DOE tells NARUC it will assist commissioners in sorting out infrastructure grants
As more federal funding pours into expanding the resilience of the U.S. power grid, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is ramping up its technical assistance for state regulatory commissions that will play a role in deciding how the bonanza is parceled out to the utility industry and what will be required of them in return, a senior DOE official said Sunday.
Brandi Martin from the DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), said the states had an enviable problem of playing a major role in setting the priorities for a windfall from the Biden administration’s new infrastructure package, including spending on matters related to cybersecurity and the development of an IT workforce to keep the grid safe from malevolent hackers and help it bounce back from natural disasters.
“It’s tons and tons of money,” Martin, the State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Program Manager for CESER, said at the opening session of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Winter Policy Meeting. “It’s a massive amount of money and we are really excited about it, but it is also somewhat overwhelming.”
Congress decided to avoid setting comprehensive rules for the upcoming grants and will instead leave it up to the individual states to determine which projects and programs to prioritize and then distribute the money themselves using the infrastructure funds they receive from the DOE.
State utility commissions, Martin told the regulators in the audience, are positioned to play a major role in sorting out and prioritizing the needs and wants of their local utilities and playing the middleman with their local legislators. “You all have a great deal of expertise and relationships (with local utilities).”
The awards, however, will cast a wide net and will involve stakeholders well beyond each state’s major investor-owned utilities (IOUs); there will also be considerations for co-ops and smaller power companies that also have urgent needs and will be seeking a cut of funding. “When you think about it, there are around 3,000 separate entities out there, so it isn’t that much,” Martin said.
An early step in the process involves the State Energy Security Plans (SESP) required from each state. Those plans, which identify the grid’s vulnerability and weaknesses, are being updated and are due to be resubmitted to the DOE by Sept. 30. Martin said the DOE was already offering “plenty of technical assistance” for the process.
The process also won’t be as simple as evaluating a utility’s wish list and then cutting a check; as with many major spending programs, there will be demands for transparency from the public and players outside the utility industry. Members of the audience raised the risk of a fuzzy boundary between publicly regulated utilities and private companies that may be bringing their own transmission or generation infrastructure online in the coming years, or what the public should know about utility operations.
“Knowing how much data to put into the public domain has been an issue of late,” said Martin, who later told Daily Energy Insider that the type of information in question is not so much proprietary or a trade secret, but instead could reveal a vulnerability to the grid but also operational numbers that constantly change and would be quickly outdated.
NARUC itself is also pitching in with its own initiatives to assist the industry with workforce development in the cybersecurity arena, which Martin noted may not be something regulatory commissions have been historically involved in but now comes under the idea of resilience that is being required in SESP plans and may be eligible for an infrastructure grant.
Lynn Costantini, deputy director of NARUC’s Center for Partnerships & Innovation, reminded the audience that “workforce development is the top priority for the utility industry, period.”
NARUC recently launched a series of recruitment videos aimed at capturing the attention of recent graduates in the highly competitive cybersecurity field who may not be aware of the opportunities in the utility and energy industry, as well as a training course for utility commissioners themselves on the topic of cybersecurity. The next program takes place March 22-25 in Indianapolis.
