Regulators have a major role in ‘Black Sky’ preparations

Utility regulators are a key to the development of expansive – and expensive – plans to prepare the United States for the harrowing prospect of a “black sky” catastrophe, which would likely leave millions of Americans without electricity and other vital utility services for days or even weeks, panelists at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Summer Policy Conference said Monday.

It will take a village to prepare cities, states and entire regions for a dreaded black sky event, a reference to the long dark nights that citizens will face if major sections of the grid are crippled by a natural disaster or even a long-feared cyberattack.

While the utility industry and emergency agencies agree that bolstering infrastructure resiliency will be the key to recovery, the expansion and hardening of the grid will involve significant capital expenditures that will have to be approved by regulators before they can be passed on to consumers. In their role as public servants and gatekeepers, regulators cannot simply rubberstamp rate increases of that magnitude even if they could pay off in the aftermath of a major earthquake, storm, or hack attack sprung by some nefarious actor.

“We don’t want to gold-plate every (project) approval because those costs will be passed on to the consumers,” said Commissioner Gladys Brown Dutrieuille, the chair of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission who also chairs NARUC’s Committee on Critical Infrastructure and is a member of the association’s newly formed Task Force on Emergency Preparedness, Recovery and Resiliency.

“We know the importance of redundancy on the grid, but we haven’t really gone through that kind of a black-sky event on the mainland,” Dutrieuille added.

Dutrieuille referred to the “mainland” because Puerto Rico found itself under a black tropical sky in 2017 after the island was tag-teamed by powerhouse Hurricanes Irma and Maria. The island’s power grid was flattened, leaving residents without power for weeks as crews struggled over remote and rugged terrain to virtually rebuild to transmission lines.

Texas got a taste of disaster this winter when a freak winter storm knocked power plants offline for several days, leaving millions without heat and electricity. The opposite happened just this summer in the Pacific Northwest when a deadly heat wave sent temperatures soaring to unprecedented levels, although the grid fortunately held up and was able to pull in major loads of power from outside the region.

“No engineer ever planned for 118 degrees on the grid,” said panelist Stefan Bird, president and CEO of Pacific Power, a division of PacifiCorp that serves 773,000 customers in Washington, Oregon and California.

The scope of these incidents, as well as the growing threat of wildfires in the West and major hurricanes on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, should convince policymakers and the public that the time to prepare for a black sky hazard is today and it is going to cost a handsome sum over the years. “You had better be way out ahead of this,” said David Anderson, president and CEO of Northwest Natural Holding Company and Northwest Natural Gas Company. “The system needs to be more resilient. Every region of the country is different, but if we try to do everything the cheapest way possible, it will be a mistake.”

Elected officials, Dutrieuille noted, tend to be “reactionary” by nature and are more comfortable addressing a specific problem once it has already occurred. The same goes for utility commissioners, who may balk at passing a major infrastructure project on to the public. In Pennsylvania, the commission approved a more-modest monthly charge on consumer utility bills to fund a regular revenue stream to accelerate the replacement of infrastructure. “It is easier to get your arms around it if you are an elected official,” she said.

Grid upgrades do, however, have an advantage in that they are needed to expand access to politically desirable renewable energy. “That same benefit is also enormous in terms of resiliency,” said Bird.

Expanding transmission is only one of the moving parts in recovering from a black sky event. With so many communities, systems and institutions depending on reliable electricity, natural gas, water and communications, planning will be highly complex and utility regulators will be called upon to approve many of the steps required while working with a dizzying number of entities, including cities, government agencies and smaller utilities they may not even have jurisdiction over.

“The role that PUCs will play in this is vital,” Dutrieuille said. “When you look at these bigger outages that have already occurred where we don’t know how long they will last, we realize the interdependency. But people are very receptive to the idea of working together and they want to be part of the discussions.”