Electric utilities prioritize preparing for the next pandemic

With over half of the U.S. population at least partially vaccinated and infection numbers declining, today the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be on the wane in the United States. But panelists on Wednesday at the Edison Electric Institute’s “The Road to Net Zero” conference agreed that the time is now for the electric utility industry to document and absorb the lessons learned to be better prepared for “next time.”

“This industry,” said Rebecca Katz, a public health expert at Georgetown University Medical Center who advises the U.S. State Dept. as well as the Edison Electric Institute board of directors, “is now challenged to reimagine threats – to add disease to the list of challenges that require detailed game plans. There are millions of biological threats out there, so designing mitigation plans is going to be critical.”

Operating in hurricane territory, Florida Power & Light Company takes pride in its culture of preparedness. Its president and CEO, Eric Silagy, says the utility even had an actual, updated pandemic plan in place before those sick with COVID-19 swamped hospitals in their service area (along the east coast of Florida from Miami to the Georgia border), and businesses and schools closed across the country.

“Now, I will tell you,” he admits, “that we did not update it with the idea of a global pandemic that would sweep across the earth and impact all the people and supply chains, but it … gave us a good head-start. We had to make a lot of adjustments … and we learned as we went – and got a lot of information and leverage from others in the industry, as well.”

In the session, titled “Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” Silagy and Katz discussed the takeaways that utilities and public health experts can glean from the past 18 months to be better prepared for the next pandemic.

For Silagy, one takeaway is simply how vital electricity is during an extended emergency. “This [pandemic] has been a stark reminder for me, and I think for all of us in the industry, on how critical electricity really is to the fundamental functioning of the economy and of society,” Silagy said.

“It’s awfully hard – if not impossible – to ask doctors and nurses to do their jobs, and for hospitals to function without electricity,” he said. “These are the men and women on the front lines who are treating those impacted by COVID-19, and they can’t do their job if we’re not doing our job. It’s impossible to ask people to shelter in place and to work from home without electricity and for students and children to be able to learn from home without electricity.”

Session moderator Tom Kuhn, the president of EEI, agreed that since the stakes are so high, preparing for the next public health disaster is of heightened importance. “Knowing that more disasters are coming because of climate change and other issues, and probably more pandemics, as well, the biological threats out there, how do we do even better next time?” he asked.

One of Silagy’s major takeaways is that preparing, planning and drilling for the next extended public health disaster should be a top priority for utilities.

“Florida’s a really good example,” he said. “You have to prepare for storms year-round, and many of the things that we do from a resiliency standpoint like hardening our distribution lines or putting in flood-monitoring systems on our substations – these things aren’t what you do overnight. This is a march, this is a regular preparation.”

He says that to accomplish this level of preparedness and resiliency for the next pandemic (or other public health emergency), utilities have to have regular communication with political leadership and regulators so they know “why we’re investing the money, time and effort.”

Kuhn and Silagy agreed that planning for the next pandemic is not just about keeping utility employees safe – it’s also about keeping the lights on.

Scott Aaronson, EEI’s vice president for security and preparedness, also spoke in a separate session about some of the challenges the pandemic posed to utilities. “Fifteen months ago every [utility] was learning on the fly what it meant to be responsive to a pandemic.”

He spoke about how The Electric Subsector Coordinating Council captured much of that wisdom in its Pandemic Resource Guide, which details recommended practices for issues ranging from sequestration of critical employees to mutual assistance planning.

“It’s been translated into two or three languages, it has been used by other sectors – it started as a six-page pamphlet, it’s now more than 150 pages,” Aaronson said.

On the public health end of things, Katz said experts want to improve outbreak forecasting and the early warning system on pandemics/outbreaks. And she says there is more to be done to prepare public health and government officials to contain outbreaks in order to prevent them from reaching pandemic status.

A second takeaway is that utilities, the public health industry and our government need to make headway on pandemic resiliency now, while the iron is hot and the overarching political will is there.

Silagy and co-panelist Katz agreed that it’s normal to, as individuals, want to move on and forget this all happened. But that the scientific community, governmental bodies, regulators and utilities need to take the lessons learned and ingrain them institutionally.

If we don’t prioritize this now, Katz and Silagy agreed, it may become too late, and lessons will be lost, political roadblocks set in place, other competing priorities come into play.

“We have to learn from every single event,” said Silagy. “That is a big advantage for our company – we are laser-focused on capturing lessons learned while they’re fresh, incorporating them into our processes and reinforcing that through training every single year so you don’t lose those learnings.”

Silagy and Katz’ final takeaway is that the difference between having a plan and not having one, the difference between succeeding or failing in a pandemic response comes down to leadership.

“Leadership matters on this,” he said, when it comes to preparing for an event like COVID-19 as if it will happen instead as if it might happen.

“We need to have those regular conversations with our political leadership, stakeholders in the community, our employees, and have the dialogue so it’s not a shock to the system. I reject the thinking that once COVID-19 is over, we’ll be out of the woods and everything is going to return to normal. There will be something else that occurs that requires all of us to pull together to try to solve the issue.