Announcer: Thank you for your patience.
Operator: Welcome to the
California Public Utilities Commission
and the office of energy safety infrastructure,
energy safety public meeting on utility safety practices
on this day, Wednesday, August 25th, 2021.
Carolina you may begin.
-: Good morning, everyone
and welcome to Southern California Edison and San Diego gas
and electric safety update briefing for the California
public utilities Commission and the office of energy
infrastructure safety.
I am Carolina Contreras with the CPUC safety policy
division, and I'll be moderating today's engagement,
but today's briefing members of the board of directors of
Southern California Edison and San Diego gas and electric
will present updates on their electric safety-related
efforts and answer questions
from the CPUC and energy safety.
Due to the Corona virus pandemic
and the shelter in place order
we are conducting today's meeting online
and by remote application participation.
The meeting is live-streamed on the CPUC website
and can be viewed.
You can view the meeting at www.adminmonitor.com/Ca/CPUC,
close captioning is available in
English and Spanish through the webcast.
You can click on the green button
to select your language of choice.
Joining us on the virtual dais today
are CPUC Commissioners,
Rechtschaffen, Shiroma, Guzman Aceves, and Houck,
and the director of the office of energy infrastructure
safety, Caroline Thomas Jacob, unfortunately,
President Batjer had a scheduling conflict
and is unable to join us today.
In terms of format for today's briefing
after opening remarks from the diets,
we'll hear safety update from Southern California Edison
representative followed by discussion and Q and A for the
Commissioners and energy safety directors.
We will then move on to a safety update by San Diego Gas and
Electric representative followed by another Q and A
discussion from the Commissioners
and energy safety director.
We are scheduled to conclude today at 12:30 PM.
We will have an opportunity for public comment
following the presentation.
If you wish to make a public comment,
dial (800) 857 1917 and enter passcode
1767567 and press star one,
you will be placed into a queue and the operator will take
your name and information.
You will be called upon to speak,
when you get to the public common period in today's agenda,
we will provide two minutes to each speaker.
So please be mindful of the time.
I will repeat this directions when we get to that point,
we also have Spanish interpretation available,
dial 1 800 857 1917 and enter passcode 3799627 pound
to be connected to the Spanish line.
I asked that my colleagues in today's speakers remain
mindful and speak clearly.
We will now repeat information about
public comment information in Spanish.
(speaking in foreign language)
I will now turn it over to Commissioner Rechtschaffen
for some opening remarks, Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
-: Thank you very much, Carolina.
Good morning, everybody.
I'd like to start by welcoming my fellow Commissioners
and also director Thomas Jacobs,
the office of energy infrastructure safety,
always a pleasure to share the day with you director.
This meeting is part of our regular efforts here at the PUC
to hold meetings with utility leadership on wildfire
mitigation and activities, public safety,
power shut off and other matters to ensure that we have the
maximum accountability and transparency
on critical safety issues.
Today's meeting is somewhat different in that we will hear
from representatives of the utilities board of directors
and I hope that the range of safety issues we discussed can
be more holistic and comprehensive.
I'd like to see us Institute that meet this meeting with the
board members as an annual practice,
as we work collectively to improve all aspects of the
utility safety performance I should add
I also think a process like this in meeting with board
members is a reasonable
and effective way for the utilities to
meet one of the criteria that's set forth in AB 1054,
the wildfire mitigation safety law
for obtaining a safety certificate
and that criteria is that the, "Electrical corporation
has established board of director level reporting to the
Commission on safety issues."
I'd also like to see board members
from the respective safety committee to the utilities
being part of this discussion going forward.
So that's an item that we can follow up on.
Updates like the ones we will get today are critical
to making sure that we are kept informed by the utilities
on all of the various aspects to improve safety,
public safety, employee safety, contractor safety,
and in particular,
the development of their organizational safety culture
we have emphasized and we have proceedings
that are working on this,
that a strong safety cultures really essential for
strong and effective safety performance
and that culture is set by the leaders of a utility.
We have been working since the middle of the last decade,
to focus on various ways to significantly enhance the level
of analysis that utilities engage in,
in assessing the risks that they say and coming up with a
more objective and quantifiable basis for
how to spend money on those risks,
kind of best mitigate the range of risks that utilities face
we've ordered the development of risk assessment,
methodologies and safety performance metrics.
This work of course goes on in two or three major
proceedings that we have open
our safety model assessment proceeding also known as SMAP,
our risk assessment and mitigation phase proceeding,
the RAMP proceeding which feeds into our general rate cases.
Also very importantly, and of course,
more and more important every day now
our climate adaptation rule making where we test
utilities to use the best climate science available
to help mitigate the risks from,
Carolina do you want me to stop
cause I'm hearing the translator?
-: Yes, translator, will you please mute?
We have had our portion of Spanish, thank you.
-: Just to finish up the climate adaptation
rulemaking is very important
risk-based rulemaking that we need to,
and we are integrating with the SMAP and RAMP proceedings
because we want utilities to be thinking holistically about
the range of risks they face and the risks from climate
change or in escapable at this point.
We of course have hundreds of experts safety staff
that perform oversight and enforcement work.
A lot of that happens outside the view of the public and
these proceedings, but it's critically important.
We have outstanding staff doing that all the time.
Today's meeting fills a gap in our current practices by
providing the public, to get an opportunity
to hear a report,
a discussion between the boards of the directors
of the utilities, the CPUC and OEIS,
and for getting a better public understanding,
really the priorities and actions of the boards of
directors and executive leadership.
I look forward to further developing this reporting process.
As I mentioned,
I'd like to see board members from the respective committees
appearing in going forward.
I'd like to thank our safety policy division and the office
of the Commission for a lot of work in preparing for today's
meetings, Carolina included,
and I look forward to the presentations from Southern
California, Edison and San Diego Gas and electric.
Carolina back to you.
-: Carolina your on mute.
-: Thank you everyone.
My apologies thank you, Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
Director Thomas Jacob.
-: Thank you and thank you Commissioner.
Good morning, everyone.
I really appreciate the opportunity to hear from Southern
California, Edison, San Diego, gas and electric today
on the status of their critical
safety initiatives and how those initiatives are
improving safety outcomes.
I couldn't agree more
with Commissioner Rechtschaffen comments
and look forward to integrating the office into the
comprehensive efforts by the Commission on safety oversight
of electrical infrastructure.
As the impacts of climate change, continue to worsen
and California's experience is a drought conditions that
increase the risk of wildfire,
the importance of building and maintaining a culture of
safety and wildfire resilience for employees, customers,
and the general public becomes ever more critical with over
6,700 fires and more than 100 million and a half acre
burn this year, the numbers, but more importantly,
the impacts of those fires are staggering
and the threat is only continuing to escalate.
Safety and climate resilience must be considered
and prioritized in every decision
to ensure every opportunity to improve worker safety
and reduce or eliminate the likelihood of emissions
from electrical lines and equipment is maximized.
Building a culture of safety or safety
is not just what you do,
but who you are is not easy nor does it happen overnight.
It takes work and strong leadership.
In December of 2020 as the wildfire safety division,
we released a strategy for reducing utility related wildfire
risk in which we set out a vision for a sustainable
California with no catastrophic utility related wildfires
that has access to safe, affordable,
and reliable electricity,
a foundational element to achieving this vision
in building a culture based on safety and risk management,
not focused solely on compliance,
but a culture that drives towards reducing risks within your
operations and from your infrastructure.
I know Edison and San Diego has the gun,
the work to build such a culture
and I look forward to hearing today how that work is leading
to improve safety outcomes for their workforce or their
customers and the communities in which they operate.
I'll leave it at that for now,
as I'm sure I'll have questions for the presenters
and as Commissioner Rechtschaffen
and thank you to all of the staff
that has helped organize this public briefing.
I really appreciate all the work everyone's put into it
and I look forward to hearing from San Diego and Edison
back to you Carolina.
-: Thank you, director Thomas Jacobs.
Commissioners Shiroma, Guzman Aceves, and Houck,
could you have any other opening remarks please go ahead.
-: Oh yes, thank you.
Yes good morning everybody.
Thank you, Ms. Thomas and the Commissioner Rechtschaffen,
like all of the Commissioners and participants today,
I am keenly interested to hear from the representatives of
the board of directors and executive management for Southern
California Edison and San Diego gas and electric on your
safety, priorities and activities.
Certainly the safety issue
at the top of everyone's mind is wildfires.
I look forward to hearing the reinforcement in Spanish on
the information shared with us in other forums on what is
being done on the mitigation of wildfires.
Additionally, and equally importantly, today,
I look forward to hearing about the utilities overall
safety, core values, and safety culture efforts,
and the safety initiatives that augment and go beyond
wildfire planning thank you.
-: And Mrs. Houck,
I just want to concur with the comments
of my fellow Commissioners
and I look forward to this important presentation
and with that, I will turn it back over to Carolina.
-: Thank you, Commissioner Houck.
If no other opening remarks,
then I think you Commissioners and director Thomas Jacob,
we will now hear from Southern California Edison
representative, Kevin Payne,
chair of the board of directors and chief executive officer
representative, Steven Powell,
executive vice president of operations and representative
Andrew Martinez, vice president of safety,
security and business resiliency and chief safety officer.
Welcome Mr. Payne, you have up to 30 minutes,
I'm turning it over to you now.
-: Thank you very much.
Good morning Commissioner Rechtschaffen,
Commissioner Guzman Aceves, Commissioner Shiroma,
Commissioner Houck and director Thomas Jacobs.
Thank you for inviting us here today to share progress
and the challenges in SCE safety, performance and culture.
I'm Kevin Payne, president and CEO
of Southern California Edison and as was said,
I serve as the chair of SCEs board of directors.
I'm joined today by Steve Powell,
Who's our executive vice president of operations
effectively our chief operations officer
and Andrew Martinez, our vice-presidents safety,
security and business resiliency
and as Carolina said chief safety officer.
As I started marking my remarks,
would you please turn the slide to slide number two?
It's the deck now projecting, I'm sorry,
I can't see it on my end.
-: I can not see it either.
-: There we go.
All right, thank you very much.
First of all, safety is integral to SCE business.
It starts with our company values of which safety is the
first, our values, our safety, integrity, excellence,
respect, continuous improvement in teamwork.
Safety is the top driver of all of our priorities,
our investments, and our standards
and I want to stress that our commitment to safety is broad.
It starts with protecting our workers and the public and
habits, but it also includes investments that replace aging
infrastructure to prevent hazardous equipment failures.
A major focus of it is preventing catastrophic wildfires,
of course, by making the grid more resilient
and capable of operating
reliably and increasingly extreme weather conditions.
But it also includes adapting more fully to climate change,
to protect and serve our for many years to come.
If you can please turn to look you're on the right slide.
Slide three, thank you.
SCE's commitment to safety starts at the very top our
safety and operations committee
or a SOC as I may refer to it today,
maintains joint responsibility with our full board of
directors for safety oversight at SCE.
The SOC is made up of five independent directors and it's
responsible for oversight of the company's safety
performance and culture, our operational goals,
safety and operational risks
and significant safety related incidents
involving employees, contractors, or members of the public.
It means that at least six times per year,
and it reports out regularly to the full board of directors.
As we noted in our request for a safety certification,
the chair of the SOC Tim O'Toole has extensive safety
experience and has been recognized in the safety leader,
both in the U.S. and internationally,
and is currently a member of the board of directors
of the national safety council.
In addition to his SOC role, Mr. O'Toole engages directly
with our operations and safety leadership team
to understand our safety performance
and programs, pressure tests, our approaches,
and provide insights based on his experience.
In my role, serving as chair of SCEs board,
I am among other things responsible for representing the
board for executive level reporting on safety issues
with this Commission
and with the office of energy infrastructure safety.
As part of my managerial role at utility,
I also attend each meeting of the board of director of
safety and operations committee or a SOC as such our board
is fully engaged on SCEs, most important safety issues.
Our comments today are going to be primarily focused on our
progress and challenges in wildfire, mitigation,
worker safety and safety culture.
Steve Powell will be discussing our progress on wildfire
mitigation while Andrew Martinez will address worker safety
issues and after that,
I'll provide an update on our safety culture.
So I'll turn it over to Steve Powell now
to discuss wildfire mitigation, Steve.
-: Yeah, thanks Kevin.
So let's start by turning to slide four
and discussing our highest priority public safety effort,
which is wildfire mitigation.
This is summarized in SCE's wildfire mitigation plan,
or I'll refer to it as our WMP.
SCE is long focused on wildfire Safety,
but launched a re-imagining of our approach shortly after
the 2017 wine country fires
and prior to the 2017 Thomas and Comic stone fires.
This led to originally our grid seeking resiliency program
application that was filed in 2018,
which was a startup key initiative like covered conductor,
enhanced inspections,
and our vegetation management practices.
We've continued to refine our wildfire mitigation strategy
with our subsequent WMP that we've been filing annually.
At these WMP consists of activities
that reduce the probability of consequence.
It probably, or consequence of ignitions
improve situational awareness,
provide local fire agencies with backpack staff, backing,
fire fighting helicopters,
and help customers prepare for power outages,
I think the early evaluate each activity and its
alternatives for risk reduction effectiveness,
speed of deployment and cost.
For example SCE identified the installation
of carbon conductor is as the most effective way
to quickly and efficiently and
effectively reduce the risk of electrical equipment
being involved in an admission during weather conditions,
when fires can be particularly destructive.
Since 2018 we've installed over 2000 circuit miles
of cover conductor to prevent ignitions from objects,
blowing into our lines or,
wireless wires coming into contact with each other
in high winds.
At the same time,
we've implemented several programs that complement cover
conductors as they're detailed on slide five
that we determined there.
These include installing 13,000 fast mapping fuses
and establishing fast curve settings for the majority of our
protection devices in high-fire areas.
This reduces the likelihood of ignition
by limiting the energy release.
When the overhead lines are damaged or equipment sales.
Our vegetation line cleaning program expands clearances to
12 feet where possible on distribution lines and expects and
inspects and trims hundreds of thousands of trees each year.
We've removed over 33,000 hazard trees since 2019,
trees that could fall into our electrical equipment
and result in potential ignitions.
And we annually are clearing brush around poles on nearly a
100,000 poles more than 100,000 poles.
We've also redesigned our inspection programs,
integrating with modeling and do our prioritization and move
beyond just a time-based compliance based approach.
We started these risk informed ground inspections in 2018,
but experienced quickly caught up that we needed to expand
these to include aerial inspections for a full 360 degree
inspection of our facilities.
Last year we performed these detailed inspections
from the ground and air on nearly 200,000 facilities
and we expect similar numbers this year.
We currently expect that we'll be meeting nearly all of our
WMP targets this year.
So we are diligently working on welfare risk reduction,
challenges persist in terms of its permitting time to permit
supply chain issues and resource constraints.
But as a company,
we continue to find ways to surmount these challenges,
to stay on track with our goals.
If they just carefully selected set of mitigation,
coupled with advances in risk modeling and prioritization
are designed to compliment each other and to significantly
mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
So far, most of what I've talked about,
really just activities.
Let's talk a little bit more known outcomes
if we can refer to slide six, please.
So first in 2021 circuits with cover conductors have
experienced 69% fewer electrical fault.
Electrical fault being the source of ignition inducing
sparks as compared to bear focus and our high fire areas.
In fact, on those segments where we have covered,
we're covered the bare conductor,
we have not experienced a single CPUC reportable ignition
from contact with objects or wired wire contacts,
which are the major sources of ignition on our system
and which is what covered conductor really is designed and
what we're using it to put that.
Second, there've been 50%,
fewer vegetation cause fault than the historic average in
SCE high fire risk areas.
This can be attributed largely to
our expanded vegetation management programs,
but complemented with more frequent inspections
and the grid hardening work that we're doing.
Additionally due to our risk informed inspection program,
we've remediated over 36,000 findings and year over year
have reduced findings by two thirds,
a strong indication of the program's effectiveness.
If we can turn to slide seven please.
On the other side of things,
I wanna acknowledge that thus far,
we have not seen a noticeable decline in the number of
ignitions in 2020 and 2021 as compared to prior years,
we believe that this is the result of the recent drought and
dry fuel conditions that we've had across our system,
as well as our improved ability to detect
and report on smaller ignitions
and the fact that we are not finished
with our grid hardening efforts.
In fact, we have still a fair amount more to go
over the coming years.
Also as you can see from the bar chart,
ignitions outside high fire areas have grown more quickly
than in high fire areas.
This happens sometimes when abnormally high
temperatures can cause equipment
such as transformers to fail,
which lead to sparks and can lead to ignition.
Perhaps most importantly,
the consequences of wildfires associated with our equipment
have been substantially reduced
and comparing 2019, the 2019-2020 period
to the prior two years of 2017 and 18,
we've had 60% less acres burned
and 94% fewer structures destroyed.
The implementation of our WMP going forward
will substantially reduce more wildfire
risks and help protect public safety.
But it's not just about our mitigation.
I do want to acknowledge the efforts of the state and our
firefighters for the impact they have had in these
improvements and managing the size of wildfires
when they started.
Supporting the public on welfare safety goes beyond just
hardening the grid.
We also helped keep our customers and community informed and
prepared for wildfire related emergencies,
supporting them with programs and services at the engages
with approximately 1600 different
community-based organizations,
Statewide and locally and partners with many nonprofit
organizations that it's this underserved communities to
better support wildfire preparedness, first responders,
capacity building and resiliency and disaster recovery.
SCE is also supporting the readiness and response efforts
of local fire agencies.
In June, SCE paid for the leases
of three suppression helicopters
through the end of the year,
two of which are among the world's largest capacity.
These resources are unique and that they can fly day and
night and are strategically stationed
across SCE service area
and made available to various jurisdictions,
resisting fire agency partnerships
and coordinating agreements.
For example, the health needs will deploy
to the Calgary fire on August 18th last week
and I've conducted a number of day and night missions
dropping over 100,000 gallons of water in retardant.
Finally, I want to address the public safety power shut off.
So PSPS, so I see move to slide eight appreciate that.
PSPS remains an important tool of last resort
in protecting the public safety in mitigating
wildfire risk under extreme weather conditions,
especially as grid hardening efforts are still underway.
We recognize the burden,
it places on our customers and communities.
It made significant efforts ever to improve.
In 2020,
we could deploy more isolating devices and weather stations
and develop an innocent switching playbook for every single
circuit in high fire risk area.
This helped us reduce PSPS event durations by 12% that year
46% of the circuits that would be energized in 2019,
we're not be-energized again in 2020.
So those circuits be energized in both years.
We impacted 36% fewer customers on average.
With the ability to be more targeted in our DNR stations,
our largest events in 2020 impacted 37% fewer customers
than our largest event in 2019.
Now, despite these strides forward,
we recognize there is still room for improvement.
In January President Batjer directed us to address
several priority items for improvements to our PSPS program
and invited us to a public meeting like one of these,
to hear direct feedback from our agency partners
and impacted communities,
we appreciated the candid feedback
received during the public meetings.
We, I, Kevin listened intently to the Commission
customers and our public safety partners,
and we've been acting SWIFTly,
double down on our efforts to enhance our PSPS program
with that input in mind.
The action plan we develop built upon the foundational work
that SCE completed in 2019 and 2020
to improve our PSPS program and increases our focus
on the customer experience.
Since January SCE has made significant progress
on the execution of our PSPS action plan
and at this time we are 78% complete with the deliverables.
A key focus needs to be in reducing the need for PSPS,
especially for the customers and communities
impacted most frequently.
As we rebuild of our efforts to celebrate the
installation of 700 miles of coverage conducted this year,
we expect to reduce customer outage time by 70% for the
customer who've experienced four or more the energization
since 2019, assuming the same weather and fuel conditions
of last year.
Additionally, we've removed 81,000 customers
from PSPS consideration altogether for this year
by reconfiguring circuits
and analyzing latest location specific fire risk.
We also focused on mitigating the impacts
to our customers during events,
especially for our AFN or access and functional needs
customers, including through deployment of backup batteries.
The qualified medical baseline customers
were on track to achieve 5,000 battery installations
by October, 2021.
And we expect to be reaching
a customer participation rate of
40 to 50% by the end of the year,
which is a significant increase
from where we were last year.
We're also working to improve coordination and communication
with our partners and customers.
We've launched the new public safety power public safety
partner portal met with our 13
county emergency management offices,
met with our critical infrastructure customers,
including water and telecoms.
We've also automated much of our notifications to improve
and improve the actual messaging for customers.
Now that I've discussed the work that keeps the public safe,
particularly around wildfires.
We'll turn to the safety of the people
who perform that work.
I'll go ahead and hand it over to Andrew Martinez my
colleague to discuss some of our efforts on worker safety,
both for employees and contractors Andrew.
-: Thank you, Steven good morning, everyone.
Our safety programs are designed
to minimize all types of injuries.
The priority focus is to reduce the number
of serious injuries and fatalities.
Can we have the next slide, please, thank you.
We do this by implementing a risk based safety program to
continually assessing performance.
We also balanced our safety programs
they focus on culture and secure ownership,
very holistic approach to advancing progress.
Next slide please, thank you.
I would like to open the performance discussion by saying we
are grateful that we have not experienced a single employee
or contractor fatality in over a year,
and I have not encountered an
employed fatality since 2016.
This year through July,
we continue to see measure improvement in contractors,
serious injuries and fatalities and DART rate,
including 14% and 48% respectively
when compared to July, 2020.
However, the contractor fatalities in the 2018
to 2020 period and the near misses for both employees
and contractors partly are a somber reminder
that further improvement is still needed.
We have made progress in reducing employee,
serious injuries or fatalities over the past seven years
barring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
This is reflected in our 20% improvement year to date
compared to our seven year performance average in this area.
Aside from the serious injuries and fatalities,
we also measure OSHA classified workplace injuries,
including DART level injuries,
which are injuries that result in employees
taking days off of work,
having restrictions to the work they can perform for
requiring transfer to a different job.
Although our DART employee rate has significantly improved
from 10 years ago,
our performance has recently pled to falling short at the
industry average and top porch health performance,
which remains our goal.
We continue focus on improving dark performance by
strengthen our safety culture
and our risk based safety programs.
We have incurred some challenges and have identified a
handful of drivers that are contributing to our work
for safety performance.
First, the significant increase in work volumes
as we ramp up wildfire mitigation efforts
alongside the unique pressures
introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in
increased worker stress and fatigue.
We are continuously learning while executing this new
wildfire mitigation work,
and we update our work methods and standards accordingly.
These changes can introduce some certainty
and distraction to our workforce.
Also, we know rising temperatures,
not only lead to more wildfire risks,
but as a recent study from UCLA Luskin school showed they
also lead to increase worker injury risks.
So we continue to make progress
on improving our safety culture.
Our 2020 safety culture assessment
indicates opportunities to increase leader safety,
ownership and engagement.
On the contractor side,
we're experiencing challenges with resource limitations
as we significantly scale up our wealth,
our mitigation efforts further compounded by a migratory
workforce that is unfamiliar with quirky and Southern
California has been a territory
or with our policies and procedures.
Next slide please, thank you.
First thank you approach is grounded in our leaders,
learning from leading indicators then incident and using
data to enhance our safety programs by systematically
identifying and reducing this.
Our leaders and workers have unfiltered discussions
about thinking incidents and finding,
creating this culture of being able to discuss issues
candidly and in a timely manner is critical to improving
psychological safety, for better outcomes
for worker and public safety areas.
As we do in our operational work and planning,
we use a continuous learning and data driven approach in
developing our safety programs,
anchors of our approach to eliminate serious injuries
and fatalities for employees including
our risk based safety program,
which evaluates and prioritizes serious injury
and fatality risks to identify
and implement risk mitigation strategies,
systematically reducing risk across high hazard work.
For example, working around energized electrical equipment
or working at heights,
our job houses for serious injury or fatality inventions,
which equips frontline workers and leaders with critical
controls to mitigate risks on the job
and our cause evaluation program,
which drives continuous learning through cause evaluations
for serious injuries and fatalities and incidents as the
potential to be serious injury or fatality.
Implementing corrective actions, reducing future risks.
Next slide please.
-: Mr. Martinez, I'm just briefly going to interrupt you.
I'm just gonna ask that at the presenters,
please speak a little slower and clearly so that our Spanish
interpreters are able to translate all the information.
Thank you.
-: No problem.
So here on slide 12,
we'll see how many of the challenges we are addressing in
the worker's safety performance area,
particularly with our contractors,
we continue to see some contractors, safety,
quality and compliance incidents,
despite progress in strengthening
and Southern California Edison's contractor program.
This reinforces the need for further improvements
for our contractor management process,
specifically focused on three key areas to increase
accountability and oversight.
This includes standardizing processes
to improve consistency of key functions,
such as contractor quality assurance and Southern California
Edison oversight of contractor fieldwork.
Verifying roles of Southern California,
independent contractor representative can improve
identification and resolution of incidents and further
integrating leading metrics to regular performance meetings
and discussions prevent significant incidents and setting
clear thresholds for action on negative trends.
This year, we have updated
our contractor safety management standards,
to drive accountability through establishing procedures,
training and improvements in safety performance oversight
from prime contractors to their sub contractors
and by year end,
our tier one high risk contractors will be required to
develop thinky culture training for their leaders.
This includes high voltage electrical work,
tree trimming and tree will Moodle activities
as well as aircraft operations,
which brings us to the topic of Southern California's
own safety culture,
which I will turn over to Kevin for discussion.
-: Thanks Andrew so far today,
you've heard a lot about our programs and projects,
and we could talk about many more given more time,
and we look forward to that opportunity in the future
and all of those programs and projects that we discussed
exist to keep people safe.
But as the number of you said in opening comments,
they can't be effective without a strong foundation
of a safety focus culture
and we've been on a journey at SCE of developing a strong
safety culture for many years,
and we have made meaningful progress.
In 2017 we engaged the safety consulting firm
Propulo to continue
our triennial safety culture assessment,
and to help us update and implement our roadmap
for continued improvements.
This assessment in 2017,
it's indicated a culture where
people were making safe choices,
but they were driven to do that because it was expected
in a maturity curve,
kind of a context Propulo refers to that as a public
compliance, rather than a culture of personal ownership,
over safe choices which is called private compliance.
Based on the results of the assessment,
SCE created and implemented and updated safety culture
roadmap and as part of this roadmap,
all leaders and employees were provided safety, culture,
language, concepts,
and tools through cognitive behavioral training
between 2018 and 2020.
The safety culture was reassessed in 2020 as part of our
standing tri-annual review and significant progress was made
in moving our culture up the maturity curve to one,
a private compliance.
The results also identified the next series of action to
continue supporting culture change such as increasing field
leader, safety engagement,
and further emphasizing a culture of speaking up
to raise safety issues.
I would note that many of the safety culture survey
questions in OEIS is recently conducted safety culture
assessment were included in SCEs 2017
and 2020 safety culture assessments and surveys.
So good alignment there.
So SCE seems strong progress
between the 2017 and 2020 assessments
and 78% of the 2020 survey respondents indicated our safety
culture has improved and 75% indicated that they've seen
improvement in safety leadership.
We also think that advancing diversity,
equity and inclusion or DEI is also an important part of
establishing a safety culture.
That's not only physically safe,
but also psychologically safe.
A diverse workforce brings unique perspectives, skills,
and strengths to the issues that we're trying to manage each
day and our culture must enable inclusion
so then each of those voices experience an environment where
they're encouraged and valued.
Part of enabling this kind of
environment is by providing opportunities for people to
engage with each other and leaders on tough issues with
respectful and candid conversation.
Just to share a few examples.
One way we do this is through our annual
and ad hoc safety standup events,
which is where our work groups gather together to discuss
safety issues and concerns and recommit themselves
to safety ownership.
We've also held a small handful of all company livestreams
since the start of COVID that were dedicated to discussing
mental wellbeing and strategies
for managing stress and anxiety
and the top leaders in the company hold monthly,
all company live streams to provide key company updates
and open the door to direct interaction
and feedback from employees.
Advancing DEI has been a priority for many years,
and we're proud of the progress that we've made.
Today we're nearly 70% total workforce diversity.
So I'm a female and or racially or ethnically diverse
and workforce diversity generally meets or exceeds the labor
market availability at all levels.
We were included in the 2020 disability equality index,
the best places to work
and have been on the human rights campaign,
best places to work for LGBTQ equality
for 13 years in a row.
Let me shift now to the topic of accountability.
Accountability obviously starts with the tone from the top,
and that starts with our corporate goals,
which are the same for all SCE employees, including me,
a significant of our executive officers target total direct
compensation is variable year to year,
meaning that most of their compensation is at risk and
dependent on meeting safety or financial stability goals,
both short term and long-term.
The safety and operations committee of the
board provides input on operational goals.
I mentioned earlier,
which our directors include in our corporate goals
after year end, they evaluate our performance
and achieving these goals
and in addition to the corporate goals,
executives must also achieve individual goals.
Each executive is held accountable for the results in their
area and for the team as a whole,
the performance of senior vice presidents and more senior
officers is reviewed directly by the compensation and
executive personnel committee of our boar.
SCEs approved executive incentive compensation structure as
required by AB 1054, promote safety as a priority insurers,
public safety and utility financial stability,
and includes measurable and enforceable performance metrics.
As part of their review of bulk performance,
the compensation and executive personnel committee has the
discretion to deduct from executives,
incentive compensation for significant safety events,
which it has done in each of the past five years.
As the CEO of this company,
I'm directly involved in holding
our executive officers accountable,
and we are accountable for the safety of each of our
coworkers, contractors, our customers
and of course the public.
-: Hey Kevin excuse me for one second.
Could you give us specifics about the five instances
where there've been deductions
for significant safety events.
-: Certainly, just a moment if I can get to, so
Sorry, I'm trying to come up with the specifics of it,
which I'll do Commissioner Rechtschaffen basically just to
shine a little more light on this while I'm looking for the
specific circumstances we have, of course, 50% of our goals,
2021 are based on safety and resiliency
and I think we've provided that information
in some of our recent filings
and so those things are scored
based on our level of achievement, of course,
but there are some things that may not get fully captured
in those goals, such as,
fatalities or injuries to the public based on system
failure, those kinds of incidents
and when those kinds of incidents occur,
the compensation committee takes those into account
and provides additional deductions in some cases
for all employees
and in some cases for officers of companies
responsible for those particular areas.
So for example, in some of the years,
you saw the data earlier where we showed contractor
fatalities or in earlier years, even employee fatalities
and in those years there were deductions taken in some cases
to the incentive compensation for the entire company
and in some cases for officers and senior officers,
I could give you some examples,
maybe this would help and,
you can tell me how much more you'd like to hear,
but in 2020 there was a 13 point deduction.
So this is based on an overall target for all,
but corporate goals of the 100.
There were, we had three contractor fatalities
and a third-party contractor,
serious injury who interacted with the electric system
and our SIP injury weight rate for our employees
was lower than our target.
So in that case in 2020 there was a 13 point deduction.
In 2019 similarly we have contractor fatalities
and a transformer failure that injured
a member of the public in that year,
there was a 14 point deduction.
So I could go through all of those if you like,
but those are the.
-: Okay no that's helpful.
So for the scale, just for order of magnitude,
is that essentially a 14% deduction of the 50% components
for safety and resiliency?
Is that or is that overly simplistic,
just in terms of the overall impact
on a compensation package,
what does the 13 point deduction mean?
-: Yeah, that's a good question.
So if you think of the incentive compensation as the
variable pay for a given year,
the variable pay is adjusted up and down based on the,
all of the corporate goals
and there is a target, an overall target of 100.
It could be less than that.
It could be more based on performance against the goals,
the adjustments that I just referred to are
after that assessment is done,
going back and looking at what kinds of safety outcomes may
not have been adequately captured
and further reductions taken and so this,
in the case of I'll just use myself as an example,
in the case of a 13 point deduction
against the target of 100,
that would be a 13% reduction in the variable pay or
incentive compensation for that year.
-: Thank you.
-: Good well, I was just about to end and
I do wanna say maybe the most important thing
that I'm gonna say today,
which is that our commitment to safety is unwavering
and we are dedicated to continuously improving,
I hope that through this meeting and all the other
interactions that we have together,
you see the depth and the breadth of the efforts
that we're putting in,
and we are driving until we get those outcomes that we're
looking for safety and the work that we're doing
pursuant to it is that the core of our business,
whether it's employee safety, contractor safety,
or public safety, and it is our highest priority.
So I just wanna thank you for the opportunity
to give you this information today.
I know it probably triggers a lot of questions,
which we're looking forward to taking.
So I'll just end there and welcome your questions.
-: Thank you, Mr. Payne, Mr. Powell, and Mr. Martinez,
I will open it now to the questions
from the virtual dais, Commissioner Rechtschaffen
-: Kevin, could you go back to slide three?
I wanna ask you a couple of some questions about the
safety oversight committee, as this,
so you said you meet six times a year.
Let me ask you, has the composition,
or mission of that changed after AB 1054 was passed and
or in light of the past two or three years
of wildfire activity?
-: Do you mean a, Commissioner do you mean the composition
in terms of the members or.
-: Members the area of expert.
Member the area of expertise,
their interaction with executive leadership,
the operation of that committee?
-: I would maybe start by saying
that our safety and operations committee
has been with us for a long time.
It has always been a very significant focus for our board
and certainly over the last four to five years as,
the risks associated with catastrophic wildfires
became more and more evident,
their focus became much more intense there as did the
companies and the leadership of the company.
We make sure that we have members
from our overall board of directors.
There are five members, as I mentioned
of the safety and operations committee who have relevant
and specific experience usually from other industries.
But we actually also have one
that has utility experience as well
and they bring those kinds of leadership approaches
to us and challenge and test our approach
to improving our own safety, culture and safety performance
by bringing that outside experience and it is a very deep
and sort of challenging interaction that we have with them,
because this is that important to us.
And we have made some changes to the composition of it,
but I wouldn't say that it was specifically because of 1054.
It was our ongoing focus on employee
or worker in public safety.
-: Okay so for example, do you meet more frequently
now that PSPS occur more frequently and that we're in a
year long wildfire situation and then secondly,
you alluded to this a little bit,
do you have people who specialize in different types of
risks that the utility faces?
-: We don't, I mentioned we meet at least six times a year
and the committee meetings like the 16 operations committee
usually formally occur the day before the board meeting,
we also have many other interactions.
So I would say we have increased the number of meetings
for things like reviewing the wildfire mitigation plans
and before we submit them,
you obviously had some interaction with Mr. O'Toole,
who the chair of our safety and operations committee before
today to ensure that we have alignment between management
and across the board on our safety performance
and how we characterize that.
So we have, I would say many more interactions with them,
but still roughly those six formal meetings that coincide
with our board meeting schedule.
-: Did they get out of the field, the board border directors,
they meet with staff.
-: They, I would say prior to COVID,
there was significantly more of that.
They are all,
I wouldn't say it's something that they do every month,
but prior to COVID and the concerns about travel and,
making sure we keep our workforce safe and them safe,
they would visit the field and they would
talk to people about safety
and many other issues and kind of make their
own assessment of what they're hearing and seeing.
I would say there's been less of that
obviously with COVID,
but I know they're looking forward to getting back to that
as soon as they can.
-: One last question about the board.
Are you okay with my suggestion that members of the safety
committee come to meet with us and accompany,
you in future iterations of these discussions.
-: Sure of course.
-: Okay, I have two questions about safety culture
are two things I wanted to say.
First of all, I wanna compliment you
about your emphasis about how diversity equity
and inclusion is an important part of
inculcating, a safety culture in the organization.
It's really critical that that not be seen as isolated
and that safety not be seen as isolated,
and that they'd be part and parcel of a comprehensive
discussions I think that's a point very well taken.
Thank you for that.
I think it was last year when we talked about safety
culture, maybe it was a year and a half ago,
and we asked you about where you are on the spectrum
and you said Edison has a long way to go.
Do you recall that or that you were very,
you were very immature or immature or something like that?
-: You mean, sorry, Commissioner,
in terms of safety culture specifically?
-: In terms of going beyond the letter of law,
a letter of law and yes,
and complying and doing things voluntarily,
having a broad sense of safety culture.
Do you recall that conversation?
-: I don't recall the specifics of it,
but I can see where you're headed
and I may very well send that.
-: Well, I take it from what you said today
that you feel like
there's now more private compliance and public compliance
that you at a more mature stage, is that fair?
-: Yes, absolutely that's what the results of our 2020 survey
seemed to indicate.
But I would also say that that puts us in a maturity curve
perspective on safety culture that puts us to the,
into the middle of the maturity curve
and maybe slightly to the right of it.
So there is significantly further for us to go
and we're nowhere near the end of our
safety culture journey.
-: Thank you, that's all Carolina for me.
-: Commissioner Shiroma.
-: Yes thank you.
Thank you, thank you, Mr. Payne
and to your vice-president Powell and Martinez
that a very excellent presentation
and it's clear that there are many, many,
many important efforts going on.
Now in terms of overall governance, like I took a perusal
of your bylaws, the compensation,
executive personnel charter,
the safety committee charter,
and just a couple of observations in so far as
(clears throat)
well all of these tremendous efforts were going on.
Any of us are here for a time
and then somebody else takes their place
and what governs are those words on the pages
that are constantly referred to
and so, for example,(clears throat)
I did look to see if it's just simply the word safety was in
the compensation and executive personnel charter
in the bylaws.
Just made a simple search, certainly risk is certainly,
but I didn't find the word safety.
Now it is, of course there's a safety committee.
The safety committee does a lot of reviewing and monitoring
and so I wanna hear just a little bit more about how the
recommendations come about through that committee.
Now in the corporate guidelines, here again no safety
we've a mark of the company safety and legal compliance,
and this is a hex program and its relationships
with its stakeholders.
That's good, I did notice though,
in those corporate governance guidelines,
that there are just,
there are review and monitor financial operations
review and evaluate major policies to keep those.
When it comes to safety it's simply monitoring,
again, what it is will the board of directors,
or do the board of directors,
review these guidelines, review their charters,
and what have you towards looking at the updating
and the emphasis with meaning is it,
when you actually have the word safety in these things
and whether they are raised in profile,
that is the governing principles
for those who are ultimately in charge.
So my question for you is, well,
the safety committee reviews and monitors,
how do recommendations come about at the highest level
of the governing hierarchy?
-: Okay that's a great question.
-: And is an opportunity to review these charters
and update them,
or at least consider updating with that emphasis on
safety besides risk, thank you.
-: Thank you, Commissioner Shiroma,
We certainly will take the opportunity to review the
charters and look at it through the lens
that you're looking at it through.
Hopefully this will shed a little bit of light
on how the board interacts with management on safety.
So foundationally as the CEO of the company,
of course, I'm responsible with,
along with my leadership team for safety performance,
our job is to identify the risks, assess the risks,
develop plans, develop programs,
develop the things that we need to do
to get good safety outcomes.
So management's job is to the full range of things
from identifying the risks
to mitigating the risks and everything in between
the board's job and the safety
and operation committee's job is
and it may be why you're seeing the words a little bit
differently there, the board's job is oversight,
which is a bit different from management.
So, but I will tell you that our board overall,
and also in particular,
our safety and operations committee
is very heavily engaged in challenging,
and bringing us the breadth of their experience
across the whole range of safety issues
and what this looks like is that when we're facing,
when we're identifying safety risks,
when we're experiencing problems with safety or performance,
that is not up to our standards,
or if we're putting into place much bigger programs like
wildfire mitigation, for example,
the board and the safety and operations committee,
their job is to make sure that we're thinking
about all the right things that we've identified,
all the right risks that we've assessed them appropriately,
that we have thought about it in a broad enough context,
and that we have put actions and programs into place that
will ultimately get us better outcomes and reduce risk
across the board.
So subtle point that their,
their job isn't to go do it and get it done.
That's my job and my team's job, but their job is,
is oversight to make sure that we have assessed it correctly
and that we're addressing all the things
that need to be addressed
and I will tell you that they do it in a very,
I will say, intrusive in a good way,
intrusive and challenging manner
and we get the full breadth of their experience
as leaders of other companies
and in some cases in other industries
where they've faced really significant challenges,
one thing just to maybe point to,
as an example of that is Tim O'Toole,
who's the chair of our SOC was in the transportation
industry and he used to run the London underground
and he was so obviously lots of
sort of parallel safety issues
and it was first worked for us and all that kind of thing
that said he can bring us lots of insight on,
on top of that,
he's on the board of the national safety council,
where he gets a tremendous amount of experience
and other information
and he also had to deal with really unusual things
like the bombing in the London underground.
He was running the London underground
at the time that that happened.
So those are the kinds of people
that we have on our safety operations committee
and they bring that breadth of experience to us to enhance
what we're doing internally here within management,
hope that, does that get a part
of what you were looking for Commissioner?
-: It does and really my perspective is that
tremendous that Mr. O'Toole
is part of the board of directors.
He's chairing the safety committee.
He brings his experience or what,
but what happens when he's replaced
and where's the continuity in the charters to really
emphasize the core value, safety, it simply,
it's worth a look by your board of directors
to see that they are emphasizing the things you need to
emphasize at the very highest levels in the bylaws,
in the well, in the charters, in these guidelines.
But thank you thank you.
-: Thank you, thanks for making that point.
our values endure safety is our number one value.
We will take a look at the charters as I said,
and we will also always make sure that on our board
and on our safety and operations committee,
that we have a relevant and valuable experience
to help guide our safety journey.
Thank you, thank you for your questions.
-: Commissioner Houck.
-: Two questions.
One, I know you're talked
in response to Commissioner Rechtschaffen
question about committee members getting out in the field.
What role or does executive leadership ever get out in the
field beyond meeting with the safety committee and what kind
of engagement do you have with the staff and the folks that
are out in the field to see firsthand what's happening
and then can you discuss a little bit how you're addressing
the severe impacts we're seeing from climate change in
regards to reconceptualizing
operating conditions on safety issues?
-: Okay, good questions.
I'll take those in order Mr. Houck.
So yes, part of our safety program is having
even our top executives get out into the field.
One of the foundational things about safety culture and a
safety program is observations from leaders at all levels
and just to give you an example,
after we did the 2017 safety culture assessment,
one of the big initiatives that we had was we brought in all
of our executives and put them through a series of training,
both in terms of how to visit the field and be around
hazardous equipment and construction and do it safely.
But also what kinds of questions to ask when they get there
and how to do what we call safety observations
in a way that is helpful.
We think it's powerful for our employees to see the top
leaders of the company in the field, talking to them,
finding out what their attitudes are about safety,
making sure that to some degree, they're,
strict adherence to safety rules and,
protective equipment and that sort of thing
is typically more the role of first
and second and third line supervision.
But our executives know how to look for that as well.
We have a term called critical observable actions,
that we try to arm people with so that when they go out to
the field, they know what to look for.
They know how to kind of assess whether our people,
are doing all the things that they're supposed to be doing.
The more important part of that though,
is seeing executives in the field,
tells our employees that safety really is our number one
value, and it is important
and they know that we care about it deeply
enough to spend our time on it
and that may have been kind of the source of your question
and if it was you're absolutely right.
So we have that as part of our program,
I will admit in full transparency that COVID has impacted
our ability to do that over the year and a half,
but many of our executives,
are still going out to the field, still doing observations
and as the pandemic subsides,
and it's more safe to do it more broadly,
we will go back to where we work for,
which has significant presence out in the field.
So climate changes was your second question
and that's a very big topic of course,
I mentioned at the beginning that,
we see things that relate to climate adaptation that needs
to be done urgently now
and we see things that need to be planned for
a much different future going forward.
I think it's clear that
from the extreme weather perspective,
that we have seen a lot more of the impacts of climate
change a lot sooner than anyone thought that we would.
So there are near-term things we're doing like our wildfire
mitigation plans and cover conductor and mitigating the
risks of the extreme weather that we're seeing.
So there is a whole set of things,
in the sort of immediate timeframe,
the next several years that we're doing to try to protect
public and worker safety,
but there's also a whole different body of work,
which says we're gonna see things like sea level rise,
and we're gonna see more,
even more routine extreme weather.
We're gonna see, higher highs in terms of wind, temperature
and maybe lower lows and different kinds of conditions
where we're gonna have to go back
and look at our systems to make sure that it,
is designed and capable of operating
in those more extreme conditions.
So, obviously we're very busy on the near term,
immediate things right now to secure the system
and make it safe,
but we have a whole other stream of work that is focused on
the future of how we adapt
and I would just point out that this is incredibly important
to us because it's important to the state
And I think everybody has seen that we see a vision of the
future that is highly electrified with clean energy flowing
over the grid to fuel things like transportation,
building heating, and cooling and other things,
absolutely critical that we have a capable,
resilient grid that customers will have confidence in
and so we need to secure it and make it safe immediately
and we also need to plan for that very different future
that will come with even more climate change.
So we see that as all part of our responsibility
and things that we're actively working on.
Aceves: Mrs. Carolina I don't know
if you have an order there,
but I just want to let you know,
I have a couple of questions,
this is Commissioner Guzman Aceves.
-: Absolutely Commissioner Guzman Aceves
I cannot see your videos.
So please do go ahead.
Aceves: Yes I apologize
I had some technical issues this morning.
Thank you and just to maybe build off of what
was just said by Kevin,
which is the need to adapt our practices,
obviously major, wake up, call here,
as you're saying on the pace of which we were behind on.
And maybe this is a question for Andrew
on the workforce side of it
and one of the things that we're obviously
in addition to safety,
and also I'm gonna ask my questions are a little bit
tangental to each other, but let me just,
if you will ask them and you can take a shot at it, Andrew,
or, but the issue obviously that you highlight here is the
worker safety and the need to things like having less
extended work hours for contractors
and just as an example here, but my question is,
are we at a place where we're recognizing that we need more
employees, more direct hires?
Is that a strategy instead of just more oversight of your
contractors, which of course is important,
but recognizing the need of a greater amount of workforce,
not only to be hardening the system,
but to be out in the field at all times, of course,
where there's many investigations still occurring,
but one of the questions I have is are these contractors is
this workforce it's hardening the system,
the same workforce that can respond to the identification
of let's say an ignition source
to try to prevent an ignition
from becoming a catastrophic wildfire.
Is this the kind of, just to say all of that one,
are you hiring more employees directly?
Are you stepping back and seeing we need to actually keep
this workforce year round?
And you've already said,
of course the fire season is year round now
should we reexamined the practice of contractors
versus direct hire that's one question, second question
is this the same workforce,
is there overlap or is it the same workforce that is being
responsive to ignitions and finding obviously prevention
is highlighted in your presentation,
but they also are, I assume, in the field
and can be responsive to finding ignition
sources and preventing spread
and so those are two and then after that's the answer,
they have very small question clarifying question for Steve
on his comment on some of the helicopters, okay.
-: Oh, great thank you Commissioner.
If its okay I'd like to maybe get started with this one
and then there's a portion of this that I think Steve would
be well-suited to answer
and then Andrew can fill in as well.
So on your first point about contract versus direct,
and are we hiring more employees we have with the increases
in workload, we have hired some more employees.
We still maintain a posture where about half of our
distribution work, for example,
is done by contractors and about half of it is
done by our internal forces and from time to time,
we think through and revisit the mix between our employees
and our contractors
and typically the reason why you would use a large number of
contractors would be for work
that you don't necessarily see going on forever.
It would be maybe more cyclic work that would ramp up and
then ramped down in,
a several year period or repeats maybe even slightly longer
and that avoids the,
sort of the hiring and laying off kinds of
things that you see,
if you try to do a much higher percentage with employees.
So maybe I would ask Steve to just make a few comments on
our assessment of contract versus direct employees
and then we can go from there into, is this,
are these the same workers?
We actually have linemen who do the work
on the electric grid
and then we also have inspectors
and other kinds of job classifications,
who help find potential sources of emissions.
So Steve, would you mind weighing in on that a little bit?
-: Sure Kevin, so with respect to,
contract workforce versus internal employees,
as Kevin mentioned, the programs that,
we have to look at each program,
and figure the right way to resource it,
how long will it exist?
Cover conductors is a great example,
where we have a few years of a lot of work to do
so to address that we really had to bring in
a lot of contractors to help build up a workforce,
to execute on that you can move to
an employee-based workforce,
if you have the ability to wanting to do it
for many, many years,
but we're constantly re-evaluating that the balance between
how much do we hire internally
and how much do we do we contract out.
Now there's a lot of base,
reliability and other work that will grow over time
and so we will be,
we will need to hire more field resources as well as support
behind it to manage that.
But every time we go in for I'd say,
contract reevaluations or contract renewals
with those contractors,
we're looking again at that balance of resources.
Now that the, as Kevin mentioned,
the different classifications of work,
you've got a separate set of inspectors that are out doing
the risk informed inspections from the ground,
from the air to identify potential sources of ignition.
Then you've got the teams that are responding to faults
or outages that happen on the ground.
So you'll send a troubleman out, still investigate those.
They're both looking at how do they fix the problem there,
but they're also looking for other hazards
that are on the system.
The line workers that are out regularly,
building new infrastructure, replacing infrastructure
you know their primary job is,
not to go identify hazard, but while they're out there,
we're training all of our workers to be risk aware
and habit aware.
In fact, those line workers that are doing a lot of that
construction for our, as our employees
a couple of years ago,
when we really launched our risk
and performance inspections,
we actually sent out those qualified electrical workers to
perform the inspection.
When we inspected all of the structures in high fire areas
over about a six month period.
So there's a balance of roles across there.
Our roles are to inspect the system to maintain it,
to build new infrastructure, generally speaking,
but it's not the role of those employees to go and,
put out fires as they start after an ignition.
If they're out doing work and there's these small ignition,
they are equipped,
with fire extinguishers and other things to deal with it.
But those can go rapidly in extreme conditions
that are willing to rely on firefight resources
to support that work.
-: Just to clarify this.
-: So go ahead Commissioner, I just want to,
make a quick time check for everybody
as we are running a 10 to 15 minutes behind.
So just to be mindful of the time and we will be shifting to
SDG&E presentation in 15, 10 minutes.
Aceves: Okay, thank you.
The question wasn't to put out any ignition,
the question is to identify the source,
and since you could have a fault or power outage in one of
your distribution lines
and trying to identify the cause of that
and so that's where who is the workforce
that you deploy out there.
Is it some of these contractors are they direct hires
is it a completely separate team and all.
-: Yeah thank you.
So generally, those are employees
and so the first responders in many cases to an outage or an
ignition is the troublemen and the trouble men will
do the initial diagnosis of what may have happened.
Is there something that's obvious there, if the trouble man,
isn't able to diagnose it,
we have a team team of engineer and we have a common
evaluation process and close assigned to an engineer that
then is evaluating the data and the information to see if
they can understand the cause
and then there are tiers to that process
and so we've really grown that inspection analysis process
and cognitive evaluation process
significantly over the last few years.
So that every single ignition that happens is we're,
we're getting to ultimately what the cause is and,
there's tiers that we work through that that bring in more
and more engineers,
but there is a first responder workforce,
that gets to initial cause,
and then we've got engineers to support them.
I know like those are the
Southern California Edison generally.
Aceves: Okay thank you.
So it sounds like it's a separate workforce?
-: Than the ones that are constructing the equipment, yes.
-: Yeah just for clarity.
I mean, they just have different, slightly different roles.
There are larger crews whose job it is to go out
and string cover conductor, replace poles,
do that kind of thing.
There are what you see referred to as troublemen,
who are the ones who are investigating,
if there's an outage going out
and making sure that it's safe,
getting the power back on where they can kind of identifying
the work that needs to be done.
So they're kind of the, in a sense,
they're kind of the first responders of alignment
and maybe that's a good way to think about it.
There are usually quite experienced and they understand how
the system is designed and they're able to troubleshoot it
to try to figure out where the problem might be coming from.
Aceves: Okay thank you.
I'll keep my other ones we'll follow up via email.
Thanks Carolina.
-: Thank you, Commissioner Guzman Aceves.
Are there any other questions from the virtual guys?
Caroline: Yes Carolina this is Caroline
and I got a couple questions.
-: Please.
-: So Mr. Payne, appreciate that
you've made several comments about how the board and the SOC
specifically has comprehensive safety background
and experience and offers recommendations.
Can you give us a couple of specific examples
of how they use,
that experience and then provided specific recommendations
that would actually detailed the recommendations
and how that was then implemented by the,
as you mentioned the folks that go
and implement those at recommendations?
-: Yes, certainly actually I can offer a few
and then Steve can offer a few as well.
Maybe, one that I would offer is
when it comes to our employee safety data,
one of the things that the SOC has pushed us a lot on is are
we getting full value from using our metrics to identify
leading indicators and there thereby having the ability to
get out in front of safety issues and in particular,
our board chair for example,
is also on the SOC and he has extensive experience in
manufacturing and the technology company
and so one of the things that he has pushed us
really hard on is,
don't make sure you're looking at the metrics
with the right level of granularity so that,
you might look fairly good overall,
but you might have pockets.
Cause he's quite aware that we serve 50,000 square miles.
We have 35 different service centers or regions that we
operate and that you could have a number of them that are
operating very well and getting very good safety outcomes,
but then you might have some others that aren't,
and those could be the places where you would see the
leading indicators for potential serious injury
or fatality coming.
So he has if Steve,
you could come in a little bit more on this too,
but he's pushed us on,
make sure you have all the metrics that you need that are
real leading indicators and make sure you're looking at them
in a granular enough way to where you can spot problems with
culture, leadership practices, tools,
anything that might be going on at one location that might
be different from another location
and we've gotten, I think,
a fair amount of value from that.
We've developed some new,
some new Pete maps and charts
and things that I think are giving us some more insight
that maybe was being a little bit masked before.
So that's one example they have,
with some of the issue, I'll give just one other example,
and then we'll see if Steve, if you have one,
but another more recent one is we've actually done pretty
well for a number of years in terms of employee fatalities
and some improvements in serious injuries.
But we struggled on the contractor side
and so because these folks are in many cases, ex CEOs,
who've dealt with some of these same kinds of contractor
management issues or contracting issues,
they've been able to give us some insight about how to look
at our contractor management processes differently,
or maybe in a more comprehensive way
so that we could try to impact
the safety performance of our contractors more effectively
and so that's an area where that expertise from them
has been, I think, particularly valuable
and Steve could talk about it if you're interested.
But we're in the process now of taking a much more holistic
view of our contractor management to see how we could bring
our safety focus to bear
on the operations of our contractors.
So I don't know, Steve, did I miss any,
or do you have a quick example you wanna add.
-: Maybe just interested at the time,
I'll keep it brief and just point to maybe another area.
So one of our directors has a lot of experience with
and pensions for process engineering
and process re-engineering
and so he's constantly pushing on how are you engineering
the risk out of these situations
and so that's really helped inform what has become a risk
based safety program, where we're taking our highest risk,
most common, serious injury drivers
Andrew had a chart that kind of pointed to some of those
and then breaking them down
and we brought in external expertise,
we'll bring in our engineers together with process experts
to really evaluate breakdown.
What are the engineering solutions we can provide to reduce
and so to reduce those injuries,
we've spent a lot of time early this year on flash injury,
flash incidents in particular
and so coming up with engineering solutions where we can
reduce the fault current that are they the amount of energy
coming through the line much more quickly and set that up in
a way so that the systems actually engineered that we're
much less likely to have a significant energy release,
with the vault.
So we're now moving to execution of that
and make an investment to improve our worker safety
and then it's as well as the other practices around,
I say, similarly, human performance elements
that helped with flash incidents,
but it's really they're pushing
each of them brings a different lens and expertise
based on how they've approached it
and this particular director really forced that process
engineering and has really driven us to go risk by risk
and do a detailed analysis with all the experts
and come up with a list of mitigation that we're deploying.
So we'll kind of working our way through,
our highest list type of sentiments right now.
-: Thank you that's really helpful.
Last second question and I'll keep it just to the two,
kind of we're short on time.
I appreciated the review.
I think this was from Mr. Martinez of the metrics
that you guys are tracking.
Can you speak a little bit and Mr. Payne or whoever's
the right person to answer on what your
specific measurable goals are that you're targeting for
either the end of this year or into 2022,
I'm not quite sure what cycle time period you,
you measure against,
but can you talk us through a little bit of what your
specific measurable goals are,
the targets that you're shooting for in those metrics?
-: Kevin you want me to step in?
-: Yeah I can do it or you can do a Steve.
I mean, the specific things that we have
as measures of success on
our corporate goals, probably a good place to start,
but why don't you go ahead.
-: Yeah So I'll point back to what was,
I believe slide 10 and the table,
that Andrew provided with the safety performance trends
and so every single year, it's not an explicit goal,
but it isn't our foundational ones.
It's always the goal of zero fatalities and so,
and we haven't had, we haven't had any this year
and as Andrew mentioned,
none in more than a year cost worker fatalities
for the employee, serious injury and fatality rates,
our goal for this year is I believe the number of 0.086,
might have difference right Kevin.
-: Sorry I was just,
I have happened to have it on the screen.
I was just agreeing with you yeah
but you got the number, right?
-: Okay, got it.
So 2023, if we're currently,
we're currently slightly ahead of that
and that's our goal for this year,
as we get to the end of the year,
we look at what our performance is for that year
and then we evaluate,
how far do we wanna improve for the subsequent year.
So every year we're looking for improvement over the prior
year or the trajectory that we've seen before.
So we don't have,
we haven't set a number for our goal for 2022 yet,
but we'll assess how big of an improvement do we want
year over year.
For our employee DART rates
and our goal for this year is 0.77,
which is and
it would be a 15 like about 15% improvement over what we
experienced in 2020.
Similarly, every year we look at
how much the improvement is.
So I don't have set targets for the future years because it
depends on how far we've been able to able to get this year.
Those are the ones that are embedded
into our corporate goals
that directly impact compensation.
We don't set specific targets
for the contractor injury rates, but generally, similarly,
we're looking for year over year improvement
from what we've seen here.
-: One follow on question then in terms of metrics.
So those are all worker safety related,
which is really important,
but so safety culture is also all about the customer
and the public that you serve.
Do you guys have set targets on,
let's call it wildfire safety
or outcome-based metrics that
you're targeting internally?
And I guess in terms of number of ignored is put out there.
I get that ignitions obviously could be determined by
weather so from a normalized basis, right?
that even with increase in extreme weather,
that you're tracking that metric to drive down,
improve or drive improvement.
-: Yeah so I'd say we have not come up with a great way yet
to normalize the ignitions in a way that we think gets to,
to it really good goal.
But that said ignitions are important
and they're a really important indicator.
We would hope that ignitions going down
will lead to better outcomes.
So CPUC reportable emissions in high fire areas
is one of them,
one of the measures and our corporate goals for this year,
the last few years,
we have to say to end earlier, but they,
those ranged around slightly under 40
last year in 2020 we had 50
and our target this year is I want to say I don't 42 maybe.
-: 42 that's 42 yeah.
-: Thank you.
-: Thank you everyone thank you Commissioners and presenters.
I just want to do another quick time check
since we are running behind,
we will be having our public common section at 12:15,
just so our public is aware of when to come online.
Are there any other questions?
Thank you everyone.
Commissioners, director, Jacob Thomas and presenters.
We will now hear from San Diego gas
and electric representative, Erbin Keith
chair of the board of directors,
safety committee and Kevin Geraghty,
chief safety officer and senior vice president
of electric operations.
Mr. Geraghty welcome
you are scheduled for 30 minutes
and I will turn it to you now.
-: I believe we're not, oh, go ahead.
Yeah good morning Commissioners my name is Erbin Keith.
I'm the deputy general counsel of Sempra energy
SDG&E parent company.
With me today is SDG&E,
chief safety officer Kevin Geraghty is also senior vice
president for electric operations.
We are pleased to meet with you today
for a safety update briefing.
We established the safety committee of the
SDG&E board of directors in July of 2019,
following the indictment of the senate bill 254.
The purpose of the committee is to advise and assist the
company's board of directors
the oversight of safely providing electric and natural gas
service to our company's customers.
I've served as the chairman of the safety committee
since its inception.
The other members of the committee currently
included Rob Borthwick,
deputy general counsel of Sempra energy and Caroline
ran SDG&Es chief executive officer.
Our committee members have held safety responsibilities
across several companies over many years.
I have held such responsibilities in various roles
in superintendency since 2000.
So our topic today is very near and dear to my heart,
as is the cabinets.
I'd like to share one observation with
you at the outset forming the safety committee of SDG&Es
board of directors was something we did to comply with
AB 1054 however, it's not something we've used
a compliance obligation,
rather the committee as something we've come to view
as an important and meaningful opportunity
to allow the board to do a deep dive
on safety issues with SDG&Es officers,
directors, and managers.
having quarterly meetings that are separate from the full
board meetings in which we receive substantive presentations
and engage in a dialogue with company personnel really
allows the time to reflect upon and guide safety outcomes.
In fact, because of the perceived benefits
of the safety committee,
our affiliate at SoCal gas on its own safety committee,
you can move to slide three.
What I like to discuss with you today is the ongoing work
of the committee,
the committee the key priority is respect to safety.
Is that with respect to safety, is that SDG&Es safe,
electric and gas facilities, work practices and protocols.
So it's work with contractors
and public always remain safe.
As Kevin will discuss safety as a constant challenge in a
business like SDG&E.
SDG&E has thousands of miles of energized electric equipment
and pressurized gas facilities
scattered across a wide service territory.
There are thousands of build employees constantly working at
or near those facilities to operate and maintain them.
Not to mention the fact that these facilities
or any other customers we serve.
Additional challenges are external California
Wildfires are well-known to this Commission as are
other risks associated with climate change.
Our facilities can be impacted by Dig-ins or viewer
contacts, reading Mylar balloons.
We're fortunate to have Kevin as our chief safety officer
dedicated to safety professionals
in a company-wide culture
of identifying and mitigating safety risks
on a constant basis.
The committee's role is somewhat different,
we're not in the field.
Our job is to oversee SDG&Es management of safety issues
and to provide strategic guidance and advice.
To date we've held nine committee meetings.
There are several reoccurring themes to those meetings
into the recommendations we make to the company
after each meeting, I'll briefly cover those things.
First wildfire prevention and mitigation.
This is a topic we cover every meeting
it includes fire season, outlooks red flag and PSPS events,
wildfire mitigation tools, and technologies,
wildfire mitigation plan updates.
Second, we seek to identify and have the company alarm
from safety incidents.
For example, the camp fire, the kincaid fire,
the Columbia gas explosion,
and a battery storage fire in Arizona.
Third, we work with and listen to the views
of community stakeholders.
The committee frequently attends the quarterly meetings of
the wildfire safety community advisory council
that was formed at around the same time
as the committee itself,
which has members from fire agencies, nonprofits,
and local government tribes and academia.
We've received a lot of valuable input from that council.
Work we examine safety metrics, protocols,
and systems for employees, contractors in the public,
such as the safety management system,
serious injury and fatality reporting line work locate Mark
program safety and energized substations
and communications during emergencies.
Fifth we review a safety program through regular audits,
six, we review SDG&Es proposed incentive
compensation plan metrics
to ensure the company's appropriately
incentivizing safety outcomes.
One constant theme across these dramatic areas
is that the committee asks questions that often generate
new presentation topics for upcoming meetings
or new recommendations to the company.
Finally, I'll note that even though it's been a challenge
conducting our safety committee work
in a virtual environment due to COVID, the COVID pandemic.
I think we've been able to overcome
that through our virtual meetings,
the pandemics impact on the SDG&E
and the health and safety of our workforce
and the ability to safely do the kind of field
work we routinely do.
Has it been another issue we've been monitoring
with the company since 2020,
I'm proud of how the company responded to that issue
and before I turn it over to Kevin,
I wanna address the question about board level
accountability for executive officers.
'Cause I know at least one of the Commissioners
had a question about that.
Fundamentally the board has a final say on the CEO
and influence on the selection of officers.
So I think that elite which is fairly clear.
SDG&E offers also have the
compensation plan that includes the annual, variable at risk
compensation that the board approves.
For 2021 at risk compensation is linked as follows,
59% is linked to safety goals 4% of customer service goals,
which I would take a position that's closely related to
safety goals as well,
5% to being of DNA goals, 27% of the financial goals.
I think this is consistent with a utility code codes goal of
promoting safety and utility financial security.
Of the 59% linked to safety goals,
10% is linked to individual safety performance.
Individual performance is evaluated based on the individual
executives safety performance plan,
and the other factors that we've set forth in the executive
compensation compliance filing,
and like SDG&E I mean like so yeah I mean SoCal Edison,
we were trading negative discretion to adjust these numbers
for if the facts and circumstances warranted
and we have exercise that negative discretion in the past,
and those examples are set forth
in our executive compensation compliance filing
with that I'll turnover to Kevin.
-: Thank you Erbin, just a soundcheck.
Am I coming across, okay?
-: You are.
-: Okay thank you and good morning, my name is Geraghty
and I am the senior vice president for electric
operations here at San Diego
and I'm also honored to serve as its chief safety officer
since January of this year.
I started with the company in July of 2020 after more than
30 years in utility operations, most recently,
12 years in Nevada,
where I was responsible for all utility operations there
and I look forward to presenting
all of our safety practices.
Today I have four slides,
one for each of the areas of examination that was requested
and so we're on the first slide,
whether in the area of personal safety
contractor safety or public safety,
SDG&E is focused on a system of safety and practices to
meet our expectation of zero safety incidences.
SDG&E safety management system,
currently being implemented at our first site
has been created using,
many parts from the traditional safety management systems
and you would see in the petrochemical industry,
but also incorporates our experience with OSHA's voluntary
protection program.
Here in San Diego we have four power plant locations
that have achieved OSHA's
voluntary protection program, star status,
and we're pursuing the same thing for our substation
and trans mission infrastructure team.
Regarding leading indicators.
This is our primary focus yep.
All across the safety spectrum.
Things like whether an incident has a potential for serious
injury or fatality things like near misses,
things like peer to peer observations,
behavioral based safety and wildfire risk events.
You can not be the best in safety without changing your
focus to more and more on leading indicators.
Moving on a wildfire, situational awareness is critical,
the most critical part of wildfire management
and first and foremost,
it's accomplished by completing at a minimum,
all of the compliance
vegetation management activities timely,
but also expanding to the greatest extent possible enhanced
vegetation management and secondaries as well in order to
further reducing risk beyond compliance.
Our system operating standard is geared towards wildfire
prevention and not reliability.
We do not allow automatic reclosing
of distribution switches, I think that's important
and the fire potential index guides operations in a way
that requires a visual observation
at the fault location before reclosing
is permitted during elevated fire risk.
Again, I think a very important attribute
and finally when I think about situational awareness,
your using drones for more detailed assessments
of all poles in the high fire threat district
makes a difference as does the expansion of our data
collection capabilities and the tools
we use to make critical last resort decisions
to the energize customers
when it's unsafe to operate overhead systems.
Like to move on to our community collaboration
and Erbin mentioned it already,
but our wildfire safety community advisory council
makes a great difference in innovation here at SDG&E,
through this engagement in collaboration,
we received tremendous guidance and feedback
regarding community needs,
which in turns leads to solutions
that improve our communities.
An example is our successful customer generator program.
This idea originated and was refined through the advisory
council, and I can tell you,
in our most recent advisory council,
the focus from the community was that our work in this space
is not just helping for wildfire resiliency.
One of our advisory committee members,
it just said, hey, look,
there's getting together in the community with SDG&E with
public safety partners is making us more resilient
to other threats our community faces like earthquakes.
Moving to electric system hardening,
our electric system hardening is focused
on our most at-risk areas
and areas that could be hard as it fits.
Is that getting that feedback?
I just wanna make sure whether I should pause.
-: I think we are hearing you okay.
-: Oh, okay thank you.
SDG&E has about 98% of our overhead transmission
infrastructure has been hardened in the most critical part
of the high fire threat district
and we expect to complete that in 2022, by 2026,
we expect that all overhead transmission infrastructure
within the high fire threat district will be completed
and this is important because hardening the transmission
assures that any last resort,
the energy stations are surgical and precise and in specific
areas where the threat can be predicted
and then use it by SDG&E needs weather system
and coordination with our
almost 900 distribution based switches.
I think our risk-based modeling has advanced to include
the threat of a PSPS in the analysis of the risks,
then efficiency in the projects we consider
and this has led to more strategic undergrounding
and more covered conductor systems being identified.
And then finally just to focus on gas
based on engagement with our emergency
management team and between them and our public safety
partners at the SDG&E created crews to be available for
emergency response to any type of gas leak 24/7
and today we have reduced our response time
from what was two to three hours
down to 30 or 40 minutes on average,
next slide please.
Regarding safety outcomes and goals.
2020 was SDG&E best year for personnel safety.
We had record numbers of near misses being reported,
record numbers of jobs observations of being completed.
Our OSHA incident rate, our lost time incident rate,
and our days away restricted or transferred rate achieved
all time best results.
Our OSHA incident rate of 1.54 was an
improvement of 30% from 2016 and similarly,
the lost time incident rate of 0.54
was a 33% improvement since 2016
and then finally our days away restricted and transferred
rate of 0.89 was a 25% improvement since 2016,
we experienced no serious injuries
and no fatalities our last vitality at SDG&E was 2015.
And our goal from an OSHA incident rate perspective is to
achieve top decile performance by the end of 2024
and our targets, our goals,
and future years reflect that glide path.
And to achieve this,
we're focused on reducing sprains and strains,
and especially in new employees
and employees new to their jobs, that is a source
of a significant number of our minor injuries,
pivoting to contractor safety performance.
Likewise,
even with a record number of contract hours
in support of our wildfire mitigation plans,
San Diego experienced its best ever contracted performance
from an OSHA incident rate perspective in 2020,
our class one contract to ocean incident rate was below 1.0,
which is a 50% reduction from 2016
and that was while increasing contract hours,
nearly fourfold.
We did not experience a fatality
and there were three serious injuries.
We use IAS net world to certify the contractors
we work with our leaders in safety.
If you're not familiar with IAS net world,
it's a platform where contracted and performance data and
incident data is collected and shared globally
so that you can make an informed decision
on who you're inviting to work for you and your communities
and our goal with contractors is to deepen our engagement
management and assessment of our contractors in a way that's
really not too different from what's happening here today.
Just this past Monday,
we had a detailed safety review with our vegetation
management contractor executives.
to ensure that we understand that their safety culture
will continue to produce safe results
and not have any ignitions.
Regarding gas system safety,
we made the decision to insource locate and mark work
last year in response to studying our events,
our compliance history,
and that team is performing amazingly well.
2020 we had our most every year
for replacement of gas pipe and
our distribution integrity management plan
that was 51 miles
and we increased our leak check frequency for modern pipe
from every five years to every three years
and then I would note that we also completed our first
pipeline taking enhancement plan project on our line 1600
and something I would love to highlight,
we also ended the year with zero link inventory,
which means at the end of the year,
the calendar moved from 2020 to 2021.
There were no leaks in the San Diego system
requiring to be addressed
and that is a multi-year achievements
of the team here at San Diego.
I'd like to talk about a wildfire risk events.
Our goal is zero emissions
and as we focus on driving down ignition events,
we must find new data to focus our programs on and wildfire
risk events does this for us.
A wildfire risk events is to wildfire risk management.
What near misses are to personnel safety.
Fire risk events,
are outages on our electric system that had the possibility
to create an ignition,
there wasn't actually an ignition
and we think we focus on wildfire risk events,
It gives us the opportunity to learn from all events that
may lead to an ignition much like focusing on
a leading indicator
and it gives us a larger pool of events to better identify
possible trends and issues that can help us on our electric
system in tracking and measuring fires events allows us to
measure the efficacy of our hardening efforts and to
continuously learn from the type of events that are
happening on our system
to improve mitigations going forward,
for instance, we know our work on hardening
our transmission system thus far has reduced
wildfire risk events by almost 83%.
I'd like to talk about emergency management excellence.
We believe our emergency management team is what drives our
excellence in managing public safety,
whether that is from a gas leak to a load curtailment
or to a PSPS of that.
This team is what enables us to work
across company organizations,
to focus on event preparedness management and recovery.
This team is deeply engaged with our public safety partners,
our customer teams, our communication teams,
and our operational teams.
We will hold nine unique tabletop exercises this year
and SDG&E is on track
to become the first investor on utility
in the United States to obtain the only nationally
internationally recognized emergency management
accreditation program in 2022
and in California,
there's only two other agencies that have achieved that
we're not satisfied with being good in that space.
This team, our goal is to be amongst
the very best in the country
and internationally for that matter
and go to the next slide, please.
Regarding challenges and actions.
When I think of the biggest challenge,
I think about the most critical part of safety
and reliability and that's people,
the demand for utility workers is high,
especially in California,
as we focus on the safety of our systems,
building resilience into them,
more also planning and building out those systems of
tomorrow, as we think about climate change
and this is especially true with lines workers competition
for these available resources can put projects at risk and
can limit throughput times.
Retention of our journeymen is important
SDG&E is responding by growing its class of
local line systems and apprentices while also attracting
experienced journeymen where possible
and making sure these new colleagues
are ready to work safely
and to construct safely is critical
and we're blessed to have the best safety partner
in the world,
the international brotherhood of electrical workers.
It can take four to five years to develop
these important line workers.
I'd like to just briefly talk about COVID.
SDG&E has worked with brilliant medical professionals
to stay on top of all the occupational safety measures,
as well as following California OSHA guidance in order to
keep our service and our projects
and support of our communities unimpacted,
to the greatest extent possible we have all,
but our field teams working from home still to this day,
we work intently to keep our field teams in fixed crews
so that we can keep them also isolated
from other crews to the greatest extent possible
and one measurement I think that shows the success of that
is we measure the percentage
of our unavailable field personnel
and so those are colleagues who have either contracted
or been exposed and cannot work from home
and I reached about 3% in the January, February timeframe.
Unfortunately, Delta is causing that to tick back up
this morning, we were just right about 2%,
but in addition to personnel safety,
we've had to be very mindful that our crew about being
supportive of critical facilities that support the fight
against COVID hospitals, labs, testing,
and vaccine storage and distribution centers receive
additional patrols and inspections and our emergency manager
team and our public affairs team stay in contact
with San Diego and Orange county
to maintain awareness of these facilities
and that was heightened during a fire season last year,
I'd like to talk about challenges
and actions in Hardening projects.
The speed for which we can complete Hardening projects is
necessarily limited by the speed for which public project
stakeholders need to review and provide critical input
or approval of those projects.
You know, our ability to execute on more projects
and more rapidly reduce the risk of wildfires
and PSPS will depend on the
ability to find ways to complete these reviews timely
and in parallel with multiple projects
and SDG&Es working with stakeholders
and advancing our planning horizon
to address this,
but risks from climate change and the need to electrify
more of our economy is making this critical reviews,
just a critical step as we look to more rapidly,
make our grid resilience.
I think it's important to know there's also customer fatigue
regarding all of the work necessary to make our grid safer,
more resilient and prepared for wildfires
and climate change, planned outages, vegetation management,
patrols, inspections, helicopter's drones being in the road,
it can and is wearing on communities and customers.
But that is another area where our work with our wildfire
safety and community advisory council
will help us find solutions.
I'll finish in challenges and actions
by talking resources.
Resources are stretched thin right now from contractor
availability to the lines workers and now supply chain.
I just, this morning receiving an update,
on transformers in the supply chain at risk,
but something as simple as getting iPads,
to help our field teams do patrols is starting to be a
challenging lead times are expanding
and it seems like anything with a computer chip these days
is taking longer, much longer to get to the dock.
But our supply management team has stayed on top of all of
these challenges to the greatest extent possible.
I'd like to move to the, to the last line
and this is our safety culture assessment.
So we have not yet received the results.
Actually I think we were seeing them
just minutes before this meeting.
Plus we've not yet received the results recommendations from
the OEIS safety culture assessment at this point,
but we look forward to reviewing it.
I won't set discuss aspects of SDG&Es
safety culture initiative that drives performance.
I think culture is a very hard thing to measure,
and it has many definitions I prefer to,
and they're both from the international
nuclear power operations group
and the first one was around organizational culture.
Organization culture is the shared basic assumptions that
are developed in an organization as it learns
and copes with problems
and I think that's an important part of that learns and
copes with problems.
The basic assumptions that have worked well enough to be
considered valid are taught to new members of the
organization as the correct way to perceive
think, act and feel
and if you notice in that section of that sentence,
it doesn't mention do their jobs or tasks, right?
Proceed, think, act and feel the grit,
the things that lead to great safety culture
and culture is really the sum total of groups learn, right?
It is to the group where character and personality are for
the individual and then further from info or the
international nuclear power organization,
safety culture that is defined as an organization's values
and behaviors modeled modeled by its leaders
and internalized by its members
and that serves to make a safety overriding priority
and I think at San Diego,
we exhibit these traits and safety culture every day
and we do have some recent affirmation.
SDG&E has participated in the national safety councils
biannual safety barometer survey for several years.
The SDG&E has used the results from that survey and
specific comments from previous surveys to improve our
safety culture over time.
In 2020, the results from the survey place SDG&E
within the top 1% of the more than 580 companies
that participated in that survey.
Over 96% of our colleagues at SDG&E participated
in that survey and that's just incredible.
SDG&E has improved in all 58 questions
from the 2018 survey results
and I would point out a few top line notices,
SDG&Es organizational climate was in the top 3%
of participants in the survey
and management participation was in the top 2%
and as info states leaders must model values and behaviors
before forged members will internalize them actions speak
louder than words
and the leaders actions are always being observed
for any conflict with stated values.
At SDG&E senior executives are engaged
in everything about safety every day,
and we meet them and participate in employee safety
committees, weekly and field walks, doc meetings,
literally every month.
Our CEO, Caroline Winn is unwavering
regarding safety and all employees notice
from her direct engagement as CEO
and importantly her career and dedication
at SDG&E and to our communities.
She is driven by zero injuries and zero wildfires
and you will hear that from her,
anytime you're around her and in any meeting you're in.
Her personal engagement makes the greatest of difference in
safety culture at SDG&E.
I can tell you personally that,
vast majority of our communications,
are in regards to us safety,
and it is not uncommon for Caroline to review a near miss,
not an injury, not an event,
but a near miss and particularly follow up on it,
which is sets your sales with culture.
Target zero is our mindset.
We want zero injuries,
zero vehicle incidents, zero wildfires,
and zero emissions and zero gas leaks,
importantly, however, is that we want to get there
by doing the right thing every step of the way.
Measuring safety takes great care by leadership.
You must have the right mix
of leading and lagging indicators,
and you must have a culture where everything good or bad
is reported and examined without fear.
Leaders must be engaged to show mistakes messages
are not received.
We wanna earn achieving zero over time because of the way
we go about doing it through making sure we are looking at
leading indicators and showing that there is no minor issue
that can be ignored if your goal is zero
and we create maintaining unquestioned value for our
organization, like some of the by,
our, one of our key values do the right thing always
and as imposed that stayed on culture,
it is developed through learning shared basic assumptions,
as the organization learns and coach with problems,
you have to accept that there will be imperfections and to
get to be the best you have to learn and cope with those.
I'd like to mention psychological safety.
I think I heard a little bit of that in some of the
questions in the last presentation,
we are firmly focused on psychological safety across the
spectrum, not just a DEI, but also as we focus in safety
and it really is around our fundamental message
of stopping stop when you're unsure stop when unsettled
and stop, when situations change,
it is critical to develop this cultural attribute as there
is no way to prepare for everything
and it is impossible to pass along the an organization's
experiences to all new employees,
but new employees will see your culture and your
demonstrated values on day one,
even without you having to tell them,
even without them having to crack one book or policy,
we emphasize near misreporting even anonymously
and the expectation that more near misreporting
is a good thing
and it's absolutely required we get to our journey to zero.
And finally, the last thing.
-: Mr. Geraghty I'm gonna do just a quick time check,
sorry to interrupt we're getting very close
to the 30 minute timeframe so it just wanna let you know.
-: And then I just have one minute,
thank you I appreciate that.
Under human factors,
we're talking about human performance and those are things
like errors, late organizational weaknesses.
It's the recognition that people in organizations can
and do make errors and to truly be safe from bad incidents,
we have to put barriers in place, simple things,
stopping, checklists, conducting challenge sessions,
investing in behavioral based safety, quality assurance,
quality control programs,
and our PSPS decision dashboard this year has undergone
the human factors engineering to make sure
that the decisions that come out of that process
and made in real time have the benefit of design
to provide focus and finally,
I would just commend the state of California and the CPUC
and OEIS for making sure public utilities
are assessing and addressing enterprise risk
as part of the regulatory process.
This is precisely why choice chose to join a California
utility, the safety culture inside the company,
and the risk informed process is outside the utility
make for excellence.
It is important to transparently present and discuss risk,
and it must be quantified and characterized as a
distribution of potential outcomes
and that same thing is for this true for risk mitigation.
I believe SDG&E is demonstrating leadership in this space
through our wildfire modeling and through the RAMP process
and my very first meeting at this company,
I attended an SDG&E, as an SDG&E employee a year ago,
it was a focus session on wildfire
and PSPS risk in our modeling.
I've been part of commodity risk
and mitigation throughout my utility career,
but what is in place in California makes the safety of our
service, the commodity,
and that is what is being studied and managed,
and it's refreshing
and I do thank you for your time and attention
and engagement and that concludes my presentation thank you.
-: Thank you, Mr. Keith, and Mr. Geraghty
just a quick update on public comment time.
We are shooting to probably have those around 12:25,
so just to keep that in mind for other speakers,
I will open it now to questions for the virtual dais.
Commissioner Shiroma, please go ahead.
-: Yes, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Keith, Mr. Geraghty,
again, tremendous efforts
San Diego Gas Electric has already deserved replication for
really (clears throat) spearheading many of
the safety efforts, particularly with wildfire mitigation
even some years before other utilities.
So I have a similar question for you in terms of the
boardroom governance site.
I did a quick perusal(clears throat) of both your website
and also Sempra's website,
looking at the governance documents that are there
and so for example (clears throat)
on the, let me see it's the governance guidelines.
There is a mention of safety systems.
We know where I found really amazingly wonderful stuff
was in the employee and contract your code of conduct,
but not in the business code of conduct for the directors.
So my query is as (clears throat) as executives,
that report to the board room,
do you have a latitude to recommend
to the governing board of directors,
that they take a fresh look at the governing principles and
determine whether there should be a greater written emphasis
on safety because the team, it could be very strong today,
but what about the team of tomorrow for continuity?
I'm a firm believer that those top echelon folks in the
boardroom have very strong governance
adopted criteria for themselves.
That's my question.
Do you have that kind of working relationship with the
governing board of directors as Sempra?
-: Erbin I can enter that.
-: Yeah Unequivocally yes.
I'm the liaison to Sempra energy's sustainability safety
and technology subcommittee of the board of directors
and that is the primary sub committee
that deals with these issues
and I actually had the latitude to make recommendations
or bring input from the Commission to the committee.
-: Okay cause again, if you look at their materials,
the code of business conduct and ethics for directors
and principal executive officers is very different
from the code of conduct for the employees,
and the contractors this is the stark difference.
It's noticeable.
All right thank you,
microphone now to back to Carolina, thank you.
-: I'd like Caroline, to get a chance to go
before me this time, Dr. Thomas Jacob,
if you want to go first,
I have some questions that can wait.
-: I appreciate that Commissioner so I was wondering Kevin,
if you could go into a little bit more detail,
I think you said something really critically important in
your part of the brief around how you guys have reoriented
grid operations around safety, as opposed to reliability.
Can you talk us through a little bit more of what that means
in a detailed level,
in terms of what kinds of changes
and how that changes your operations?
-: So of course, I can't talk to it
from a change perspective.
It exists here SDG&E at the time I joined the company and I
think at some point the idea was we were putting operators
in a spot to where having to make and use discretion to make
some decisions on reclosing switches and how you operate
decisions or operate the system based on information they
may have available, we simply removed that factor.
It was, we will not automatically reclose switches.
We will not allow that if a system actually trips,
we will pause,
we will examine all the conditions and things that we know
are making them form decisions,
whether or not to reclose those customers and the points of
where it's located in a system that has elevated risk,
we will not reclose it no matter what we will pass the truck
past a person, get eyes on the fault,
understand the fault location before we will reclose
that requires just discipline and reinforcement.
I'm sure years ago that focused on the drive
towards safety and reliability,
and knowing that there's impacts the customer sometimes can
drive a behavior that could lead for a risky outcome.
So it's very important for leadership for management to
remove that, remove that and enforce it.
That operators are required to make
a non-discretionary decisions.
They shall not have a switch on automatic reclose,
and they shall not as closing a switch during risky
conditions and you enforce it just each and every day,
not through just written policy,
but we talk about it every day in our daily obstacle every
day, the team that runs that part of the grid,
make sure it's clear, hey, here's our current conditions.
-: Thank you another question was,
is actually more of a request.
So really appreciated the run-through on the metrics that
you guys are tracking and the current statistics on those,
as well as the goals would have loved to have seen those in
the presentation so that we could keep a copy.
Could we get a copy of those of those metrics?
'Cause I think was talk through in your briefing
that it sounds like you guys are really
making a lot of decisions based on
the data and making data informed decisions.
So it'd be helpful to see that.
So if I could just put that request out there
and then finally, this is the same question
I asked the Edison
and maybe Mr. Keith, this might be you,
if you guys could walk us through a couple of examples of
directly how the board safety committee has been offering
recommendations and how that is then operationalized
into the organization.
-: Yes well, first of all, at the safety committee meetings,
Kevin always attends me, our senior officers attend,
and we do a deep dive on the topics
that are being presented
and out of that discussion,
the safety committee makes just by asking questions,
focusing on certain issues makes recommendations to the
organization about things they need to focus more effort on,
or be clear on about the way we go about managing safety and
mitigating safety risk.
After that,
we take input from the advisory council from we're informed
by Commission activity, for example,
they will make on PSPS and we ask our,
we asked SDG&E to make presentations to us
about how they're dealing the PSPS,
what the best practices are,
give our input to those best practices based upon our
individual experiences, whether it be in an operating role,
a legal role or a regulatory role
that really answered the question.
-: I can share a recent experience that I think maybe
highlights the question.
So when were reviewing a particular project
to substation upgrades,
and one of the questions came from the board was that
how do you know you're safely performing work
in an energized substation?
Well, the ops teams and obsolete,
it's very easy to take that for granted
and, but the request was, look,
I want you to demonstrate to the board that you understand
and all the things that you're doing that assure safe
operations and energized switch yards and getting some of
our teams closest to that work to actually make that
presentation to a board really just creates what you want
and safety is that two way kind of affirmation
it's important and yes,
we know it's important and here's how we
are doing that work today
and that's a recent example of that,
where it's is very fluid and very engaging.
-: Yeah I like that example that there are others,
but I liked this quote about what the role of board is.
The board influences the tone of,
in safety culture of an organization
through the questions they ask,
the focus they place on key organizational issues
and the message they give
during direct interactions with employees.
That is the purpose of this committee is to give a sense of
the focus of the board through those interactions
and getting, tensioning the organization I mean,
it's pretty intimidating to come to the board after a
presentation that how you're managing risk
and often I give Kevin credit for this.
Often, these are presentations are done,
are led by directors and managers
with the support of the officers.
So we're kind of embedding that tension
in the organization to know that the board considers this
to be important to the organization.
-: Thank you and then last question, target zeros.
So clearly a commendable sort of aspirational goals, right?
To have zero across the board.
I would imagine that there's going to be a timeline
in terms of getting to that are there any immediate,
initial goals to move towards target zero for at the end
of this year or in 2022 that you can walk us through?
-: Yeah so, and when I send the data,
I can show you our next three or four years goals on
personnel safety, right?
To where those are the things we know,
the rate that we think we can improve to actually
achieve top this out performance.
So the answers as is clearly yes in personnel safety
every year we also take a look
and say our wildfire risk mitigation measurements as well
and this year we added four onto
our ICP plan this year,
we added average days for tier three level one corrections.
We added vegetation contacts in HFTV.
We added PSPS average circuit restoration time
for located patrol and we added,
and I mentioned it in my prepared remarks,
our wildfire risk events, right?
And so we are measuring these and simply measuring within
the bounds of whether you hit them or miss them
will guide us towards driving the things
to improve all those.
So in those areas just simply this year for the first time,
putting them on, we actually had to establish min and max
and where do we want to go?
So I think I can share those for you
within the data requests that actually shows where we're at,
but they absolutely lead us
in the actions that we're taking.
-: Thank you, those are all my questions
back to you Commissioner.
-: Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen would you like us
to get back to you later?
Aceves: Maybe still cognitive cause he seems to have
be having audio problems.
-: I don't think we can hear you Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
Is there perhaps Commissioner Houck,
do you have any questions in the meantime?
-: I do not have any questions at this time I know
Commissioner Guzman Aceves
or Commissioner Rechtschaffen audio.
Aceves: Thank you I wasn't to just ask
a little bit more about one of the descriptions
that you had around the community,
I forget the title of the community advisory.
While about her safety thank you
and the recognition that you said,
maybe it came from some of the locals on the benefit for
coordination for other safety and emergency incidents
and I wonder, has there been thought in expanding that also,
when did you begin that effort?
I know and I'll let you answer here,
but I know part of our discussions have been in
particularly, you obviously have the benefit
of the smaller territory,
but really to be able to replicate that model,
much of our guidance has given some discretion
on how to do this with locals in particular.
Can you give a little more detail on the inception,
the frequency, the makeup
and the potential feature of expanding the purpose.
-: The advisory council, go ahead Erbin.
-: I was just gonna point out it was,
it was created about the same time we created the safety
committee and it was intended to be complimentary to the
committee by providing outside input to the
committee as to safety issues
that are important to the community.
Kevin if you want to add to that?
-: Yeah, I would say,
and I think maybe Erbin mentioned it earlier,
every meeting has an attendance by one of our safety
committee, if not all of our board safety committee,
which I think makes for an impact.
The makeup includes from community-based organizations
to public safety partners,
to obviously fire first responders,
tribal interests as well.
So what I think is probably the complete fabric
of our communities here in San Diego county
and while we were not intended to grow beyond wildfire
mitigation to reality gets to be,
is that the introduction of resiliency that we're building
into our community through engagement
is gonna make a difference,
we had a earthquake tabletop exercise for instance,
this year became very easy to reach out to that team for
input into our tabletop exercise.
I think we're always open to grow it,
we include academia in that,
which is I think critically important because that's a
fabric of our community and quite frankly,
one of our strongest partners in figuring out
how to innovate
and I think it's one of those things,
as far as how to do it, it's gotta be smaller.
It's gotta be representative other community such that the
folks that are participating in that know each other
and work with each other outside of that committee,
outside of that council on a large list of items.
So for a very large utility,
it may take having many of these councils,
I can understand the breadth
of the territory could impact that,
but we do have the benefit of being condensed here
within San Diego county
and I've never seen anything like it,
it's a difference maker.
Aceves: Oh, thank you
and thank you for pointing out that your
board committee members attend,
that's also very significant
and one quick flip on that.
Oh, sorry was there another?
Good well just one quick follow-up which is,
do you also include the critical facility,
particularly water and telecommunications
have been such chronic issues,
are those also in attendance?
-: I think the answer that is yes, whether they're,
always there or just at different times there, but yes.
That even if they're not there, obviously not today
'cause I think we have a pretty good handle on that,
but I think in the early parts of this council
advisory council,
things like water and comms were issues
that we had to get on top of
and I think we have really excellent relationships,
with our communication providers
and our water providers in our communities.
-: Yeah to add color to that.
We've had members on the committee from cost communication,
the San Diego county water authority
and California, San Diego, so it's very inclusive.
Aceves: Excellent thank you.
-: I think we've Commissioner Rechtschaffen back in the line.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
-: Thank you I apologize I lost audio for a little bit.
I know we want to get to the public comment,
Mr. Keith I was gonna ask you a question
and sounds like you got into it a little bit with
Commissioners Guzman Aceves.
How often do you and other board members of the
members of the safety committee get into the field?
And if like I had asked that already.
Please speak on it. -: No no its fine.
-: I'll catch up with my camera.
-: Yeah no I can't give you a quick answer to that.
One of the members of the committee is Carolina
and she's the CEO of the company
so obviously she's intimate with appeal.
I'm the former general counsel for SDG&E
and the risk function reported to me as well.
So I've spent plenty of hours in EOC for red flag events
and other, critical events, I've traveled to the facilities.
I've been to San Antonio for a year I mean,
all the things you expect from general counsel at SDG&E.
So I'm very familiar with those activities
and Rob Borthwick our other committee member,
same thing spent plenty of time in the EOC,
the weather center, he was involved in wildfire mitigation
in the past is very familiar with root cause analysis
and in our facilities as a result of that.
-: Thank you I wanted to ask about near miss requirements.
Mr. Geraghty, you talked about it and you talked about,
you talked about how Caroline Winn reviews,
some of those who are people reflect the normal
chain of reporting for near miss requirements
that's the first question.
How many, and secondly,
how many near-miss reports do you get a year roughly?
-: So the, we actually have an app
it's actually available online
and anybody can afford that the system
there is no limitations, right?
And so those don't get filtered in any way,
shape or form that near miss ends up going to Ron Corolla,
who reports to me and those all get published
and an email that he puts out
and the only reason we put a stop there is occasionally,
sometimes people may have some personally identifiable
information that we probably shouldn't identify,
but then those goes straight out.
I think last year we had a total of 100,
our goal this year for nearly 300
and I think right now we're right at about 200
subject to check and I'll follow up with the data on that.
But we emphasize that
and for me near misses are a report on the psychological
safety of your organization.
Are people willing to provide information
because when they don't
neither means because it's frowned upon
or you don't follow up on.
-: Thank you and then if you could provide
any more specific information of an instance
where you've adjusted compensation negatively
based on an adverse safety outcome,
you mentioned in general that that's been done,
but there were no specifics of when the level of executive
for whom it was adjusted, the degree of adjustment.
-: Yes we provided a summary of that
in our compliance filing, but you're right.
It doesn't get down to that level of granularity
and we can supplement that for you.
-: Thank you, Carolina those are all my questions.
I know we wanna get to the public.
-: Thank you, Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
if we don't have any other questions,
then I will move on to our public comment
portion of the today's agenda.
I asked that is the representatives of SDG&E and SCE
please remain for this portion
so that you may hear what the public has to say.
And thank you again for the Commissioners and presenters
and director Jacob Thomas, for questions and comments.
As a reminder, if you wish to make a public comment,
dial into (800) 857 1917 and enter passcode 1767567
for the English line pass line
and passcode 3799627 for the Spanish line,
unmute your phone and press star one.
You will be placed into a queue and the operator will take
your name and information.
You will be called upon to speak in the order,
your call was received.
You will have two minutes to speak.
You will hear a bell sound when your time is up.
Please be mindful of other speakers in the queue
and keep to your allotted time.
I will now turn to the operator
to open public comment, telephone lines.
Operator: The public comment line is now open.
Our first speaker is Mr. Dan Courtney.
Your line is now open.
Courtney: Hello my name is Dan Courtney.
I have my feet in a couple of different things.
And I have to tell you,
I am impressed throughout the course about the rate increase
coming up, but haven't lived through the,
which fire the Cedar fire in the rim fire,
which burned through my property up North.
I understand that wildfire safety is number one with it,
current conditions,
we have to go to every extent possible to prevent these
and I appreciate what I'm hearing from Southern California
the SCE and SDG&E but I know the contrast between
that and what's going on up North with PG&E and I would
urge the Commission to really get that situation in line
and for example, the reclosers,
it's great that a SDG&E is going to
is eliminating those automatic reclosers
and I believe they've already converted 90%
lines in the high fire threat districts
to covered conductor and also have
eliminated a similar percentage of the explosion
non-exempt explosion fuses,
which we wouldn't be surprised to see
possibly play a part in the Dixie fire.
So we really want to see that the,
same effort in the same things I've been in a PG&E
and I realized that's not the subject of today's meeting,
but I want to just note and point out the contrast that
we're seeing here and to congratulate SCE and SDG&E in
taking such a serious and a productive approach
towards 12 hour safety thank you.
-: Thank you, caller operator.
Next caller, please.
Operator: As a reminder to speak
during this public comment period,
please unmute your phone, press star one,
and record your name and organization clearly when prompted.
-: Thank you operator,
if we can have the next caller, please.
Operator: I'm currently showing
no additional callers in the queue.
-: Thank you with no more comments on the line
the public common period is closed.
Thank you to all who did provide comments.
I will turn it now to Commissioner Rechtschaffen,
and director Thomas Jacobs for closing remarks.
-: I wanna thank the folks at Edison and SDG&E
for their participation today, for your insights,
this level of close examination of your safety efforts,
particularly your efforts on safety culture
are very, very important
and we look forward to continuing the discussion,
maybe with some different participation, as I mentioned,
and to continuing to work with you,
to ensure that we have the most accountability
and transparency for everything you do.
Thank you very much.
-: I too I would like to thank all the assistance,
from Southern California Edison
and San Diego Gas and Electric,
appreciate the detail and look forward to
continuing these on an annual basis
and I wanna thank the Commission for taking lead on
hosting this meeting and all the work that's gone into that
very much appreciate getting to participate with you all
and look forward to the continuing conversations
and focus on safety and driving wildfire safety
and safety culture in general,
significantly across all of our electrical corporations.
So appreciate the time
and look forward to the follow-up thank you.
Aceves: Sorry to interrupt.
-: Yeah go ahead Commissioner Guzman Aceves.
Aceves: Thank you Carolina.
I also just wanna recognize that, oh,
what I see as a much more dedicated
leadership from this effort and really just be a direct
involvement of the leadership and hearing about that is very
critical and how we can see that continuously
as Commissioner Shiroma has really reinforced
to really institutionalize this
and really hearing about the importance of
both the workforce and the public in ensuring that.
So I wanna thank you for that and really encourage us
to look at because we have a new normal,
what really is the future of the workforce in terms of
the longevity and the duration,
the retention, the recruitment of course
and I'm glad to hear that that's a big focus of,
of everyone's planning.
Thank you very much.
-: Anybody else in the dais
would like to have any closing comments.
-: Simply to say, thank you.
Very good conversation, presentations.
Of course, we all have much more work to do.
Yeah thank you.
-: And just also thank you for the presentations
was a good discussion,
so we'll look forward to more information
and continuing these discussions.
-: Okay so thank you, Commissioners director Jacob Thomas,
and thank you to Southern California,
Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric
for your presentations and your time.
This meeting is now adjourned.