Portland General Electric CEO urges robust electric industry, government partnership to manage wildfires

Maria Pope, president and CEO of Portland General Electric, highlighted the need to strengthen industry and government collaboration in confronting the risk that wildfires pose to critical infrastructure during the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Annual Meeting on Monday.

“The number of billion-dollar wildfires is growing in a significant way,” Pope said during a meeting of utility commissioners and other stakeholders from the Western region. “We also believe that it’s going to get worse and not better and that’s really the reality we face. These unprecedented circumstances are requiring us to think differently. As utilities, as regulators, as stakeholders, as policymakers, we must redouble our efforts, not just to rebuild and restore essential infrastructure and services, but also to develop new frameworks and partnerships.”

Pope has served as the CEO of Portland General, the largest electric company in Oregon, since 2018, before which she held the position of senior vice president of power supply, operations and resource strategy, where she oversaw the utility’s transition to the Western Energy Imbalance Market, a foundational step in creating a regional smart grid.

“While we love to think of our environment in the west as unique and special, there is also much to learn from the rest of the country’s hurricanes, tornadoes, and other significant natural disasters in preparation and response,” Pope said.

Currently, Pope also chairs the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) CEO Wildfire Task Force and co-chairs the Electric Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC) Wildfire Working Group. The ESCC brings together senior government and industry leaders to address threats, both cyber and physical, to the electricity grid. In 2019, the ESCC created the Wildfire Working Group to address increasing devastation from wildfires.

“Early in my career, I spent over a dozen years working in the forest products sector and a number of additional years on the boards of directors of Canadian and U.S. forest products group,” Pope said. “I can tell you that these types of collaborations, these forums, are not the norm, neither in our country or in Canada, but are new and are driven by tremendous threats and the urgency to make a difference.”

Pope specifically thanked the work that Commissioner Letha Tawney of the Oregon Public Utility Commission had done in organizing connections between several critical agency parties for proactive approaches to resiliency measures and prevention methods.

Tawney, who also spoke during the meeting, called attention to the need to immediately start planning for California-style wildfires in the future, consider appropriate enforcement, acknowledging a balance between adequate shareholder and customer risk, and adjusting industry insight in extreme weather event trend lines.

“We need help from the federal government just as communities do that face repeated flooding or extreme hurricanes,” Tawney said. “We are going to need support in building that resilience. We’re going to have some of the same challenges in the scope and scale of this as it unfolds as we rethink what resiliency looks like even after system hardening.”

Pope noted crucial collaborations include the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Energy (DOE), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Western Area Power Administration as well as public utility districts, municipalities, and co-op partners.

Within these partnerships, Pope continued, there are three major areas of focus for utilities: mitigation, detection, and response.

For mitigation, Pope noted that the industry has been heavily investing in increased and enhanced vegetation management jointly with the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Interior, and making the infrastructure more resilient to wildfires, such as replacing wood poles with iron and steel poles, adding covered conductor wire, and installing more agile reclosing technologies. The industry has also increased the inspection schedules of the infrastructure to detect any risk to the system and is conducting multiple inspections in high-risk areas particularly during wildfire season. Critical to this effort is the FAA approval for the expanded use of drones for beyond the visual line of sight work, Pope said.

Additionally, improving technology research and development and deployment, and adapting operational best practices, namely the use of public safety power shutoffs, is critical to continued utility success.

“Last year, working through the Department of Energy’s grid modernization laboratory consortium, the industry began evaluating nearly a dozen different technology options,” Pope said. “For example, an Oak Ridge National Lab project to better understand arcing characteristics enables automatic de-energization of power lines.”

For detection, the industry is investing in sensors, high-definition cameras, and weather stations, taking cues from California companies that have developed the most advanced weather tracking systems.

“Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, and others have been incredibly generous in sharing their lessons learned in training and monitoring capabilities. We are now working collaboratively with utilities and others from Australia and other places hard hit [during this wildfire season],” Pope said. “We are also coordinating with a variety of federal agencies through DOE to establish platforms that will allow shared access to mapping tools, satellite data, fire spread modeling, and other analytics that will help drive real-time decisions and actions across agencies and utilities.”

To improve response, utilities are exploring ways to better coordinate efforts with federal, state, and local entities, particularly local agencies and first responders who are helping suppress the wildfires, conducting damage assessments, and restoring power safely and quickly. The industry is also working on enhanced communication with customers and community leaders to ensure they are prepared for potential impacts of the wildfire season.

“Speaking for Portland General, I cannot express how beneficial it has been to coordinate closely with county emergency managers and other local groups,” Pope said. “With our most recent wildfires, we utilized reverse 911 calling to enhance communication outreach and to help get to customers to help them understand what was happening.”

In his remarks at the end of the meeting, Edison Electric Institute President Tom Kuhn agreed with Pope’s analysis of the benefits of government collaboration as well as the opportunities such partnerships will afford electric companies in saving time and money and deploying new technologies and adequate prevention measures.

“I am a real strong believer in collaboration with the federal agencies, with the state agencies, etc., where the utilities can actually become firefighters and be part of the solution to prevent this in the future,” Kuhn said.