does factor that into account.
If we were to achieve the 100% execution level,
we would be at around 78% CMI reduction.
So we recognize and we're aware that challenges can emerge
and things can get in the way.
We are fighting for every last CMI.
So I wanna make that clear and we have meetings
almost every week to go over whatever the latest challenges
and they occur on a very regular basis.
The goal is to continue to work to clear
whatever the barrier is.
Sometimes we can't.
So for example, in several of our circuits,
the Arroyo toad has been discovered
and what we're told by our biologists
and environmental personnel is that we cannot work
in those areas until October 20th.
So that's just too late for us,
recognizing PSPS can really begin in earnest in October.
so we are looking for alternative ways
and in one case, there's a small segment of one
of the circuits that is gonna remain uncovered.
It affects one customer but beyond
that circuitry we're gonna put in a generator
and during a PSPS event, so that portion will be covered
so we can generate it.
It's more complicated but we feel we have an obligation
to do what we can to preserve as much of the CMI benefit
as we can but it does account for the fact
that there's likely gonna be some challenges that emerge
that prevent us from accomplishing all the work
by October 1. -: Great, thank you.
It's good to know you're not overestimating a goal
that may not be realistic.
So appreciate that clarification now.
Thank you. -: You're welcome.
I think I was talking about,
were there any other questions?
Okay, so I was talking about some of the other tools
that we use, segmentation of weather stations.
This was really a focus area for us last year
and we're continuing to build upon that this year,
looking for incremental opportunities to expand
as part of our 2021 action plan.
And then beyond these tools, we also look for areas
that we can develop reasonable exceptions to our protocols,
which would enable us to reduce CMI.
So for example, portions of our circuits
that might have crossed a recent burn scar
that may be at a lower risk for a consequential wildfire.
So in areas like these, we were able to
either increase the thresholds to the same level as those,
with circuits with covered conductor
or entirely remove customers from PSPS scope.
So in total, circuit exceptions
and other protocol adjustments have allowed us
to remove 81,000 customers from scope.
Steve mentioned this earlier and having concluded
that these customers will not be de-energized,
we're also removing them from all PSPS notifications.
The idea here is we wanna reduce the frustration
of over notification.
So without, this fall, when PSPS starts up again,
our goal is to also measure the results.
We're saying an expected 70% reduction in duration
but when we do have events,
we're gonna measure the actual outcomes, what happened,
how effective were the plans that we put in place?
I mentioned the Tapo earlier,
the expectation here is identical weather events
should result in no PSPS de-energization.
We can't predict what the weather is gonna be, fall
but we can measure how we do
and that can also help inform us where we may need
to target additional covered conductor
or other mitigations for 2022.
So one last thing I was gonna point out.
We heard this last time at this meeting
and from our various community meetings
to provide information
on the 72 frequently impacted circuits
to our customers and community.
Each of the 72 circuits has
it's own web page showing the work scope,
the intended benefits and progress.
There's also a lookup feature
that lets customers input their address to see
if they're on an impacted circuit
and that information is all available
at sce.com/pspsenhancements.
So that concludes my portion.
If there's no questions, I'll hand it over to Ranbir Sekhon
to talk more about our other mitigations
and our PSPS execution.
-: I just have one quick question
before you do the handoff Terry
and that is how do you notify folks about the information
that's on the website, where they can look up their address?
How widespread is that communication and that information?
Is it in a bill, a flyer that goes with their bill
or how are you communicating to your customers?
Are you just putting it on the website?
(indistinct)
-: I know and I may ask for help here
but we have shared it in our community meetings
and other meetings with elected officials.
So there's awareness around there
and we've been sharing that information
even before we had all the information up
because we wanted to try to get the word out
and I think we've referenced it in some other articles
but I'm not entirely sure,
I'm not sure if someone else on the call knows some
of the other methods that we've used
to communicate -: Terry, Steve.
So this, we actually email it to all
of the impacted customers
and so for all those we have a email address for,
we've been improving our total database of customers
that we have contact info for.
So we directly send them an email with these updates
on the new information that's available
and the tools available on the website
and Jessica Lim can speak more to this when she comes
to talk about our customer notifications and outreach.
-: Okay, I appreciate that.
Jessica Lim: I'll also add that we send letters mailed
to customers as well. -: Good.
So much communicate, communicate, communicate
and repeat, repeat, repeat.
It's the only way you can actually get it done.
-: Well said.
Thank you President Batjer -: Thank you.
-: Yep, thanks Terry for that.
We can move on to the next slide and also just to add on
to what Terry was discussing.
Our duration forecast,
reduction forecast for all the HFRA is 50%
versus the 70% reduction on FICs.
So that's just a fact that addresses the question
that was asked.
For all of HFRA we're expecting to see a 50% reduction
in duration in CMI.
So moving on.
In addition to the grid hardening mitigation discussed
by Terry, our wildfire mitigation plan
also includes other further key activities,
including a high fire risk inspection program.
As part of our summer readiness activities,
we have accelerated inspections in areas most vulnerable
to PSPS to reduce the kind of repair issues
that could otherwise potentially lower thresholds for PSPS.
Our inspection program uses both ground and aerial programs
to create a 360 degree view of our assets
and you can see in the photo of the drone to the right.
As of July 30th, we are ahead of plan
for our ground-based inspections and on track
for our aerial-based inspections for 2021.
We also use infrared and Corona inspection
to detect deterioration on lines
and connection points that are not visible
with the naked eye and we have met our goals.
We expect 50% of those circuits located
in our HFRA.
These inspections are highly effective.
SCE began its high fire risk inspection program in 2019
and we have found 66% fewer conditions requiring mitigation
on the same structures year over year.
Any questions here before I move on to the next slide?
-: I do have a question. -: Sure
Woman: Commissioner Rechtschaffen
-: No, I'm sorry.
Yeah, what is an area of concern exactly?
How are you defining that?
-: So the areas of concern are something
that we look at each year,
and these are areas where we might have no fire history.
So there haven't been any recent fires.
So there's a moderate dry brush in that area.
There's other weather data indicating
that this area could propagate a very large fire.
So those are how we identify our areas of concerns.
Our fire science team looks at all of our historical data.
This year, we identified about 15 areas of concern
and these are areas where we are more focused on,
doing additional inspections,
doing additional remediation and making sure
that we're prepared for our PSPS season.
So it's part of our summer readiness activities.
-: Thank you.
-: I have a question.
So Ranbir, you said 66% reduction
in your findings from the inspections.
What are the actual numbers of the findings?
-: I don't have that information available to me right now
and just keep, I got it.
-: Yeah director,
I don't have the number available right now,
maybe we can get it during the call and put it back.
Generally, we're doing 150
to 200,000 inspections each season.
The find rates have dropped over time.
I believe the find rates are below 5% now
but we're still talking about a few tens of thousands
of findings.
Now those range from our priority ones,
which are the ones that we have to go out
and make safe right away and have them within 72 hours
and those are a very small number in the hundreds,
I believe.
The priority twos are a large chunk and those are the ones
that generally need to be completed
within the next six months or so
and there's a whole lot of priority threes
that have five years to complete
and so it gives you a sense of the order of magnitude.
We'll see if we can get the specific numbers on the number
of findings we're talking about here.
-: Okay, thank you.
-: Okay, so let's move on to the next slide.
So our vegetation management activities are
also significantly contribute to reductions in both wildfire
and PSPS risk.
Vegetation, such as palm fronds
and branches regularly become airborne
during windstorms and can present real wildfire risk.
For example, airborne vegetation
may contact bare electrical wire, ignite and fall
to the ground or branches from nearby trees could break off
and fall onto our lines in windy conditions.
Therefore vegetation management continues to be one
of our primary mitigation measures.
We know that these efforts are effective.
Where SCE has experienced expanded
vegetation clearance instances
and removed trees that could fall
into its lines, there have been 50% fewer tree
or vegetation course faults than the historic average
After we identified that palms caused approximately three
and a half times more interruptions
than the next most frequent tree type,
we introduced our palm program.
Palms are very fast growing, require more frequent trimming,
in heavy winds their fronds sway dramatically
and dead fronds can easily detach from the mainstem
and drop into it or fly into electrical lines.
Vegetation is not the only source of debris
that can contact our lines.
We often see mylar balloons and other objects blow
into our lines during windstorms, for example
tops and last year even a trampoline.
This is why vegetation management
in of itself is not a replacement strategy for PSPS.
Any questions here before I move on to the next slide.
Woman: Would you repeat that last sentence?
I'm not sure I understood it.
That vegetation management is not?
Or would you finish the sentence?
-: Sure, what I said was that,
vegetation is not the only source of debris
that can contact our lines.
So we often see many other types of debris
such as mylar balloons or objects that are flown into
and hit our lines for example, tops,
last year we even saw a trampoline, I mentioned
and so this is why vegetation management is not
in of itself a replacement strategy for PSPS
So just because we've trimmed trees
and we've removed vegetation from our, the rights of ways
it doesn't mean that we can stop using PSPS as a tool
of last resort because of many other debris
that could fly into our lines.
Woman: Okay, thank you for the explanation,
for the repeat, thank you. -: Thank you.
(indistinct) no other questions,
let's move on to the next slide.
So we know that transparency around that decision making
and thresholds for activation
and de-energization are important issues
for this Commission, our customers and our partners.
To prepare for the 2021 fire season we have looked
at both refining these decisions as we (indistinct)
in a grid and providing more information
about how we have come to these decisions.
PSPS decisions are based on quantitative analysis
while accounting for qualitative factors, such as
for fire (indistinct) and emergency management impacts.
The fire potential index or FPI is the formula
that estimates fire potential based
on factors which include the live fuel moisture,
the dead fuel moisture, the state of cured grasses
and other environmental characteristics.
So SCE, we currently use an FPI threshold of 12, system-wide
for activation, which was validated by looking
at over 25 years of historical fires.
However, we are evaluating
whether we can set FPI threshold separately for each
of our climate zones in our service area,
based on a more granular review
of historical fire activity.
And just to add some context here,
within our territory we have 11 fire climate zones
and about six of them are in a high fire area.
So we were talking about looking
at updating our thresholds
on six of those high fire climate zones.
This change would allow us to increase FPI threshold
for many circuits.
We plan to provide an update to the Commission
as part of our bi-weekly action plan updates
in the coming weeks.
We are in the works right now to finalize that proposal
and we will be sharing it with the Commission
in the coming weeks.
I will turn to wind speeds.
As a general rule SCE's wind speed threshold
for activating the PSPS protocol are set at the lower
of the 99% of wind speeds for that local area
or of the circuit
or the National Weather Service wind advisory level,
which is 31 miles per hour sustained
and 46 miles per hour gust.
The national weather service cap represents the wind speed
at which the National Weather Service has determined
the debris can become airborne.
And reiterating from the previous slide,
as much as we can prune and remediate vegetation
in our rights of ways, we cannot protect our lines
from all debris.
Again, we don't see a lot of trampolines but we do see a lot
of tops and other debris whenever we have extreme winds.
Fortunately, results show
that covered conductors does protect our lines
on fully covered segments if they can be isolated
from non-covered segments.
For covered circuits,
we typically will be increasing the wind speed threshold
for activation
to the National Weather Service high wind warning level
of 40 miles per hour sustained with 58 miles per hour gusts.
These are the wind speed values
where the National Weather Service has determined
that infrastructure damage may occur
and when there is an increased threat from tree
or branches breaking off and becoming airborne,
striking out equipment.
As Terry mentioned before, by increasing our threshold,
we will reach these higher wind speeds much later
and the events should typically end earlier
for customers on our circuits.
One issue that has come up a lot
for scrutiny is our de-energization protocols.
In large events
we cannot de-energize every circuit simultaneously
and we do not want circuits crossing the threshold
into unsafe wind speeds,
therefore we use a prioritization framework
to differentiate between this.
Circuits that would have a higher likelihood
to contribute to a significant wildfire are de-energized
before other less risky circuits.
All of this information
that I've just shared has been a focused effort for us
to increase transparency.
We have laid out our decision-making process
in a technical paper and adapted that into a fact sheet.
Both of these are available at the web address at the bottom
of this page and as we refine
that FPI we will provide a revision to this technical paper
to clarify this change.
We've shared this technical paper in our community meetings
and in ,our engagements and we continue to share it
whenever we have contacts with our customers,
but this information is available for them to look at.
Any questions on this slide?
-: Ranbir, do you post in real time your determination
of what the fire potential index is
or where wind speeds are?
-: We don't post that. (indistinct)
-: Do you share that
with the other local emergency management officials?
-: Yeah, so I'm gonna be talking
about our public safety partner portal
in a minute where we do post a lot of information
and a lot of information is available
to our public safety partners
and critical infrastructure customers
but from a general awareness for the public we are working
towards being able to post a five-day forecast
and a FPI forecast on our website.
That's something that's gonna be coming later on
in the year, probably by year end or early in 2022.
-: Is there any reason you can't post this information
as you develop it in real time to the public?
-: Like I said, that is something that we are trying to do
so there is some backend work that we need to do to be able
to post it real-time as we are developing the forecast.
So the forecast that we do are done twice a day.
So as we have those forecasts available, we will be sharing
that information on our website once we've got
that constructed and available for public consumption.
-: [President Batjer] Ranbir, I have a quick question too
about wind speeds.
Have you guys reviewed all of the PSPSs that you called,
literally that you activated, not just all the notifications
that you gave but the actual call
and what the wind speed was at that time?
I remember one in particular,
I think Director Ghilarducci is gonna remember this too
in the Santa Barbara PSPS,
where our information was much different,
that wind speeds at a sustained amount were far less
than 31 miles per hour however, you all called the PSPS
and I believe in the same, not shared territory
but you are in a nexus with PG&E
and they did not have a sustained miles an hour of wind
that you all or,
we were a little bit perplexed why it was called.
I just wondered if you had looked back to last year in terms
of lessons learned and what you've done in comparison
or any corrective actions on making sure that you really are
in a sustained wind situation of 31 miles an hour.
-: Yeah, so we regularly,
in our events are monitoring wind speeds
from weather stations and our mobile weather stations
and in all cases where we are forecasting
to exceed our threshold that I described previously,
we did hit the gust threshold
and de-energization threshold prioritized for that risk.
So we may not have been in the sustain.
So remember, there's two categories that we have,
the sustained and then the gust
and both of those are extremely important
because gusts can cause debris to start moving around
and so whenever we have looked at our history,
we have seen that we have breached those gust thresholds
when we have de-energized a circuit.
-: Yeah and Ranbir, maybe I could add
on a little bit as well.
As we look back at the, it wasn't just last year
but prior years, we are looking
to see when did we de-energize relative
to those thresholds.
I'd say the standard or the number
that's often used are those 31 mile per hour sustained
and 46 gust.
There's a number of circuits where the thresholds are lower
and the threshold may be lower for a number of factors.
We look at historically the outages that,
the wind-driven outages that occurred on circuits
and we do have some circuits
where we typically get a lot more outages
at lower wind speeds than those 31, 46
and we've taken that into account in some of our thresholds
but now looking back at them,
that's where we're really trying to target our efforts
to make sure we can harden those circuits,
clear them so we can raise the threshold
so we know they will stand higher wind speeds.
So we have looked at that.
We do know, the targeted or the set threshold we have
on some circuits last year were lower and so some were
in the 20s and certain situations where we had large events
and had to de-energize a lot of circuits,
they were getting de-energized
at relatively low wind speeds and largely it was because
of the conditions of those that we've seen on those circuits
in the past but that's exactly
where we would go target our grid hardening
and drive those improvements.
So that's part of the action learning that we did
from last year that's driven a lot
of the actions we've taken this year.
-: Thanks Steven.
One of the other things.
-: Can I ask a (indistinct) on that?
Sorry Ranbir, maybe you're gonna address this
but if you could,
are you gonna eliminate the historical threshold
once you've gone covered conductor?
-: So we are gonna be talking about that in the next slide.
So what I talked about here is
once we've installed covered conductor,
we do raise the thresholds to the higher values.
So we don't use that 31, 46 anymore.
We use the 40, 58
and so once covered conductor is installed,
the threshold does increase for those covered segments
and that results in less PSPS activations
and less notifications for customers.
-: Right, so do you also eliminate the historical threshold
because currently you have it as an or,
as Steven just described.
-: Yeah, so you're talking about
if there's a localized issue, yes.
So that's part of the review process that we go through.
So when we look at that circuit, once it's covered,
we do look at whether now, basically being covered
and based on the data that we have available,
can we increase it to the higher threshold
even if there was a 99 percentile that was lower.
-: The answer to that is correct.
Once we've fully covered the circuit and validated
that it's covered, the historic wind speed analysis,
no longer applies to that circuit
and instead it's strictly being used on the 40, 58.
We'll continue to evaluate the performance of those circuits
to see if we need to adjust those further
and we take into account conditions that exist.
So if we go out and do a pre-patrol on circuits
and we see some issues on the circuit, we may need
to lower those slightly but we're no longer considering
that 99% on historic wind speed for the circuit set
that are still bare wire.
-: Okay, thank you. (indistinct)
-: Ranbir, I have a question
while we're talking about the wind speed thresholds.
Two questions.
One is, the metrics that you're using this year
for fully covered even the bare wire,
is that different from last year
or are these the exact same metrics?
And then the second part of my question is,
do you have any plans to upgrade your weather station so
that your weather data is being reported more frequently
than what you currently have?
I'm trying to think, we've been seeing that some
of the other utilities providing data
as frequently as every 30 seconds.
So just curious on those two elements related to wind.
-: Yeah, so the threshold themselves are the same
as we had last year, the 31, 46 and the 40, 58,
those are the same thresholds for bear and covered
but yes, we are focus on improving the granularity
of our weather forecast
and installing more local weather stations
for more actual data coming in
and so I'll be talking about that on the next slide,
in terms of the improvements that we're making.
So that is a big focus for us
and I think this year we've installed
200 new weather stations because that has been a challenge
because if we don't have a weather station close
to a circuit, we have to use the next available proxy
and that's sometimes has been the cause
of a particular circuit being put onto a watch list,
a notification list
because we didn't have better weather data,
so we are looking at that
and we are deploying more weather stations
to combat that issue.
-: But just to be clear and if it's gonna be the next slide,
I didn't see that
but more doesn't necessarily mean more frequent,
so are all 200 additional weather stations going
to provide you more frequent weather data
and that those more frequent weather inputs will be included
into this decision-making.
-: Yes, I mean, every weather station
that we deploy will provide us actual weather conditions
at that location on a real-time basis coming
into our systems and then we are making updates
on our modeling to go from a two kilometer forecast
to a one kilometer forecast.
-: And to maybe, just directly to the question, sorry,
directly to the question of the frequency
that the data pulls down,
we currently are at 10 minute intervals
so not a 30 second interval that I think you heard
from San Diego.
We're working with our vendors to evaluate that,
what it would take to get to something more frequent than
that 10 minute interval but we don't currently have a plan
to enhance that at the moment, the focus has been
on the better granularity
as opposed to that higher frequency.
-: Thank you. -: Yep.
-: (indistinct), can I ask you a quick question
on that as well.
Do you ever follow up with,
once you get the data and the technology with actually boots
on the ground to go and verify what's actually happening
in that particular environment to make,
sort of affirm what you're seeing before you make a decision
on a PSPS? -: Absolutely.
So part of our PSPS protocols include both pre-patrols
and post-patrols and live field observations.
So as soon as we put a circuit into our period of concern
on our monitored circuit list, we start that process
of doing pre-patrols on that circuit.
If we don't have weather stations available
in that area, we have teams go out
with handheld weather stations to get more accurate data
and then we do these live field observations to make sure
that our forecast,
we're actually seeing what our forecast are telling us
in the field.
-: Okay, I appreciate that.
I do know the topic that President Batjer is bringing up.
It was very confusing, I think on that one
both from the standpoint
of the way the fire service was looking at that event.
You're telling us now that it was really you're looking
at the gusts that were occurring
and there was some complexities with PG&E not moving forward
with a similar sort of assessment.
So anyway, I appreciate the clarity,
clarification on that.
I know that some of these,
there's nothing linear about this really
and it can be complex. -: Yep.
Many factors to consider
but thank you for the question.
Let's move on to the next slide.
So on this slide we have lined up some of the new tools
that we are using for decision-making
against the high level process flows
so you can see how these improvements
will impact our events.
We understand how much
of a pain point the false positives are for customers,
which is why it will be a focus in the coming season
on addressing state,
on having state of the art forecasting tools,
including two new supercomputers
to help us in our weather modeling.
By providing more precision
and improving our in-house forecasting capabilities,
we will reduce the number of customers de-energized
without prior notification and reduce the variance
between the customers who are notified
of potential de-energization
and the customers who are actually de-energized.
However, as Steve mentioned, we do our forecasting
at the circuit level but our de-energizing
at the circuit segment level and our efforts
to keep customers power on will always produced a delta.
We are frequently asked why we can't just forecast
at the circuit segment level and the weather analogy
that best describes this is to think about other wind events
like hurricanes.
At two or three days out we can forecast
with some certainty what's going to happen
but we cannot do it at the geographic precision
of a circuit segment and that's the challenge that we have
from how we do the notifications
to how we actually do the de-energization.
As we get more accurate,
like for instance, using machine learning
to increase the accuracy of our forecast
by using historical weather station data, we will continue
to narrow this gap.
And to this end,
as well as to provide greater situational awareness
of the outside conditions at the segment level, we have,
as I mentioned before installed
nearly 200 additional weather stations this year.
Any questions around some of those improvements
to our accuracy and weather forecasting.
We've also created a new tool to enhance our evaluation
of the risk of wildfire risk against the risk
of de-energization.
So the quantification of those risks.
This tool quantifies the financial safety
and reliability impact of PSPS
against potential financial safety and the loss
of the impact of a wildfire,
but individual circuits using forecast
in event weather data and conditions.
We've modeled every event, approximately 24 hours in advance
of the period of concern
and we will make these findings available
after the fact in our post-event reporting
and this information will also be used as part
of our de-energization decision-making process
by our instrument commanders.
This year SCE met again
with our local and state emergency management
and public safety agencies to increase their understanding
of PSPS processes and more importantly
to solicit input on our engagement during PSPS events.
We looked at our partners at Cal OES
and other IOUs to standardize
and improve our communication practices
with the California State Warning Center.
We also developed a post-event survey that will be sent out
to all public safety partners following each event
to request feedback on the engagement and communication.
I will close on this slide
by reaffirming our ongoing commitment to partner
with the Safety Enforcement Division
to increase transparency
through our post-event reporting practices in accordance
with the standardized principles
that have been defined by the Commission now.
Any questions on any of the improvements
that we are focused on.
-: Ranbir, I have a quick question
on the last point you've just made
and that was surveying post event.
To whom does that survey go?
Who's responding to that?
-: So the survey goes to all
of our public safety partners following each event.
So any of the entities that were involved
that we engage with as part
of our in-events processes will get the survey to assess
whether the information we provided was complete,
informative and actionable.
-: That would include state partners such as OES.
-: Yes, it would.
-: Okay, and this is new this year.
-: This is new this year.
Yes. -: Okay.
-: Yeah, I would just say that I think that will be valuable.
I still get a lot of incoming during the event
and then post events from local fire chiefs
and emergency managers who are feeling a lack
of communication and the sheriff reacting to the activities,
something that they don't fully understand what's happening.
So I think that will be really good to get that feedback so
that you guys can get a broader sense from them
and collectively as a industry
and then that may maybe, hopefully
from that information you can work
on building better pre-event communications and education
but then during the event, a better way
to push out information to all
of these public safety leaders that are sort of responding
to the events in real time.
-: Yep, absolutely
and just got some information on a fact basis.
We met with all 13 county emergency management agencies
in the HFRA to optimize the comms and the protocols.
So we have met with all of them and we have monthly meetings
with Mike Massone of Cal OES,
the system director of response operations.
So we are getting back feedback and we are incorporating it
into our lessons learned.
-: Yeah, appreciate it, thank you.
-: Okay, moving on to the next part.
(indistinct)
-: Can you just clarify a couple of things you said.
This page shows that you have 61 weather stations
but I think you mentioned 200.
Are these 200 not gonna be integrated
or what's the distinction there.
-: So the distinction that is where we're going
to apply our machine learning algorithms.
So the 61 weather stations are where we plan to produce
and apply our machine learning models.
It's very computationally intensive
so we've identified where the best use of that is,
where to pilot that and
as we get good results, we'll plan to expand it
to the other weather stations.
These 61 are areas that have proven
to be difficult to forecast.
The value that we're generating
from applying the machine learning methodology.
-: Okay, so you're integrating those particular stations
for forecasting and these remain,
a 200 additional or is it 139 are stations that are,
how are those being integrated?
-: Yeah, so right now we have
about 1200 weather stations total, system-wide
and so we're incrementally adding to that, the 200
and then from a forecasting accuracy perspective,
we've identified 62 stations where they could benefit
because they're very difficult to forecast,
where they can benefit
from additional machine learning capabilities.
-: And the ones that are not being used for machine learning.
How do you utilize that in real time?
-: So those weather stations provide basic real-time
information to us.
Real-time weather data and information
that comes back every 10 minutes, as Steve mentioned
that help us understand the actual conditions
that are happening at that site, so that location
and then they also basically generate
that historical dataset to improve our forecasting.
-: Go ahead Steve.
-: So all of the stations are used
for real-time situational awareness.
From a forecasting perspective, we also have forecasts
on all of the 1200 plus weather stations that are out there.
There are certain areas that Ranbir mentioned where we find
that the forecast that we get aren't very good
and actually by applying machine learning,
we can improve those quite a bit
and so that's where the 61 is.
Now to Ranbir's point,
as we get better at that, we'll apply that,
we can apply that machine learning across more
and more weather stations to get better at forecasting
and it's those forecasts that's gonna help us
with the customer, the over and under notifications,
so that we're getting more accurate there
but all those stations get used real time
for the decision making on the actual de-energization.
-: Can you all remind me,
getting back to the communications
with the county officials, both the emergency managers
as well as fire officials.
Can you remind me
of the actual exercises you have done this summer
to make sure that your protocols are in place
and are well coordinated
and there's a decent understanding both coming and going
between and among the counties and yourselves.
I know that you did some but not,
I'm really interested in actual exercising
not just tabletops.
-: Yeah, so I actually have one
of our business (indistinct) expert on the line
and I'm gonna hand off to Tom Brady to address
that question because he's been leading that effort.
-: Hey, good afternoon
or actually good morning everyone.
Can you hear me okay?
-: We can hear you and now we can see you.
(chuckles softly)
-: Yeah, yes that.
Camera was focused downwards.
So yes, to respond directly to that question,
we have had seven exercises that we did conduct
between April 16th and June 25th
really to stimulate (indistinct) activation
and de-energization plus re-energization activity.
So to your point, not a tabletop,
real functional exercises,
we did invite our external partners to observe the exercises
that occurred on April 27th and April 28th.
We sent out approximately 280 invitations
to public safety partners, which included local, county
and state agency representatives,
tribal representatives and members
from our access and functional needs
and vulnerable population communities.
We did have 82 total observers who attended,
52 of those were on the April 27th date
and 30 were on the April 28th date.
I will also note as it is a focus of our conversation
that the telcos were invited to these conversations,
that did include AT&T, Verizon Wireless,
Cox Communication,
Charter Communication and Sprint/T-Mobile.
So hopefully that's responded to the question
and I'm available if there's any followups.
-: And Tom, maybe you just add,
we have a pretty large exercise also coming up
on August 19th that a lot of folks will participate in.
So that'll include, (indistinct) PSPS.
-: That's a really good point Steve.
Thanks for the reminder.
That'll be taking place on August 19th
and it's actually based on actual events that happened
in 2020, which included a region-wide heat wave,
which resulted in multiple wildfires, the heat storm,
public safety power shutoff and rotating outages.
So required to respond to multiple lines,
our electrical services incident management team,
our public safety power shutoff incident management team,
et cetera and external partners will be invited
to this exercise as well to both observe and to participate.
-: Thomas, this is Caroline, two questions.
I think I heard you say in terms of the t-comm,
that they were invited.
Can you confirm whether they attended the exercises
and then more broadly for those that were observers
in the exercise, did you guys have a method for them
to be able to provide feedback after the exercise?
-: Yeah, both excellent questions.
So in terms of attendance, AT&T and Cox did attend.
So that answers that question
and then in terms of providing feedback,
we did send out a pre-event survey so
that we can incorporate some of the preferences
of those partners in terms of exercise design and build
and we did also solicit feedback at the end
of the exercise as well.
I think the most salient point of feedback
that we received is how
to best integrate these public safety partners
into the virtual EOC concepts.
So we still have work underway to make sure
that we're providing an immersive
and an intuitive experience for those folks
but overall, I think that the experiences reiterated
how important it was to continue that ongoing dialogue
and engagement with our public safety partners.
-: Director Ghilarducci,
I heard you were about to ask a question.
Did you also have a question?
-: Yeah, I may have missed when he said,
these are tabletop exercises or functional exercises?
-: Yeah, they're functional exercises.
-: Okay, and the one
on the 19th is gonna be a functional exercise as well?
-: Yeah, that's right and we do have participants
and I do believe Cal OES is actually participating
in that exercise with us.
-: Okay, great thanks.
-: Thanks Tom. -: You're welcome.
-: So let's move on to the next slide on notifications.
So we've heard from the Commission and our agency partners,
and also from our customers
that notification were a significant pain point
so in January, this was one of the first areas
of execution that we got to work on.
We started by listening
and asking our customers what they wanted.
We heard a lot about over notification,
but when we asked both residential
and commercial customers directly,
they were clear they did not
simply want fewer notifications,
what they wanted were notifications
that were more informative and more actionable.
We have reduced the number of notifications
that customers will get pre-event from two per day
to one per day by combining data from two weather forecasts
to reduce the number of customers who boomerang
in and out of scope
but at the same time we've added another notification
that we're referring to as a next day notification,
because we also heard from customers who surveyed
that customers who were de-energized felt abandoned
when they were still without power the next morning.
The new notification will provide an update
and provide updated information
about the forecasted end of the event.
Another new notification will let customers know
as soon as we have removed them from scope
for the duration of the event.
So all these changes are driving
towards being more informative and more actionable
for our customers.
As Steve alluded to,
we are also working at (indistinct) language,
replacing de-energization with shutoff
and re-energization with restoration,
but also being more direct with our customers.
For instance, replacing your power may be restored
at any time with the forecasted time for the end
of the event and adding a typical restoration time.
Steve also mentioned some of the new automations
that we've put in place.
These automations will allow data streams to speak
with each other, improving accuracy, timeliness
and tracking of customer data
and experiences during an event.
Customers will see this as fewer missed notifications,
faster notification
and by speeding up our processes, we can be more exact.
For instance, sending imminence now
expected shut off notifications at the segment level,
this will reduce false positives that came
from sending imminent notifications
at the circuit level previously.
This is all helping us improve the accuracy
of our notifications.
On our situational awareness,
notifications which are sent to the public safety partners
and some of our critical infrastructure providers
also got a revamp.
The language is clearer and more precise
and our partners will also be getting one update per day
per event.
We also updated the way we provide circuit information
to our public safety partners.
Both customers and partners are going to benefit
from one significant improvement that is in the works
and will be available by the fourth quarter of this year.
We are adding an address level alert that is not tied
to an account and can be subscribed to
for a specific address such as a homeless shelter
or a address of a family member.
When this goes live, it will replace our zip code alerts,
which were overly broad
and provided seemingly conflicting information.
These were a source of frustration
for both residential users and public safety partners.
As an added benefit,
the address level alerts will allow our telecom customers
to tie specific reps to their PSPS notifications,
addressing a request they had for us to send different types
of notifications to different reps.
So we're seeing a lot of value
from the address level alerts solution
that we will be getting into in the fourth quarter
of this year.
Any questions on this.
-: [President Batjer] For interrupting Ranbir,
but you just said it won't be,
these updates and changes and improvements
that you're making will not go into effect
until the fourth quarter.
-: No, the only thing that's gonna be delivered
in the fourth quarter is the address alerts solution.
All of the other changes on communications,
the adjustments to notifications, the cadence,
those are all in place right now.
So they are all in place for the startup of fire season.
The thing that's taken us a little longer
to deliver is the address alert solution,
which will will come in the fourth quarter of this year.
-: That will be very important.
We did have a lot of complaints
and confusion about use of zip codes.
And when you say fourth quarter,
is that gonna be like October?
Is that gonna be December.
-: Jessica, do you have a timeline?
I think it was September, October timeframe
that it will be coming out.
Jessica Lim: Yeah that's right, late September,
early October is what we're looking at so far.
-: Okay, that's great.
Because obviously the Santa Ana winds begin sooner
and end later as we experienced last year.
-: Yep. -: Okay.
Thank you for that clarification.
-: Any additional questions here?
Okay, let's move on to the next slide.
So working with community leaders, public safety partners
and our critical infrastructure customers, we have designed
and released a new public safety partner portal
for those customers.
The portal is a single destination
for public safety partners
and critical infrastructure customers
to find PSPS information.
Our partners can now conveniently access
pre-event PSPS information
such as potentially impacted circuits, maps
and summaries on potentially impacted customers,
our policies and procedures
as well as sample notifications.
During events partners can access event-specific information
such as a PSPS interactive event map,
which includes outreach areas, the impacted circuits
with estimated restoration times,
locations of our customer resource centers,
our customer crew vehicles,
as well as event-specific files that are downloadable
and those files can contain reports
such as our outage areas, our impacted circuits,
the critical facilities
and identified medical baseline customers,
summaries of our impacted customers
as well as an archive of any inactive past events.
So a lot of information available
on this public safety partner portal.
We currently have 153 registered entities
represented by most of our customers sectors.
This is more than three times greater than the number
of unique customers registered for our (indistinct) service,
which has 42 registered user.
We are continuing to promote the advantage
of using the public portal and expect
to have a much higher level of participation for use
of that portal by the year end.
We've also made enhancements to sce.com/pspspages
for customers with additional enhancements in the works.
In the past, we had separate lookup tools
for different kinds of outages, which were confusing when
for instance, customers might have been in scope
for a PSPS event but then lost power
to a weather related outage.
Last month, we launched a consolidated lookup tool
so customers can better understand the status
of any given outage just by simply entering their address.
In October, we will be combining our outreach maps
for further enhancing our outreach information.
This will help solve issues we had previously
where customers who had lost power would still appear
to be under consideration for a PSPS outage.
We also corrected what has been a significant source
of frustration.
Our worst case online estimated restoration times or ERT.
Now, when customers click on a circuit,
they will see the end of the period of concern
plus an advisory that typical restoration takes
between three and eight hours.
So that's a big improvement in terms
of actionable information the customers will receive.
On Friday we launched a new webpage
for our access and functional needs population.
This web page provides information on how
to obtain contact information, sign up for alerts
and access information on helpful programs and services.
They include information on independent living centers
and 211, all in one convenient spot.
To speak more about outreach and services provided
to customers I'm gonna turn over to Jessica in a minute.
If there are any questions I can address them now.
-: I do have a couple.
So, I guess it goes to the captain obvious on my part here,
but if the power's out,
people aren't gonna have access technically to a portal
so that's one thing,
that's where the community resource centers
may become more valuable.
I've sort of been monitoring the speed and duration
and sort of quality of the community resource centers
that you guys have been putting in place.
What is the metric
on which you deploy a community resource center?
Is it exactly when the PSPS occurs?
Is it prior to the PSPS occurring
and you've noticed all of the public that
that community resource center is open and operational
and have you gotten feedback from the community
in general that what meets the needs of the community for
that community resource center versus what meets the needs
of utility for that community resource center?
So those are all sort of things around.
I know I get a lot of angst related
to the community resource centers and where and when
and how many and availability.
So maybe you can clarify some of that.
-: Yeah, so Jessica's actually gonna be covering a lot
of that information in her slides,
-: All right.
-: Of the community resource centers.
So if you can hold on and then wait for Jessica to cover it
and address it and then you can ask the question again.
-: Thanks. -: Thank you.
If there's no further questions I can hand
it over to Jessica now.
-: Great, thanks Ranbir.
First I want to say good morning to everyone
and I also wanted to share that like the lineman
that Steve spoke about this morning,
I'm also a customer that's impacted
by a high fire risk area.
So when I'm planning for our customers PSPS experience,
I really put myself in our customer's shoes
and as a customer, I would want to know and be prepared
for our PSPS events and not to hear about PSPS
for the first time when I get a notification.
So we make every effort to inform our customers
before and during fire season on what a PSPS is,
how to prepare and what programs and services are available.
So SCE, oh, I'm sorry.
We can (indistinct) to the next slide, please.
Thank you.
So SCE launched an annual marketing campaign in January
and we used a variety of methods with wide reach
and this year we have increased our focus
on promoting our programs and services.
We created a new digital and print ads
for the medical baseline program and outage alerts
and these messages were also published
in 40 ethnic newspapers and really to reflect the diversity
of Southern California,
our marketing campaign is also delivered
in multiple languages and translated versions are accessible
on our SCE wildfire communications center web page.
We have generated,
since June of this year 410 million impressions
with 34 million coming from our increase
in new medical baseline ads and 15 million
from new ads on customer programs
and what this means is that we have reached our customers
about 37 times in six months
or one time every five days with our messages.
And as a result of this expanded outreach,
our overall awareness metric has increased
almost 10% compared to last year.
And we remain on track
to deliver 1 billion impressions this year.
Are there any questions so far?
-: Yes, I'd like to, if I may please,
and thank you for your presentation and joining us.
Remind me what your critical care population is
that you are communicating with
and that you have regular communications with.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm gonna get into this a little bit more
in our next slide, but I will say that we have registered
in our systems we could tag and reach out directly
to about 2.5 million access and functional needs customers
and then I will get
into our medical baseline population as well.
-: Okay, thank you. -: Sure.
Actually, it's a good time.
If we can go to the next slide please.
All right, so in addition
to the broad based marketing outreach,
we are really focused
on reaching our access and functional needs customers.
Just the criticality of these customers are so important
and I wanna share that I have been attending
the monthly Statewide AFN council meetings
and I really wanna express appreciation
for the members of this council.
These discussions have really challenged us to do more
in this area and by partnering, we have been able
to reach this broader race and population.
We have worked with PG&E, SDG&E and state agencies
to promote the medical baseline program and outage alerts
and we're currently working
with the Hospital Association of Southern California
to reach their network of 185 hospitals and 8,500 people.
The picture that you see here on the slide was a newsletter
that they sent out on Friday, just this past Friday.
I also wanna appreciate our network
of 1600 community-based organizations
that help us share important messages
with their communities.
And this year we've also made it easier for customers
to sign up for the medical baseline program
by enabling physicians to provide an e-signature
on application.
And as of June, we have a 6% increase
in our medical baseline programming enrollment,
which stands out about 110,000 customer accounts.
And I do recognize, while we've made some good strides,
we know we can do even more.
We have established a sub-committee
within the Statewide AFN council to really focus year long
on how we can partner on communications.
And as I mentioned, we have identified
about 2 million customers that we designate as AFN
and at an aggregate level,
we have appended our data geographically
and we use this data for planning during events.
For example, our new PSPS risk assessment tool
includes an AFN index, which takes the safety risk
of our AFN communities
into account when making those de-energization decisions
and we also use this data to take into consideration
of the locations
of where we should take our community resource centers
and community crew vehicles,
because we do have our AFN population mapped out
by our circuits.
And if anyone is curious in terms
of how our numbers worked out,
we do have about 36,000 medical baseline customers
in our high fire risk area
and of that about 6,000 are critical care.
-: [Commissioner Shiroma] Question, Jessica.
Thank you. -: Sure
-: [Commissioner Shiroma] I do want to thank you
for your participation in service
on our low income oversight board on behalf
of the investor owned utilities.
Here's my question.
For the active and functional needs individually,
which covers seniors,
folks from our (indistinct)
and certainly medical baseline critical care,
(indistinct)
for the 72 circuits that were highlighted earlier,
the response for covered conductors,
Is your index, does it show how many,
what percentage of the AFN population reside
within the affected area of those 72 circuits
and does that index feed into the choice.
I know it's based on four PSPSs or more or high
(indistinct)
But maybe what it is is,
do you have a percentage for how many AFN folks live
within those 72 circuit areas?
Jessica Lim: Yeah, thank you, Commissioner Shiroma.
So as I mentioned of our,
about 2.5 million total AFN customers,
as you noted, they are not just
in the disability access and functional needs
but they are spread out, low income, seniors,
those with limited English.
When we look at our data,
we look at of that 2.5 million base
about 500,000 are in a high fire risk area.
-: [Commissioner Shiroma] And the 17 circuits
don't cover the entire high wildfire area, but they focus
risk based on the temperatures of the last couple of years
and where there were PSPSs.
So (indistinct), is subset then that reside
within that scope as a (indistinct).
Jessica Lim: Are there more granny level, right?
Yeah, I don't have the number within the 72 circuits
of our AFN but I'm sure we could figure that out.
-: Okay, and then the dedicated AFN liaison officer
(indistinct) during PSPS events
but is that officer operating year round?
-: Yeah, great question.
So we are going to be formalizing a
dedicated AFN liaison officer role this year to activate
during events and we are gonna be starting with PSPS,
but our goal is to make it year round for all hazards.
-: Okay, thank you. (indistinct)
-: Just to finish.
-: Just a quick follow up and we may have said this,
but you said 2.5 million customers are AFN,
qualified for AFN.
Of those, do you guys have,
have you identified which of those rely on power
to maintain life saving medical devices?
Do you actually know each of those.
-: Yes, great question.
We do.
Within our medical baseline population, we have a subset
that we call critical care
that fits the life sustaining definition
that you just mentioned
and we use a customer care dashboard
during events where we do have the critical care designation
and that stands out within the dashboard.
So then when we're looking at our customer care plans
during events we can see how many customers are
not only AFN by circuit
but how many have life sustaining needs.
-: Okay, good and then how do you address those?
I mean, is there a special outreach for them
or how does that interaction take place?
-: Yeah, so what we do, as I had mentioned,
at the beginning of the year we do make sure
that we get the word out to as many people
in as many channels as possible but when it gets close
to PSPS fire season and even during events,
it's very critical that we reach out to our AFN customers
and so what we are doing as Steve mentioned
in his opening remarks,
this year we're expanding our in-person notifications
to all medical baseline customer, not just those
that are in the life-sustaining category.
So we'll be rolling that out this year
and in case we can't get ahold
of someone, we'll make sure we send someone out to visit
that person's home.
And then I'll be getting into also some new services
that we'll be offering for our AFN customers
and we'll be talking about our new partnership with 211
that will help in this space as well.
-: Great, thanks. -: Sure.
Okay, I think we're ready now to move on to our next slide,
unless there's any more questions.
So this year we're increasing the resources that we provide
to our at-risk customers
and I wanna start off with our backup power program.
We offer a fully subsidized critical care backup battery
and we stepped up our outreach and picked up the pace
for battery deployments to customers this year.
We expanded eligibility
and we also conducted customer surveys
to optimize our outreach materials.
We then contact the customers through direct mail, email,
outbound calling and door-to-door efforts.
So we make multiple attempts to contact customers
by sending first, second and third direct mail letters
and emails as well as repeated phone calls
after each mailing
and President Batjer I really liked the way you said
it this morning, communicate, communicate, repeat, repeat
and that's definitely what we're doing in this case
but we're also partnering
with our community-based organizations
as well as our other broader marketing channels
that I mentioned earlier to increase awareness.
So really it's a full court press here
to get as many customers signed up as possible
and I wanna talk a little bit about our results today.
So as of January through July 31st of this year,
just a few updated numbers that are on this slide here,
but late breaking as of yesterday,
we have deployed for this year 3,817 batteries
and we have 900 more pending delivery
and we expect to deliver about 5,000 batteries
by early October of this year
and we predict for that customer participation
by the end of this year, we'll be in the 40 to 50% range.
(indistinct)
-: Can I ask you a couple of questions about this
and I'm glad you mentioned the 40% range
because Steve had mentioned that
and it confused me a little bit.
I wanted to distinguish between the critical care customers
and the medical baseline customers,
and also the areas that you're targeting.
So this slide says you've expanded it
to all eligible medical baseline customers.
For this category who are you focusing on?
What is your target?
-: Yeah, so.
-: Is there a critical care in all areas
that have been subject to PSPS events?
What is it exactly?
What's the overall target
for providing backup batteries to critical care customers?
-: Yeah, thank you.
So just to clarify,
last year we started with our critical care customers,
which is a subset of medical baseline.
These are the life-sustaining customers
that were mentioned earlier.
So the difference is that this year we expanded beyond
that subset to all eligible medical baseline customers,
which added another 13 or 12,000 customers eligible
and not only do our customers need to be enrolled
in medical baseline, they also need to be enrolled
in either our CARE or FERA rate discount program
and they need to reside in a high fire risk area
or be served by a circuit that connects
through a high fire risk area.
So those variables bring us to the population of 13,000
or so customers that are eligible.
-: And these are customers.
Okay, so you said 36,000,
you have 36,000 medical baseline customers total
in these areas but of those that are CARE or FERA customers,
it's 12 or 13,000?
-: Yes, you can look at it that way.
-: So 12 or 13,000 are eligible,
a smaller subset of critical care customers, correct?
-: And they're still eligible.
-: And they're eligible regardless of income
or just if they're CARE and FERA customers?
-: They would also need to be low-income CARE/FERA.
-: I see.
So you've extended it to all 12 or 13000
and 40% of that is more than 5,000.
So I don't understand.
What is the 40% that you referred to?
-: That's just the number of batteries
that we have deployed divided by that 13,000 eligible base.
-: Okay so you're trying to reach all 12 or 13,000,
is there a special focus on the critical care portion
of the 12 or 13,000 medical baseline customers?
-: Yeah, so I would say that we really had a special focus
on those customers last year and then we,
that was our primary focus
and (indistinct) we've now opened up the lens
to include the more broader medical baseline eligible
for CARE/FERA.
So we're still focused on the critical care customers.
-: Okay, and then one last question.
I gather that you've extended eligibility
to this entire universe.
Some people don't respond.
So that in part is responsible for the lower number
of batteries that are actually deployed
but other people who've responded
with interest, who haven't gotten batteries
because you haven't procured enough batteries yet,
that's been a problem in the past.
In other words,
is everyone who responds favorably been provided
with a battery to date and if not, what is the difference
between those who've requested it
and those who've actually gotten it?
-: Yeah, we're in a different predicament
than we were last year.
Fortunately last year we had a lot more inventory challenges
and we stepped back with COVID.
So this year, as I mentioned, we really picked up the pace
and picked up our outreach.
We have pre-ordered our batteries,
which is why we've been able
to deploy as many as we have
and this week we're getting another shipment
of about 1000 batteries.
By the end of this year,
we have pre-ordered about 6,500 batteries
and so I know that there were some global constraints going
on with the court in China,
with the, COVID as well as some impacts here in our court.
So far we've been working through that.
We have not yet had a situation where we are falling short
with the additional replenishment
of 1000 batteries this year,
we'll be getting to those 900 that are pending this week.
So we should be good on that.
So we are hopeful that we will exceed our forecast
and we'll be monitoring the inventory situation
on a weekly daily basis.
-: But are there people
on a waiting list who haven't gotten batteries
because you haven't procured all of them yet?
I know you said you're hopeful you'll get these batteries.
Are there people currently waiting for them?
-: We have about 900 customers waiting for their batteries
to be delivered to them,
but they have already been earmarked and have enrolled.
Other than that, everyone, their batteries.
-: Everyone who's asked for
other than those 900 have received it.
-: That's right and those 900 will be getting
those replenished inventory shipments this week.
-: Okay. -: Jessica,
maybe if I could add just a small comment
around just the 40% and really the progress
that we've made here.
Coming into the year.
So Commissioner Rechtschaffen, you're right.
13000, 40%, call it 5,200 would be about 40%.
We're hoping now on a forecast basis that we can get close
to that 5,200.
Coming into the year, based on past experience
with this program and other related programs,
we set our target at getting to 30%
and so that was, we felt that was important
to get to that 30%.
The team's planned to go well beyond that,
which is why we've procured these extra batteries
and we think now we'll be able to get to
and possibly exceed 40%.
So it's been a lot of additional,
to both President Batjer and Jessica's point,
a lot of additional marketing, communications, repeat
to continually get at these customers.
So to get that take rate much higher than we expected
that we've seen in the past.
So we'll continue to try to fill those in and go further
and I think over time we can get there
but just wanted to note our original target was 30%,
now we're forecasting to get somewhere around 40.
-: Thank you Steve. (indistinct)
-: Ask you a question real quickly?
Can you tell us what type
of batteries these are generally speaking
and what's the duration of the timeframe
on most of them and what's the mixture.
Do you have a longer-term batteries that are larger
for those who are on your critical care list?
-: Yeah, sure.
So we have three types of batteries.
They are all the Goal Zero batteries.
We have a 1500 watt hour battery,
3000 and a 6,000.
So what we do is that when our customer is interested
in this program,
our contractors have an assessment discussion
with our customers.
In many cases, a lot of our customers have more than
just one medical device in their home so the contractor has
to aggregate that power load
and then they right-size the best battery fit for them based
on their condition but just to give you a sense
of some examples, a sleep apnea machine
on the littlest battery we offer,
the 1500 watt hour could last for 16 hours,
according to the manufacturer.
For a larger machine, like an oxygen generator,
the largest battery, the 6,000 battery can last
for about nine hours and I will be talking a little later
on about how we're augmenting solutions
for customers where this just may not be enough.
-: Okay, very helpful
and I look forward to that further augmentation
to your presentation.
Thank you.
-: And I wanna let you all know and see
that I really wanna get to 50% of our battery.
So, all right.
And I wanna cover off just quickly
that there are customers that may not be eligible
for the fully subsidized battery,
so we do offer a $500 rebate on a portable generator
and this rebate was recently updated to include eligibility
for customers enrolled in medical baseline.
So you don't need to be on care
and medical baseline to get that rebate.
And as I was alluding to,
we understand that portable batteries
and generators may not fully satisfy the needs
of some of our access and functional needs customers
therefore, we have partnered
with the 211 referral organization
to provide direct services such as transportation, lodging
or meal delivery and, to our customers before
and during PSPS events to help our customers prepare
and have a resiliency plan and they will also be ready
to take calls 24/7 during events.
SCE is working with PG&E to offer this service targeted
to start in September
and this builds upon what San Diego started last year
and I wanted to just take a moment to thank Cal OES
for providing this idea to the Statewide council.
I'm really excited for that 211 service
to get off the ground next month
and I wanna just end with, while we have,
I have highlighted some of the key updates
for our AFN customers and services in our appendix,
we do have a comprehensive list of services
that are offered.
Any questions?
All right, so let's go to the next slide, please.
So I also wanted to touch on our other program updates
that we're offering this year to our customers more broadly.
Based on our customer survey results that we did,
we have updated our other rebates to be more accessible.
We are now offering a $200 rebate portable generator
for any customer in a high fire risk area
and we eliminated the requirement
to have a water pumping dependency.
We also increased our $50 rebate for our portable battery
to $75 and this rebate is good
for smaller portable batteries
that can power electronic devices, such as a modem
or router, cell phones, laptops or iPads
and these batteries and generators can be found
on SCE's online marketplace
and we have links where customers can purchase online
or at retail stores
and some stores also offer financing options.
We've also created new educational short videos
that's accessible in multiple languages
and closed caption to help our customers.
And since we've made these rebate changes on July 1st,
it's a little too early to see the full impact
but so far we have close to 50% increase this year
versus last year on customers who are taking advantage
of these rebates.
And then lastly, we have expanded the number
of hotels participating in our hotel discount program,
where we have negotiated up to 25% discounts
for our customers and these are options
for those customers who may not qualify
for our 211 temporary lodging service for AFN customers.
Okay, next slide please.
-: [President Batjer] Jessica,
before you go on can I just ask,
what is the retail price of this backup battery?
Jessica Lim: Yeah, so there's a lot
of different price ranges
and I will just give a couple of examples.
A portable battery that most
of our customers purchase last year cost
between 100 to $200 and that is maybe about three
or 400 watt hour capacity battery and then we also,
in terms of generators, these vary as well,
a customer can buy a $400 gas generator
and that has 3,500 running wattage for it
and then also, you can go up to a $500 generator
and that would give you
about a 5,000 running watt power capacity.
So hopefully that gives a sense,
but it is a pretty wide range so
that customers can choose what works best for them.
-: [President Batjer] And on the smaller batteries,
what type of fuel source is there,
is it on the smaller batteries,
on the ones that would cost 100 to 150 or $200?
Jessica Lim: Those batteries, typically they're lithium.
I can't pronounce that, lithium ion batteries.
-: [President Batjer] Okay, all right.
Thank you.
Steven Powell: Before you go on real quick.
President Batjer, I just do wanna be respectful
of leaving enough time for public comment
and we've got a couple more slides,
mostly focused on CRCs as well as engagement with partners.
So looking to your guidance on how much time you'd like
to use to close this out before we move on.
-: Let's try and get
to a couple more slides.
And we've been asking questions all along
but I will probably before we turn
to public comment, I'll go back to the virtual dais
and make sure that everyone has their questions asked
but I'm very,
thank you Steve for being mindful of our public.
-: Jessica if you wanna quickly go through the key points
on (indistinct) answer questions.
Thank you. -: Okay, thank you.
So we can go to the next slide, please.
So I wanna talk about our community resource centers
and community crew vehicles.
These continue to be a good way for us to connect
with our customers and share information about status
of events, providing resiliency, kit resources,
and with any other customer service needs.
I wanna mention that we do survey our customers
as an option, and so on a scale of one
to 10 customers have given us a score
of 8.64 overall satisfaction with this program.
I believe that was the question from earlier.
And this year we have added nine new CRC locations
as a result of refreshing,
where we needed to bolster areas as needed
and we have also doubled our internal staff
that support our CRCs and CCVs to close
to about 100 team members
and we have recently finished all of our training sessions
to prepare for activations this year.
And then just some of our logistics.
When a PSPS event is activated,
we do hold daily external coordination calls
to collaborate with local authorities,
including (indistinct) CRCs.
I wanna answer the question about the timeline
of our CRC activations.
So at about 72 hours out, we create our plans for our CRCs
and our CCVs and at the 48 hour mark,
we are busy mobilizing our resources
and planning where do we send our employees
and booking hotels for them and all of that.
At the 24 hour mark we deploy our employees out
into the field, so that the next day
at the 12 hour mark they're ready to set up
and they set up to start at 7:00 AM so
that we can serve customers from 8:00 to 10:00 PM.
I think that's the most important points here.
I do wanna just quickly mentioned that,
it's important for us to stay connected
to our customer's experience so
that we can make improvements and in fact,
Steven got to visit a CRC last year
and gave us back his insights,
so I really appreciated that.
Last year we added gloves and hand sanitizers to our kits
and this year through practice,
best practice discussions we are looking
at providing a cooling case for medication.
And so lastly,
we're enabling eight resiliency zones this year
with temporary backup power generation
in certain communities to keep essential services energized,
such as the neighborhood gas station.
And five of these sites are ready now.
and we have three in progress for October.
And these sites are
in some of our most frequently impacted communities.
Any questions?
-: [President Batjer] Yes, were these additional sites
that you all chose.
Two things.
Did you work with the local community groups
slash government slash tribal communities to site them?
And did you say we need this or did they come to you
and say, we need a CRC and third question,
are there any requests for CRCs that you're not addressing
in terms of some of the local government needs?
Jessica Lim: I'll start with your last question,
President Batjer.
The answer is no.
We have no remaining requests that we have not followed
through on and as far as these nine news CRCs,
we took the initiative based on,
every year we look at our circuit situation
and we take a look at our list of our CRCs to see
if there were any topics we might wanna bolster.
And of course, we reached out
through our local public affairs group to work
with local counties and authorities tribal areas
to figure out where we should place our CRCs
as we do during events.
Steven Powell: And Jessica I'll just add,
it's a ongoing process.
We continue to engage with our local partners
and so I'm sure that additional opportunities
for CRCs will be raised
and we'll evaluate these working with them as well.
Jessica Lim: Thank you and next slide.
Man: Let me, (indistinct) quick question,
have you done a survey or an evaluation of how successful
or impactful the CRCs have been to date
to the communities so that you know
whether or not you're meeting the needs
of the community appropriately?
Jessica Lim: Yes, absolutely.
We do offer a survey
that customers can take when they visit our CRCs
and CCVs we ask for information if they would like
to participate and so based on that,
out of a scale of one to 10, we did receive an 8.6
in terms of overall satisfaction from our customers.
We know that customers come
because they wanna know about the status of an event
and they also wanna know how they can be prepared
and there's a third reason why they visit is
to charge their devices.
Man: And what kind of volume do you see
at those CRCs?
Is it pretty high by comparison to the population
that's being impacted in that particular service area?
Jessica Lim: That's a really good question.
It ranges, depending on the event, the CRC location,
at an aggregate level we had
about 6,000 customers visit our CRCs and CCVs last year
and that's out of about 138,000 unique customers impacted
by our events last year.
Man: Thank you.
-: [President Batjer] President Batjer,
You just got 8.6,
Is that right? -: I'm sorry.
-: [President Batjer] Is that 8.6 out of.
Can you hear me? -: Yeah, now we can.
-: [President Batjer] Okay, so the 8.6 score
Is that out of 10, Jessica?
-: Yes, it's 8.6 out of 10. -: Okay, all right.
In the meantime, on the resiliency zones,
what kind of backup power generation is being used?
Jessica Lim: They are going to be generators
that we provide. -: Diesel?
(indistinct) vegetable oil.
(chuckles softly)
Jessica Lim: I'm not sure actually what the type will be.
-: [President Batjer] Okay, would be preferable
if they're not diesel. (chuckles softly)
Just saying.
Yeah, (indistinct)
Anyways, okay, thank you.
By the way I noted the,
you have 1600 community based organizations
that you're interfacing with, that's very impressive
and hopefully that's a very successful relationship.
-: Yeah, thank you. -: Thank you.
Jessica Lim: Okay, then I'll go ahead
and just wrap up quickly on the last couple of slides,
if that's okay.
If we can go to the next one.
Okay, I just wanna.
-: [President Batjer] Like Steve said earlier,
Jessica, if you could just hit the high points,
so we're (indistinct) -: Sure
-: [President Batjer] Continued time for the virtual dais
to ask questions and then we've got
to turn to public comment.
So thank you. -: Yeah.
I will just start by mentioning that it is really important
for us to meet the needs
of what our stakeholders are telling us
and so we heard a lot of feedback and so between March
and July we held over 100 meetings
with our local and tribal government,
public safety partners, emergency management,
critical infrastructure providers, our working groups,
advisory board and other stakeholders and customers
and we started with outreach on those communities
that were most frequently impacted,
like Acton and Simi Valley and Santa Clarita
and I wanna just share that overall
after these community meetings, customers told us
that 70% of them felt better informed after attending one
of these meetings and these conversations,
I just wanna call to attention that we had opportunities
to meet our customer's needs.
As Terry shared earlier, we got a lot of feedback
in our live streams about wanting
to know what circuit customers were on
so we did make that improvement
and Ranbir talked a lot about the notifications
and the portal, which we've incorporated feedback
But I wanted to say something where I was
on a live stream and one customer was interested
in our backup battery program and she was
on medical baseline so we reached out to her
and found out she was not on CARE so we helped enroll her
because she was qualified and so we got that extra sign up
and helped that customer, which was very rewarding for me
and we also conducted,
I wanna note that we conducted testing of our outreach
to local governments, communications, water, waste water,
just to test that our contacts are up-to-date
and so we'll be repeating that in August.
I think those are the main points that are important to me
at this point and then just to maybe end
with tribal governments.
We continue to engage with our tribal government.
We've had PSPS workshops, resiliency workshops.
We continue to reach out
and we've trained our local governments
and tribal governments on their portal
and we have about half of them in the process of signing up
and then also I wanted to say that as we talk
to our tribal governments about resiliency opportunities,
one of the resiliency zones is actually a market
that's owned by the Bridgeport Colony Indian Nation
in Mono County so we're excited about that.
So those are the key points and I'll end here
with this last slide and point out,
as you can see, we did get a lot
of survey responses where there's a high level of awareness
in terms of our efforts with local governments
in high-risk areas and we know that
while these marks are great we still have more that we want
to do and more that we will collaborate on.
So I would just end there.
Unless there any questions, I will turn it back over
to Steve.
-: All right, just real quickly in closing President Batjer.
I'll just reiterate a couple of points that you made
at the beginning, but it's really important
because we hear it and this is how we're focused.
First, evaluated based on their actions
and the results that you see.
So as we get through the season, that's where we're focused.
Fewer customers in scope, reduced impact to those customers,
especially on the frequently impacted circuits,
better communication coordination,
as well as more customer services
and we've talked a lot about those today.
The second point is really that this is the work
for this year.
We'll continue to work on it
but we're not done asking for feedback
and I'm sure we will get plenty of it
as we go through this season as well.
So we've established the continuous feedback mechanisms
through voice of customer surveys,
all of these meetings that we've got with our partners,
with local communities, working groups,
it's a long list of, and a rich place to get that feedback.
We won't just wait till next year.
We'll adapt as we go through this year as well.
So hopefully people are sharing their views
as we go through it.
Continuous improvement is one of our core company values
and you've got our commitment that this year is going
to look a lot better than it looked last year
and I'm sure next year we'll leave and better
because it's not something we solve in just one year.
We will keep listening.
We will stay engaged and we wanna hear the feedback
from everywhere and with that, thank you
and President Batjer back over to you
for any additional questions that we can address.
-: Thank you Steve very much
and thank you to the other presenters.
We are looking forward to a much different response
from Edison this year, as we heard, as we noticed
and I noted in my presentation
earlier than had last year.
As I said, you will be judged by your outcomes
not by your plans.
So I think we're sharing that same sentiment.
Are there any other questions at this time
from my colleagues on the virtual dais.
I can't see you all so please speak up
if you have a question.
-: Yes President Batjer.
-: Before I turn it to you Commissioner Shiroma,
excuse me, but I just wanted to say
that Director Ghilarducci was called away and he apologized
that he had to step off the virtual dais
and he will be joining us
for the PG&E presentation this afternoon.
So please, Commissioner Shiroma
-: More of a comment, I think.
And you mentioned the fact sheet which I sent up
and it has a link to circuits
and earlier this year, we heard a lot
from local governments and customers
from the Santa Clarita area, from Malibu,
from many parts as (indistinct)
and so it is good to be able to pull up the circuits
that are in the queue or having three
to four, covered conductors and to see that
why these areas that we heard from are included
in this list.
I mean, I realized that these particular circuits
may or may not have covered some
of the (indistinct) calls in but many
of the locales are familiar in terms of what I remember
from the public comments from earlier this year.
So I appreciate having access to the list.
Be kind of nice to have a geographical map
but at least having that list is, I think helpful
to local government and to the public.
If they can navigate your website and it's actually,
(indistinct)
If they are internet savvy.
Just wanted acknowledge that that information is there.
Thank you.
-: President Batjer
-: Yes hi, come on, please go ahead Caroline.
-: Yes, yeah just to sort of a final comment really,
wanted to just appreciate the presentation today
from Edison and the detail and as the indicators seem
to point things are moving in the right direction,
do just wanna sort of highlight though
that there were a number of items
that there are still things that need to get done prior
to the fall in terms of meeting those expectations
and those targets.
So I look forward to continuing to meet with Edison
in our bi-weekly meetings on the corrective action plan
because there are a number of items
to continue moving forward on but do appreciate
that the progress they've made today.
Thank you.
-: [Lauren Utterback] Hello, I'd like to queue
for public comment.
This is Lauren Utterback
-: One moment, please.
We haven't turned to public comment yet.
We're running a little bit behind.
Lauren: Thank you.
-: Are there any other questions from the virtual dais?
Okay, see none.
And then we will now turn to our public comment portion
of our agenda.
As a reminder, if you wish to make a public comment,
please dial into 1-800-857-1917.
Enter pass code 7218384#
and press *1.
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 *1
to the time the operator asks for your information.
So please be patient and stay on the line.
You will be provided a two minute period of time to speak,
two minutes.
You will hear a bell sound when your time is up.
Please listen for the bell
and when you hear it, please end your comment.
Operator, if you will please bring
on our first caller, please.
Operator: The public comment line is now open.
Our first speaker is Melissa Kasnitz.
Melissa Kasnitz: Can you hear me?
-: Yes, we can Melissa. -: Thank you.
This is Melissa Kasnitz.
I'm the legal director
with the Center for Accessible Technology,
an active party
in all proceedings addressing de-energization
and the representative of people with disabilities
and medical vulnerabilities who are affected
by power outages.
Last year, the power shutoffs conducted
by SCE were deeply problematic,
particularly to the constituency that I represent
and the feedback that was given
in real time last year was not addressed in a timely manner.
Especially for medical baseline customers the lack
of support was evident except for the subset
of those customers who were identified as critical care.
I'm very glad to hear of the expansion of support
for medical baseline
and medically vulnerable customers this year
but I have to say the presentation of this expansion
as success remains tone-deaf.
The efforts to address the needs
of these constituencies were in place
before the 2020 wildfire season and SCE failed to deliver.
So aiming to reach that far
for the 2021 fire season is the bare minimum
that the utility should be expected to achieve.
I do look forward to better service and I look forward
to seeing the utility show a better understanding
of the harms that their customers suffer from outages
and to address those harms with at least as much insight
as they address the fire risk
that leads to this decision to turn off power.
I'm also looking to learn more about who is paying the costs
of the various services, including for the referrals
to 211 and questions about how the CBOs
that SCE relies on are compensated.
How much of these costs are still coming out of pocket
from customers who are the ones who have
to endure the hardship from the power outages.
Overall, I appreciate the efforts to do better,
but I think there's a long way to go,
particularly in meeting the needs
of the most vulnerable customers.
Thank you. -: Thank you
Operator, the next caller please.
Operator: Thank you, Ms. Kasnitz.
Our next speaker is our Ariel Strauss
Ariel Strauss: Hi, this is Ariel Strauss
for Small Business Utility Advocates.
Thank you for holding this presentation.
I wanted to point out that much
of what is being done today has been recommended by,
in terms of the improvements to covered conductor
and other steps that SCE has taken has been requested
quite loudly and consistently since 2019 by SBUA
and other groups and these issues were largely unaddressed,
at least not to the extent they are now
until the Commission took action in January, 2021,
switched to put out the important
and critical continued involvement of the Commission
ensuring that SCE and other IOUs take the necessary steps
that are in many ways quite obvious and were needed
for the last two years
and it's somewhat disappointing
that only now are being addressed as low urgency
that we see in this presentation.
I also wish to point out that the June 14th PS post event,
PSPS report from SCE still states that the safety impacts
of PSPS are not being evaluated or rather
that the safety impacts of PSPS will be evaluated
through some future mechanism that it's not yet known
and I've not heard any discussion today
of SCE's mechanism or method
of identifying those safety impacts in order to ensure
that PSPS events are only conducted
when the safety considerations from wildfires outweigh those
from a PSPS event.
I look forward to further Commission involvement
in this issue, particularly in the identification
of safety impacts so that those can be avoided
and that PSPS is only in fact used as a last resort
in the interest of public safety.
Thank you very much. -: Thank you.
Operator the next caller please.
Operator: Thank you, Mr. Strauss.
Our next speaker is Hans Laetz.
Hans Laetz: Good morning and thank you for your time.
My name is Hans Laetz.
I run a LPFM radio station that serves Malibu, California.
Since we've been getting
so many blackouts our radio station has had
to really stretch its budget and install solar and batteries
to the tune of around $30,000 to keep our radio station
on the air when Edison can't.
Edison has been of no support of this whatsoever
despite the fact
that our LPFM radio station is the only way
to reach people in Malibu when the power is out.
They're talking about setting up a disaster center out here,
there's never been one set up in Malibu.
There's no way for people to get information.
Furthermore, all of the communications outreach
that we've heard about at great length over and over again
from Edison, including its summaries today,
which by the way, we've heard again and again, and again,
it's top down, it's not bottom up.
Reporters who call in for information during PSPS warnings
or blackouts are either stonewalled or gaslighted by Edison.
We don't get information on the phone.
We cannot get information online or via email.
We ask specific questions about
when specifically the circuits will be pulled,
what the problem is or if they have any estimate
on restoration and we get no answers.
The problem is the company is all,
everything we heard today was top-down, not responsive
and when the situation goes into play,
it becomes dynamic, people in Malibu and other areas need
to know, should I send my kids to school?
Is the highway going to be operable?
Are the traffic lights going to work?
How long will they be out?
Should I try to make it into work or not?
When we ask questions framed from that need to know basis,
the Edison company has been totally unavailable,
totally unable to answer those kinds of questions.
Everything we've heard some today is talking
about government to government or government
to official spokesperson.
We are not getting answers.
There needs to be a way for low power FM stations that exist
in places like the Santa Clarita Valley in,
I'll hurry, and in Malibu to stay on the air.
Edison needs to help us with generators and Edison needs
to be responsive and give us answers,
which they've been totally unable to do.
Thank you for listening. -: Thank you Mr. Laetz.
Operator, next caller please.
Operator: President Batjer, there are no more speakers
on the public comment telephone line.
-: Okay, can you make the announcement again as to how to get
into the public comment to just so we make sure
that we've captured those who might be having difficulties?
Operator: Absolutely, it is *1 if anyone would like
to have a comment
and please record your name for introduction.
-: Anybody else joined operator?
Operator: There are no speakers at this time.
-: Okay, with that, thank you very much operator.
With no more callers on the line,
the public comment period is now.
-: Excuse me -: Yes.
-: [Lauren Utterback] This is Lauren Utterback
from the Independent Living Resource Center.
I had difficulty with signing on with the operator.
-: Oh, I'm so very sorry.
Go ahead Lauren. -: Thank you very much.
Good morning and thank you for the opportunity
to provide comments today.
My name is Lauren Utterback.
I am the emergency preparedness services manager
for the Independent Living Resource Center,
which serves the majority high risk area
of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties when looking
at SCE's territory.
As you're all aware,
the Independent Living Center serve individuals
with disabilities of all income levels and ages
and therefore serve a very high percentage of those
within the broad definition of access and functional needs.
I heard a lot of comments today regarding the past hearings
in the last year or two of PSPS events.
As a representative of an organization
in a high fire risk area that does experience PSPS,
I will say that in the past we have expressed concern
about PSPS and even the way SCE handled them.
However, there has been a marked improvement
in communication, notification transparency
and the overall relationship between SCE in general
and especially with the AFN population.
We're happy to be a part of the effort
to identify AFN customers,
to ensure they are knowledgeable
about the programs available to them to be prepared.
Additionally, SCE has
far improved their backup power provision
and connection with our organization to benefit the needs
of our consumers.
SCE has shown a genuine care and prioritization
of the AFN community and we are very glad to work with them.
They're making big changes, which take time,
but they are obvious.
We have significant.
We have a specific contact and know who to go to
for any issues and questions.
I think we can all agree that's an achievement when working
with a big company.
Thank you.
-: Thank you and I'm sorry you had difficulty getting in.
Operator this time, is there anybody else
that you're aware of?
Operator: President Batjer there are no speakers
at this time. -: Okay, thank you operator.
Then I will end the public comment period.
And again, I wanna thank everyone for joining us today.
I wanna thank my fellow colleagues who have been
on the virtual dais.
Very much appreciate having Director Ghilarducci here
with us today and very much appreciate all
of our representatives and my colleagues from CPUC.
I wanna thank our executive director, Rachel Peterson
for her leadership in putting this together
and for her leadership in the every other week meetings
that we're having with Edison in terms of the action plan
that we have been actively involved in since January.
I wanna also thank Tony Noll
and the entire team here at CPUC for all
of the hard work putting this workshop and hearing together.
It's been extremely informative
and I also wanna thank Edison,
the representatives of Edison
for their informative presentation today
and we really do look forward
to a much improved wildfire response this wildfire season.
So with that, I wanna thank you all for joining us
and please do come back this afternoon and join us
for the presentation that we will receive from PG&E.
Thank you all very much for your participation.
Operator: Thank you.
That does conclude today's conference.