Announcer: To you by adminmonitor.com.
We'll begin momentarily.
Thank you for your patience.
Operator: Welcome
to the California Public Utilities Commission.
This is the Remote Participation Joint IOUs Workshop
on the 2021 Public Safety Power Shutoff Events.
Thank you, you may begin.
-: All right.
We're about 1:09, so let's go ahead and get started.
Thank you for joining us on this Friday afternoon.
My name is Steven Klaiber.
I'm a Senior Regulatory Analyst
in SED Wildfire Safety Enforcement Branch,
and I will be your facilitator today.
This will be day two
of the Public Briefings on Utility Execution
of 2021 PSPS Events.
In addition to looking back at the 2021 PSPS Events,
the utilities will also present on the lessons learned
and improvements planned
in preparation of the 2022 Wildfire Season.
To recap day one,
we heard presentations from PG&E, Liberty Utilities
and the Civic Court,
as well as public comments at the end of the session.
Reviewing the agenda,
we will start with opening remarks from the virtual Dias.
You will hear remarks from CPUC President Reynolds,
Commissioner Houck, Commissioner Jon Reynolds,
Commissioner Shiroma and Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
Additionally, we have Mike Massone from Cal OES,
Daniel Berlant from Cal Fire
and Caroline Thomas Jacobs from Energy Safety.
Our first presentation will be held
by SCE and led by VP Jill Anderson.
Our second and last presentation of the workshop
will be held by SDG&E and led by Vice President
of Electric Operations, Kevin Geraghty.
Each utility will be allotted an hour,
and this will account for questions asked by our panel.
We open the phone line and allow for public comments
after both utilities have presented.
We will end with closing remarks from our panel.
That being said,
I will hand it over to President Reynolds
for opening remarks.
-: Thank you, Steven.
I did wanna welcome everyone here today to day two
of our two-day workshop on Public Safety Power Shutoffs,
and I'm very pleased to share the virtual Dias
with CPUC's sister agencies.
It's an honor to be here with all of you.
And then I also wanted to recognize that this is our time
to hear a report from our IOUs on their efforts to improve
the performance of PSPS events.
So this is a very important workshop to us.
It's critical to hear efforts to recognize both
the effectiveness of PSPS as a tool,
but also maybe even more importantly,
the impact the tool has on customers and efforts
to mitigate those impacts.
We have been working with the utilities and emphasizing
that PSPS should be a tool of last resort.
We continue to look forward to hearing reporting on efforts
to make sure the tool is made smaller,
smaller scope, smaller scale, less on impacts.
And so we'll be listening very carefully for those actions
that the utilities have taken.
I'm really hopeful that through this event
and follow-up events,
we can hear that the utilities are working hard to get
the protections of customers right,
to move towards a day when hopefully PSPS will not be a tool
in our toolbox, and that we can use today to share
the lessons learned, what's working,
what's not working, and a critique of current practices.
We can improve of oversight and accountability,
and also lead to stronger lines of communication
and improvement of joint operations of utilities,
government entities,
community-based organizations, and others.
I did wanna also thank Commission staff,
Kevin Klaiber, our moderator today,
as well as Tony Noel,
who did a lot of work to put this workshop together.
Thanks.
Thanks to both of them
for their efforts in organizing this workshop.
And with that,
I will turn it over to my fellow Commissioners
for opening statements.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen, would you like?
-: I have no opening remarks.
-: And I have no opening remarks either.
This is Commissioner Houck.
-: This is Shiroma.
I just wanted to say that it was in 2019
that I had a chance to visit
the San Diego Gas Electric Emergency Center
from which it operates
its Public Safety Power Shutoff efforts.
It was very insightful to hear what they have been doing
and lessons learned over the years for them.
And then (clears throat)
through the Southern California Edison General Rate Case,
I learned many details about what Southern California Edison
is doing and of course
through their wildfire mitigation plans.
So I look forward to hearing this update today
on how last year went for these utilities
and what they foresee for the future.
Thank you.
-: And I have no opening remarks as well.
Thank you.
-: I wanted to check with Frank and Caroline,
did you guys have any opening remarks?
-: This is Caroline.
I just had a few things,.
So well, thank you, President Reynolds and Commissioners.
Really appreciate the opportunity to join the Commission,
Cal OES and Cal Fire today
to hear from San Diego and Southern California Edison
on PSPS, both their execution in 2021 and their plans
for 2022 and improvement.
As President Reynold said,
while PSPS has been used to reduce the risk of fires caused
by utility infrastructure,
we know it comes that high price to customers
and community members.
Each use of PSPS poses serious risk to life safety
for those at-risk and vulnerable community members,
as well as significant impacts on quality of life.
For these reasons, PSPS must continue to be a use
of the mitigation of last for resorts.
Through the wildfire mitigation plans,
Energy Safety remains focused on how each of you
are taking action to reduce the scale,
scope and frequency of its use.
It's our expectation that each of you will continue
to reimagine how you build,
operate and maintain the infrastructure
so is not to be reliant on PSPS as a future
for mitigation tactic.
And while it is a short-term tactic,
it should and cannot be considered a long-term strategy.
In our 2021 wildfire mitigation plan evaluations,
we focused on a few critical areas,
how your wildfire mitigation initiatives
were driving towards the elimination of use of PSPS,
how you were doing what you were doing to reduce the scale,
scope and frequency with an emphasis on frequency
of PSPS events and how you're improving your forecasting
for improving the accuracy of the number of times
you're doing PSPS and the need for PSPS.
So in 2022, we will be following up on all these areas
in our wild fire mitigation plan evaluation
with particular attention
to the frequently, impacted and circuit.
I look forward to today's briefing
from San Diego and Southern California Edison.
And I would, I do wanna just call out,
I'm gonna have to step out at two o'clock
for a very short meeting that I must take,
but I did wanna let you know I have reviewed the materials
and I'll just catch back up wherever you are
in the presentation.
So look forward to today.
Thank you, President.
-: Thank you, Director Jacobs.
With that being said,
let's open up the line to SCE Vice President, Jill Anderson.
-: Thank you so much.
I'm happy to get us started.
So I know we provided some material,
and I'll be sharing that as we go.
Let me first just say, good afternoon,
President Reynolds and other Commissioners
along with Director Thomas Jacobs and the other leadership
that we have here from OES and Cal Fire
and our community members and customers.
So we appreciate the invitation and the opportunity today
to share what we have been doing directly in line
with the opening remarks that we just heard
from President Reynolds and Director Thomas Jacobs
around what we are doing to reduce the frequency
and the impacts of PSPS,
how we performed last year
and what we're doing going forward.
So I think you're gonna hear all of that from us today.
Let me also introduce the other people from SCE
who are with me.
You're also gonna hear from Erik Takayesu,
who's our Vice President of Asset Strategy and Planning.
You'll hear from Katie Sloan, who's our Vice President
of Customer Programs and Services,
Tom Brady, who leads our PSPS Readiness Group,
and he's a Principal Manager
in our Emergency Operations Organization,
and Michael B. Williams, who is a Principal Manager for us
in our business Customer Division.
So we've really brought the experts here
and we're looking forward to sharing with you
our progress and our opportunities for improvement.
Additionally, we have Terry Ohanian, who's our Director
of the Southeast Distribution Construction
and Maintenance Group,
who I know that has spoken to many of these events
in the past, and Scott Scudder, who's our Senior Manager
of Business Process Improvement in our PSPS Readiness Team.
They are standing by with us to make sure
we can get the direct answers to any questions
that you wanna cover today.
I'm just gonna start out really by acknowledging
that PSPS is very difficult for our customers.
I think President Reynolds, you explained that
as you did your introductory remarks,
not, especially difficult for vulnerable customers,
but it is difficult for all of our customers.
I staff these events myself.
We, Commissioner Shiroma,
you mentioned the Energy Operations Center,
that's actually where I'm at today
for, I had other meetings here this morning, and so,
but during these PSPS events, I go out into the community.
I was out on Thanksgiving at our community crew vehicles
where I'm interacting directly with customers
and I heard for first hand the frustration, the anger,
and we understand it, we understand
it's certainly very real for our customers.
We are only doing PSPS to reduce the wildfire risk
to the communities, but to our customers who are impacted,
they feel the extended outage,
the extreme personal hardship,
and they're not, us telling them it's a last resort tool
is usually not sufficient for us to satisfy their concerns.
So we continue to make sure that anytime we're using PSPS,
it is only at a time of last resort.
And I'm gonna show some statistics with you
this afternoon and where you'll see that.
But while we're talking briefly here
about Thanksgiving Event,
and I'm sure we'll talk more about that in our remarks,
'cause it was our largest event last year,
I also wanna acknowledge all of you,
the CPUC, OES, Cal OES, Cal Fire,
all the local government, when we initiate event,
we very much realize and appreciate that it creates work
and activity for many other organizations.
And many of your team members had to also give up
your holiday and time with your families in order to support
your communities and the role you play with this,
and we're very grateful for that.
So we are gonna talk through some of our accomplishments,
and some of the things that we've been able to improve
and things that we're proud of.
We're also gonna talk about upcoming work we have
because we know that we have more work to do.
And we're also gonna be very transparent and share some
of the lessons learned, some of the areas where we missed.
We, as I said, we are only using PSPS when we know
that it's necessary to protect public safety,
when we're talking
about being in a very dangerous environmental condition
posing significant risks to wildfire,
but our goal is to make sure that we are reducing the use
of PSPS year over year,
we're continuing to improve our management of it,
that we continue to treat our customers with transparency,
with respect to appreciate that any outage of any length
is too long for most customers.
And we wanna make sure that we're providing them the tools
they need to manage through those.
So with that, I know we shared a some material
and I think it'd probably be helpful if we could display it
so that I could talk through a couple of the numbers.
Thank you.
So if you wanna go to the next slide.
Okay.
So Erik is gonna speak after me and he's gonna talk
a little bit about the grid hardening that we've done,
but I start out by emphasizing some
of these top line numbers.
If we look at the top left here, you see 45%.
This is a number that we see that we reduced in PSPS usage,
that reduction of the duration in 2021
based on all the mitigations that we put in place.
Because of the work that we did that year,
that last year, we saw there were 45% fewer customer minutes
of outage than there would've been
if we hadn't done the grid hardening work.
We also looked at specific locations that we're targeting,
and I heard Director Thomas Jacobs,
you talked about frequently impacted circuits.
So when looked specifically at frequently impacted circuits,
we reduced the customer minutes of interruption
by the number on the bottom left there, 73%.
We also reduced the scope of the interruptions.
And so looking at 72%,
which is the frequency on the circuits themselves,
and instrumental to all this reduction,
as I talked about, was grid hardening.
And so right there in the top middle,
we installed more than 1,500 miles of covered conductor,
and almost half of that,
we deployed on frequently impacted circuits.
And we're able to look at event by event and demonstrate
that if not for cover conductor,
additional customers would have been out
during those wind storms.
So we're very pleased with the progress that we've seen.
And I think the numbers here tell a very positive story.
Most significant when I think about 2021 is the outcome
of keeping our communities safe.
So we did not have any significant utility-caused ignitions
in our service area in 2021.
The next thing I'd like to review is on the next slide,
and here's some of our top line achievement
when we think about how we are working with our customers
and helping inform our customers,
helping get our customers ready
for extreme weather events and outages.
And you're gonna hear a little more from Katie and Michael
who are gonna break down these in more detail,
but the overarching message is that this
has been a tremendous area of focus for us.
It's something we work on year round.
Not only are we trying to mitigate the use
of the PSPS themselves,
but also looking at the breadth of our efforts in connecting
with customers, making sure that our customers are prepared.
Some of the stats we have here is that we held
over 100 meetings with our local government and customers.
We, all of these are attended by people like me in roles
like I have in other executives.
We also had more than 2,700 visitors
to our community care resource centers.
And we surveyed these customers after they joined one
of their either community crew vehicle
or one of our resource centers,
and though, and I told you, I meet with them myself.
I go out to these locations regularly,
and as frustrated as they are,
in the surveys that we've received back from customers,
we got an overall rating of 8.8 out of 10.
And I can attest that what we hear firsthand from verbatims
is definite chow that are presented by PSPS,
but appreciation for the services that are being provided
at these customer care locations.
So I think the investment that we've done in partnership
with the CPUC and that we're seeing
working on with our other sister utilities really pays off
in the customer care that goes on during these events.
In the bottom right, you see another metric here
where we're talking about our public safety partners
and the readiness and work that we did in 2021
for making sure that we can work
to manage emergencies together.
And this is not just something that is PSPS-related.
When we think about the outreach we do with customers,
the work we're doing with other public safety partners,
we're thinking about all hazards.
And so that's earthquakes
or other climate change-related extreme weather.
And we are really,
really gratified that we've had such positive engagement
throughout the last year.
And so I'm gonna ask Erik to pick up and walk you
through a little more about 2021 in our action plan.
And then I'm gonna come back at the end
and add a little bit more and be then be happy
to beyond to take any questions.
-: Thank you, Jill, and good afternoon, everyone.
I think I'm gonna start off here.
PSPS action plan that we filed last year.
So if you wouldn't mind going to the next slide.
So the action plan we filed,
you'll see the five sort of areas of focus
in our work stream.
And there was 132 steps altogether.
We're nearly complete with the plan.
We have one milestone left that will be finished at the end
of March, but this is in a way,
the way we're gonna talk through both the lessons learned
and our sort of plans for how we're getting ready for 2022.
So I'll cover a number of things around grid hardening
and some of the issues that happen in our events.
And then we're gonna go through in a lot more detail
around just the very specific lessons learned across each
of these five categories.
So we can go to the next slide.
So this table is our customer outage statistics
when we compare 2020 to 2021.
So last year we had the nine PSPS events
that was down from the 13th of previous year,
and you can see the difference
in the member of customers impacted.
Now, part of the reductions here were due
to the grid hardening efforts, which I'll talk about
in more detail,
but the other part of it was also driven by weather.
We had a, somewhat of a more mild PSPS season.
We had a bit of moisture moisture
that came in in the summer,
but then really what defined most of 2021
was that one really large event over Thanksgiving,
which I'll talk about,
but we did have have nine events overall,
and these are, when we add it all up,
this is the primary difference between what you see here
between 2020 and 2021.
Now, one thing I do wanna note here is when we look
at these kinds of statistics, it's important to note here,
I think, that our events
are very distribution system-centric.
So when we de-energize customers,
this is not something that we've seen yet since 2019,
or actually ever since we've had PSPS in place,
we have not instituted any large scale de-energizations
from our bulk power system.
These are segment by segment
and circuit-by-circuit de-energizations
that make up these numbers.
Let's go to the next slide.
Okay, thank you.
So our, again, our most significant event occurring here
in Thanksgiving, so different from other events,
and I've been involved in PSPS events since we started this.
And one thing I think that sort of differentiates this event
from others is really the size, scale and really the speed
of this event as it escalated from where we started
on June, or November 22nd, leading up to November 25th.
So, and the challenges that we experienced during this event
are really the basis for our focus areas in 2022.
Now, before I get into the details
about these very specific circumstances,
I will say that while there were significant improvements,
as we've been highlighting,
we could have done better in this particular event.
And while our dedicated team was on the job
throughout the whole weekend, everybody was on board,
there were gaps and we have room for improvement
in several areas.
And the team is gonna go
through the subsequent actions in the next three slides.
So back on this event,
our Wednesday forecasts were continually increasing
and expanding to more areas.
More and more circuits were being added to scope.
The forecast of our wind speeds were climbing.
And what we weren't anticipating is the day that we started
to de-energize, that we saw wind speed gust up
to 89 miles an hour in a number of different locations.
Just just one way to put that in a perspective,
several of the weather stations in the Malibu area recorded
their highest wind peak gust in the four years
since they've been installed.
So we didn't see throughout that event,
the difference in the numbers,
so between how many circuits and customers were in scope
for that de-energization versus those
that were actually de-energized.
But one of the significant challenges though,
what we saw with this very rapid escalation
was really the inability to get out notifications and time
to all of our customers.
Additionally, one thing I wanna point out here
is that we recently identified that we under-reported
the number of mist notifications in the post-event report.
We're assessing the data issues,
we're aided by, here, who we use to convert
our manual system to an automated one,
and we'll be filing updated information
as soon as that review is complete.
We have advised the Safety Enforcement Division
and we'll be discussing those findings in further detail
at the next monthly meeting in March.
So we do these bi-week or now monthly check-ins
with the SED on the action plan itself.
But near the end of December, we implemented
an automated solution that we placed a number
of our manual processes
that we had in place previously for notifications,
and unfortunately, that system was not in place in time
for this Thanksgiving Event.
The systems are in place now, they've been tested.
We'll walk through those later,
but this is really gonna be a game changer for us
and the accuracy and timeliness of those notifications.
Besides the notifications,
other things that we are focusing on
is, as you saw in the chart here, the escalating wind feeds.
We're gonna have to continue to increase the accuracy
and precision of our forecasting.
We had started putting in machine learning models
on our weather stations,
particularly because we had some areas
that have been historically difficult to forecast.
We have some very encouraging results from that,
and so we're gonna be expanding that
to 500 locations this year.
Restoration time is another issue that we saw
with this kind of wide scale long duration of that.
So we're gonna be taking a number steps to continue
to improve the restoration time
regardless of the size and scale,
but all of this is also gonna require
more training and drilling,
especially as we implement new tools to ensure
that we're gonna be better prepared for this season.
And finally, we're further automating to improve consistency
across our data sources and methodologies
and our post, reporting to ensure
that they're more accurately reflective,
using the automation systems that are now put in place.
So we did significantly reduce the need for PSPS,
but because of the grid hardening,
and I'm gonna go ahead and, if there are no other questions,
I'm gonna go and more specifically
into those grid hardening steps that we took.
You can go to the next slide.
Okay.
So in last year we focused,
we defined as frequently impacted circuits.
So Director Thomas Jacobs appropriately identified
the term frequently impacted circuits,
and the way we defined it last year,
it was any circuit that had experienced four
or more de-energizations from 2019 through January of 2021.
So that represents two fire seasons,
the fire season of 2020 and 2019, 2020 being defined
all the way through January of 2021.
This population was seven in two circuits,
and altogether they experienced
nearly 160 million customer outage minutes in 2020,
just due to PSPS.
Now, one of the advantages we have
with our cover conductor plan
is we performed risk modeling on those.
And what we found out is we had already put in the scope
a significant number of miles that we were already planning
to do now, all they weren't necessarily planned to be done
in the timeframe that we needed to,
so we accelerated grid hardening efforts
with all attempts to get everything done by October 1st,
and time for the peak, and an season.
But we accelerated 685 miles of cover conductor.
That allowed us to raise wind thresholds,
and hence that's where we get the benefits
from the grid hardening to avoid or minimize damages.
Now, we also took other measures as well.
You see some of those listed here.
On one of the slides Joe had,
there were 81,000 customers
that we more permanently removed from PSPS.
And we took a much closer look
at all the different areas that circuits were reversing.
There's different topologies or places where fuel
is really not existing 'cause maybe circuits start
in the rural, they go through communities
when they come out.
So we also leveraged the flexibility in our system to do
the best we can to remove customers in the first place.
But all these measures,
we did everything we could, and even where cover conductor
was delayed, we accelerated other mitigation.
So we're really happy to say that communities
like Acton did not get de-energized
during that November event.
What we're also saying is the cover conductor
is providing benefits year around.
So not just in high fire conditions,
they're helping us to avoid outages
under normal storm conditions,
and when other things come into contact with their lives.
So raise one speed thresholds, reduce the frequency of PSPS.
There are areas that still exceeded our thresholds
because of the extreme wind speeds that I had talked about.
And that's gonna be the breeding ground for additional views
on mitigations, on what additional things could we do?
I'll say that Our 2022 grid hardening plans will focus
on the circuit that have been accumulating here in terms
of being frequently impacted.
We're also gonna put special emphasis
on the Thanksgiving Event to see what other circuits we need
to address that may have even showed up for the first time.
So with that, that's the end of my section,
and what we're gonna do is dive much more deeply,
and so all these other areas around notification,
customer programs, our emergency response
over the next few speakers here.
So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and hand it off
to Mr. Tom Brady.
-: Hey, thanks Erik, and good afternoon, everyone.
So I wanna kick things off here this afternoon by sharing
some of the work that was completed
by our Fire Science and Meteorology teams last year,
really to improve both the precision and the granularity
of our weather and fuel modeling capabilities.
And I think it builds nicely on some of the opening comments
that we heard as well as what Jill and Erik shared
around really improving the precision of our forecast.
And the reason is, as we all know,
PSPS execution relies on access to timely
and accurate forecast data.
It starts at the very beginning of the event.
Forecast data informs which circuits are expected
to meet PSPS criteria, and that drives a lot
of our pre-event processes around notifications,
pre-patrols, et cetera.
These same forecasts are also critical for determining
when those dangerous conditions debates,
and the data informs when we can start restoration patrols
to get the lights back on as quickly as possible.
So as you've heard the previous speakers mention,
we have made substantial upgrades to our in-house weather
and fuel modeling capabilities throughout 2021,
and it's really enabled us to increase that precision
and that granularity that we all talked about.
So first, we added two additional super computers last year,
and it's allowed us to double our forecast resolution.
Prior to having those additional super computers,
we were at a two kilometer resolution,
and since we've installed them,
we're now down to one kilometer.
And so what factor here is really that greater granularity
helps our meteorologist more precisely determine some
of the details around event scope and also event timing.
We're also using machine learning technology to improve
our wind speed forecast at point-specific locations
where PSPS has occurred most frequently
in prior PSPS or wildfire years.
Early last season,
we saw the benefits of this new technology.
These models actually picked up a threat
on one of our circuits,
the Sam Canyon Circuit, that may have been otherwise missed
using our legacy models.
So early on indication that these machine learning models
are really moving the needle for us
in the forecasting space.
Lastly, we added an entirely new weather model
to our setup forecasting tools,
and that's the European weather model.
And this provides two main benefits.
Number one, if our existing legacy models become unavailable
for whatever reason, we have redundancy now
because we can get data from this European model
to develop our forecast,
but also it gives our meteorologists
with an entirely incremental set of forecast scenarios
from which to consider and evaluate the PSPS forecast list.
So I guess the summary here is these three enhancements
really help us identify where, when and how long
these potentialization de-energization events may last,
improving precision in notification,
and really just overall event execution.
We also updated our fire potential index thresholds.
or FPI, and what FPI is
is it's an index that estimates the likelihood
of a spark turning into a major wildfire.
It has a range of one to 17, with 17 being the most extreme.
So in 2020, we set our thresholds for FPI to 12.
However, based on additional data that we had available
in 2021, we were able to go back and look at 26 years
of historical fuel and FPI data and determine
where these larger fires tend to occur.
The outcome of this study was an increase
in our fire potential index threshold from a 12 to 13
in most fire climate zones subject to some exceptions.
So what's in the plans for 2022?
Really leaning into continuing developing
those machine learning models.
I talked about one of the main benefits
we're seeing some really promising early results
into how useful these are for our meteorologist.
It's gonna help us reduce the variance between the customers
who are notified of potential de-energization
and the customers who are actually de-energized.
Additionally, it's also gonna help us improve timing
or the number of customers who are de-energized
with no notice at all.
So that's a quick flyover of some
of our weather and field modeling capabilities.
I wanna pause briefly and then I'll go into more detail
on our execution.
All right, next slide, please.
-: Right, quick question.
-: So you've heard Jill and Erik talk a lot
about the Thanksgiving activation, the largest event
that occurred for SCE in 2021.
And it really strange.
-: Tom, I think we had a quick question.
-: Oh, I'm sorry.
Absolutely.
Yes, please.
-: Sorry, I missed this.
What is this European modeling?
I'm sorry, what is that?
-: So there's the North American weather model
and then there's also another model
that is in Europe
and we previously didn't have access to it.
It's, the acronym is ECMWS.
And this model provides our meteorologist
with an entirely incremental set of forecast outcomes
for which they base their PSPS decisions on in terms
of what circuits are on scope,
what circuits are not in scope.
So it's essentially what we have the North American model,
but it's the European model.
-: Okay.
Have you included that in your most recent
wildfire mitigation plan application to OEIS?
-: I'd have to take that as a follow-up just to make sure
that it's in there.
I do believe it's in the wildfire mitigation plan,
but I would want to check and confirm
before making a final statement on that.
-: Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
-: You're welcome.
-: I'll coordinate with you on getting the answer to that
and then getting the answer over
to the Commissioner's post-meeting.
Sounds good.
And I suspect that we'll hear back from the team here,
and we may be able to close it out here on the call
in a little bit as well.
All right.
So shifting back into this slide,
we talked about the size and complexity,
really straining our pre-automation processes resulting
in, like Erik said,
delays in processing our weather forecast and sending some
of those pre-event notifications.
And in many cases, these processing delays were made worse
or exacerbated by our efforts to send notifications
at the segment level for pre-event.
And the reason that this is important is because in part
of the grid, or in the grid hardening activities
that Erik described earlier,
we now have higher threshold for fully isolatable segments
of circuit with covered conductor.
And so the team is always trying to filter
those notifications so that we only notify the customers
that are most likely to be de-energized.
Well, by doing this, it added an additional layer
of complexity, which made it more difficult
to get through those updated forecast
and get those notifications out to customers.
Additionally, during the period of concern,
this event rapidly intensified in terms
of the span or the boundary of the weather condition,
which pulled more circus in the scope.
And this also made it difficult to support some
of those pre-event notifications, but also in event,
seeing rapid increases in wind speeds and having
to move quickly.
So just these convergence of complexity factors
making it hard to dispatch those notifications.
So I think that takes us nicely
to the work we're doing to help improve automation.
We've heard us speak a lot about it specifically
about, which is a tool that was developed
by the talent here, and as Erik mentioned,
some of these capabilities or all of these capabilities
that would've helped in this situation
were not operationalized at the time
of the Thanksgiving Event,
since we've operationalized several core processes
around the PSPS workflow,
and they're really gonna be game changers in terms
of reducing processing time and minimizing
the potential for error.
So I'm gonna go through a couple of those,
and then we'll talk about some other learnings
from the Thanksgiving Event.
So the first of which is we developed automation
to help our Meteorology Team intake and synthesize all
of these weather model inputs, right?
To inform the development of what we call
our PSPS circuit list,
which is essentially the list of circuits that our forecast
to meet or exceed criteria.
We also automated the processes that are used
by our Outage Notifications team to dispatch
and inform Notification, Team.
This is again, really gonna reduce that processing time
and increased accuracy in the notification space.
An additional use case that I do wanna share
is publishing information
to the Public Safety Partner Portal,
the process of going in and determining what circuits
are impacted and how many customers are impacted
on those circuits.
Now, that has been automated to help us support timely
and event updates to our Public Safety Partner Portal
and to sce.com.
So in 2022, we look to continue to build on the automation
to further and increase and optimize
our event management practices, and wanting to, again,
provide some examples of where we're gonna do that.
So in-event situational awareness is critical.
It supports our external reporting
and briefing requirements.
And so we're building our new situational awareness tool
that will provide us with better access
to near realtime data on circuit that are in scope
and the customers that are impacted.
We're also automating the process for how we populate
our in-event risk calculator.
Legacy process is highly manual.
Some of this new automation will make that quicker
and more efficient,
so we can get that important data in front
of our incident commanders for decision-making
And then you also heard earlier in the discussion
about our post-event reports,
we're applying expensive automation
and energy around automation
that's gonna help increase the accuracy by integrating all
of the disparate data sources that exist
across our response operation and standardizing
the methodology that we use to query that data.
So that's a quick play over of automation,
and now I wanna shift gears and talk a bit
about our restoration process.
Erik mentioned previously that we had some learnings
in this space too,
and so wanted to note that in the Thanksgiving Event,
we saw our average restoration time
right at about nine hours.
And this is outside of the typical restoration range
that we share with customers, which is three to eight hours.
So why was that?
In this particular event,
restoration was complicated by a late breaking shift
in the weather that resulted in the period of concern
ending earlier than we had initially expected,
and it was also late in the evening.
So this change required us to adjust our resourcing strategy
extremely late in the game.
And then to complicate factors further, in many cases,
restoration couldn't be performed until daylight hours
for circuits that required air patrol,
as well as some other circuits where we have visibility
and access issues.
So for 2022, we look to codify the use
of a dedicated representative
on our incident management team
who's sole purpose on the response operation is to lead
the overall restoration planning and staffing efforts,
and this really includes refining our operational protocol
for many things,
including making sure we get our helicopters in the air
as soon as it's safely possible.
So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and close, but before I do,
I wanna echo what both Jill and Erik said.
We've obviously come a long way in terms
of our PSPS execution, impacting fewer customers,
expanding our mitigation efforts,
but based on what I just shared,
we know that our performance in November left room
for improvement, and so wanted
to share some of our learnings
on how we're going about tackling those issues.
I see a hand.
-: This is Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
So I wanna ask you a little bit more
about the Thanksgiving Event
and sort of learnings going forward.
Are you, so the first question
is, are you now including those sets of circuits
in the most frequently impacted circuits
that get priority for remediation work
like coverage conductors?
That that's the first question.
And then it just strikes me that all
of the automation improvements that you're making
still will leave you with a judgment of how inclusive
or broad you're gonna be in a situation where things
are rapidly changing.
And of course, rapidly-changing climate is now the norm,
not the exception, and I know
you've got two new super computers trying
to figure that out.
So I guess what I'm looking for is your assessment
about whether you think you drew the line
in the wrong place, and would you draw the line differently?
Would you be more inclusive in notifying people sooner,
even though there's a probability
that they wouldn't be de-energized,
given the experience you had last Thanksgiving?
-: Okay.
So let me take those in order.
And then I also welcome the voices of my SDE colleagues
who are on the phone to help expand on the answers.
So the first one I think
was about prioritizing grid hardening efforts
based on the outcomes of the Thanksgiving Event.
Is that right?
-: Correct.
-: Okay.
And the answer to that is yes.
We're currently going through and assessing
the circuit de-energizations that did take place
during the Thanksgiving Event and looking
at how frequently those circuits were impacted previously.
That event was a bit atypical,
like Erik stated, in terms of those sheer wind speeds,
seeing levels on some of our weather stations
that we haven't seen since they've been installed.
So like a, think about like a four-year history.
So we wanted to take that into consideration
as we look to understand how frequently those circuits
are impacted and if accelerated grid hardening is warranted
for those locations.
And I'll pause there briefly to see if Erik or anybody else
has anything to add,
and then I'll take your second question.
-: Yeah, Tom, I'll go ahead and add a few things.
So thank you for the question, Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
When we started and we identified those 72 circuits,
we did draw that line at four or more de-energizations,
and we knew that at that time that there was another subset
of those that we called them sort
of near frequently impacted circuits,
ones that maybe energized three or more times,
or had other circumstances.
So the grid hardening
that's in our longterm mitigation plan is associated
with extending out more circuits below that line,
knowing that's a potential likelihood that those circuits
can come into the picture.
What's interesting about the Thanksgiving Event though,
and if we compare to even the events that occurred in 2021,
this one was more or less dominated
by non-frequently impacted circuits.
And this is where we saw wind speeds
that we hadn't seen historically.
So that's why we're also adding into the scope
those circuits that, we start to look at mitigations
and other circuits, but we're gonna be accelerating
those efforts to really try to understand
what that particular Thanksgiving Event, what it brought,
and what's the likelihood that those things
are gonna show up down the road?
I think you make a great point here,
that with climate change,
there is gonna be sort of an upward trajectory
of uncertainty and more difficult things to predict.
So I think that the goal for us is to continue driving
these sort of grid hardening mitigation
that align both with mitigating the risk of ignitions,
but also mitigating and reducing the need for PSPS.
So the short answer, just to summarize,
we are looking at that next level down
that that was the basis of our grid hardening plans,
and we're adding two with additional circuits
and considerations based on the Thanksgiving Event.
-: Thanks, Erik.
And now I can shift gears to the second question
if there's no further questions on that topic.
But I think the second question was in terms
of notifications, I had mentioned how we tried
to filter notifications for the circuit
that were most likely to be de-energized,
and what comes to mind for me on that question
is we're always trying to strike that right balance.
We don't wanna over notify customers who are likely
to be de-energized, but at the same time,
we wanna make sure
that we're providing sufficient notifications
when there is a probability of that happening.
And so I think what we learned in Thanksgiving,
and it's an excellent question,
is what's that appropriate balance, right?
And so as part of our 2022 planning efforts,
we're going back and determining what the at right level
of buffer is to put in place.
So if a forecast is coming in and it's indicating
that we're not gonna breach those thresholds,
we need to make sure that we're accounting
for margin of error.
And so that is definitely a priority for 2022.
-: Thank you.
-: I have a follow question for that.
On customer notifications,
I know you had slides that show statistics on reduction
of the total number of events.
Do you have metrics on a events that were notified?
So how many events were notified through the years
as you've been doing this?
Has there been a downward trajectory of that,
or are you still kind of notifying more events
that you're calling and have you been able to reduce that?
I agree.
I think there is an effect of notifying,
even if you don't call an event,
it has an effect on customers who have to plan,
local responders have to get organized,
you maybe experience a crying wolf syndrome
if you do it too much.
So just was wondering how your numbers are looking in terms
of notification of events versus, so that larger number
of total events notified,
and have you been able to reduce that?
-: So to kind of restate the question,
just to make sure I understand it correctly, my question
is are we seeing any changes in that false positive rate?
Is that a good way to put it?
-: I think it is.
That's a coming at it a little bit differently,
but I think we would get to the same result.
-: Okay, well, excellent question.
I think, again, that Thanksgiving Event
was a great example, right?
Where we looked to try to minimize notifications
to customers who weren't likely to get de-energized.
And of course, the flip side of doing that
is if you cut it too close, then you run into the issue
where folks don't get enough advanced notice.
I don't have the metrics with me in terms
of false positive rates over the seasons,
or even over the events within a season.
So if you're okay with it,
I'd like to take an action item and commit to getting back
to you with that data,
unless somebody else on the SDE Team
has that readily available.
-: Thank you.
I appreciate at that follow-up.
-: And I did want to confirm as well that the question
about the European weather model
and whether or not it was in the WMP,
team confirmed that it is, it's on page 284, table 531
in the WMP.
So just wanted to close the loop on as well.
-: Thank you.
-: You said page 284 of WMP?
Page 284 of the WMP.
-: Gotcha.
-: I wanna ask the panel one more time,
so they have any questions
regarding the SCE presentation today?
And we still have additional slides as well.
I'm about to hand over to Katie to talk a bit
about how we're mitigating the impact of PSPS
through our customer care programs.
But let me pause briefly to see
if there there's no additional follow-up, and then if not,
I'll go ahead and hand over to her.
All right, Katie.
-: Great.
Thank you.
And we can go to the next page.
Thanks, Tom.
Good afternoon.
First, I just really would like to start by saying
that I can't overstate how important
our various PSPS mitigations are to SCE.
And as long as we continue to need to use PSPS,
it's our highest priority to minimize impacts
in our communities for all customers,
and especially those with Access and Functional Needs
who are at higher risk.
In the 2021 fire season,
we activated on 33 occasions for a total of 67 days.
And this year, our added services
included onsite language translation for customers
for whom spoken English is not their primary language,
and this also includes American Sign Language.
In the 2021 fire season, we had more than 2,700 visitors
to our community resource centers
and community crew vehicles,
including more than 2,000 visitors
during the Thanksgiving Event.
As Jill mentioned in her opening remarks,
you can see her here in our picture with one
of our employee volunteers
at the Silverado Community crew vehicles.
Many of our executives went out to be with our customers
and team members over the Thanksgiving activation
to hear directly from them.
In 2021, we also completed construction
of manual transfer switch equipment,
six resiliency zone sites,
and now have seven resiliency zone sites
in remote communities impacted by PSPS events
in 2019 and 2020.
These are customer sites where we entered into a contract
to install generators-switching equipment,
and deploy backup generation during an event.
For example, during our Thanksgiving Event,
we deployed a generator to the Cabazon Fuel Center
as part of this program.
Separately, we provided community resource centers
in Actan and Cabazon with manual transfer switch equipment
and deployed backup generation to both sites
during the Thanksgiving Event.
Over the Thanksgiving Event,
we were resource-constrained and had some logistical issues
that affected the delivery of resiliency materials.
We are currently expanding our pool
of customer care team members and looking
at ways to smooth those logistical issues
that we experienced.
We will also be continuing to listen to our customers
through onsite customer research focus groups
and through our working group and community meetings.
To increase feedback, we added a QR code option
to our onsite survey to increase customer usability.
In 2021, we deployed 6,021 critical care battery backup.
Our 2022 goal will be to target
an additional 2,750 batteries,
which is about 35% of remaining eligible customers.
We acknowledge that not all customers
who use a medical device or assistive technology
for independence, health or safety are eligible
for critical care battery backup programs.
In 2022, to further assist customers with access
and functional needs, we are piloting
an in-event battery loan program
to provide a portable battery backup to customers
who are notified of the potential for de-energization
as part of PSPS.
We will be partnering
with various community-based organizations
who serve customers disabilities
and faith-based organizations for implementation.
I'll go ahead and pause here and see
if there's any questions before we talk
about some of our other community customer care programs.
Yes, I see Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
-: Thanks.
Could you just clarify what you said your target for 2022
is 35% of remaining eligible customers?
Is that right?
-: Yes, exactly, of the remaining eligible customers.
To date we've deployed batteries for 48%
of total customers that are eligible.
-: And what, and just remind us
what the universe is that you're describing.
Are these all critical-care customers
or Medical Baselines customers,
and are they in highly impacted circuits
or what is the universe, the 48% and the 35%?
If you've done that 48 and you have targeting 35,
how many will be remaining in the numerator?
If I could ask you a compound question like that.
-: So, yeah, no, and trust me, I'm always asking for the map.
So I'll start with the denominator.
The denominator is 14,000 eligible customers,
and we define those as customers that are enrolled
in Medical Baseline for our care fair programs,
which are income-qualified rate programs,
and that also live in a high fire zone.
So that's the total.
In total, we've deployed to 6,741 customers.
And in 2022, we'll be adding to that 2,750.
So the numerator,
to answer your questions, is 9,491.
-: Well, you have another four to 5,000 that you still need
to reach over that, after 2022.
And some of them you're targeting
with this in-event battery loan pilot,
but otherwise you just you're are still trying
to get those customers backup batteries, basically.
-: Yes.
And just to elaborate on that, SCE notifies
the customers that are eligible,
and we actually have additional customers
that are eligible each month,
we add them to the list of customers
that we're reaching out to.
And we attempt to reach out to those customers
through direct mail and letters and emails.
We try up to three times,
and then the vendor that we work with will conduct
up to six outbound calls to eligible customers,
and we're doing this on a monthly basis.
In addition, we're providing information and education
to community-based organizations,
and we're using social media platforms
like Nextdoor and Twitter in order to reach customers.
In addition, we're actually going in-person
and knocking on doors to try to reach more people.
and we actually just got an update last night
that last year, just through knocking on doors,
not just calling or emailing,
we've delivered batteries to an additional, 106, excuse me,
106 batteries to an additional amount of customers.
-: And do you know how many are, what percentage
of the relative share of those 14,000 have
that are in highly impacted
or frequently impacted circuits have you been able
to get batteries to?
-: Could you state that question again?
-: I was asking you for the frequently impacted circuits,
which is a lower number
than all your high-fire threat areas,
so I'm curious if you have any idea of the percentage
of customers, eligible customers that you've reached
in those frequently impacted circuits
as opposed to the entire universe of high-fire threat areas?
-: Thank you for clarifying.
Right.
And as we've been talking about,
the 14,000 is in the high-fire threat area.
I don't have the statistic
on the frequently impacted customers,
but we can get that number and get back to you.
-: Thank you very much.
-: Thank you.
And Commissioner Reynolds.
-: Just as a follow-up on the battery question,
can you explain a little bit more about what types
of batteries these are?
It sounds like they're not portable
because that's a separate program.
Are they whole house batteries?
And are there batteries that work in multifamily buildings
as well as single family buildings?
If you could just give me some more detail on that,
that would be great.
-: Sure.
The batteries are, they are portable
in that they can move around,
and the larger ones actually are on a cart that have wheels.
So they're not like a power wall, for example.
And they come in multiple different sizes.
We have 1,500 watt-hour battery up to 6,000 watt battery,
and they can, we talk to customers
about what medical devices they have
and then we help to size the type battery that they get
based on the medical equipment that they're running.
-: Thank you.
-: I have a question also.
Oh, sorry, Commissioner Houck, I jump ahead of you.
-: Oh no, no, I think raised your hand before me,
but I either way, you wanna go first or?
-: Okay, sure.
So, and for that Thanksgiving Event, okay?
Describe a little bit of what kind
of customer care resources were deployed
for that Thanksgiving Event.
-: Yes, I'm happy to discuss that.
So during this Thanksgiving Event,
we activated 13 community resource centers
and community crew vehicles.
So breaking that down,
we had five community crew vehicles throughout Los Angeles,
Ventura, Orange and San Bernardino,
and eight of the community resource centers.
And just as a reminder,
I'm not sure if the different utilities
use different terminology, but for us,
the community crew vehicles
are vehicles that can be moved
throughout our service area
depending on need and our community resource centers,
our locations, like community centers, police departments,
sometimes hotels or motels,
that our actual physical locations.
And so during Thanksgiving,
we had eight of those community resource centers
that were open and available to customers.
In addition to some of the things
that we were doing over Thanksgiving
is that we distributed 2,818 $25 grocery gift cards.
And that was for a total of about $70,000
through these various locations.
We distributed snacks,
water, resiliency kits that included phone chargers
and LED lights in addition to personal protective equipment
and additional program and resource information
to our customers.
Thank you.
-: Did that answer the question?
-: Yes.
Yes, thank you.
-: I just wanted to get a little more information
about your coordination
with the community-based organizations.
I think the earlier slide referenced 1,600 organizations.
And if you could just talk a little bit
about how you're engaging with them
and how they're engaging
with of customers, and then also the local
and tribal engagements.
I think it said there was 134,
and if you could give a little more detail
about how you're working with local and tribal governments,
that would be really appreciated.
-: Great, thank you.
Yeah, we work with over 1,600 different nonprofits,
and they're community-based organizations
that serve all various types of customers,
including those with Access and Functional Needs.
We partner with them by providing them with information
on the various services that we offer,
and they distribute that through their channels
to the communities that they serve.
We're actually this year looking into working with new types
of community organizations, like independent living centers,
area agencies on aging, food banks and nutritional programs,
and we're looking to distribute more battery backup
through those projects.
We also use those community-based organizations.
They have various social media channels
that they can provide information to their constituents on.
So we do that.
We really are working with them very regularly
and we also have instituted
an Access and Functional Needs Liaison
that's dedicated during our PSPS events to do coordination
specifically with our community-based organizations.
And could you, I think there was a second part
of that question.
Could you repeat that?
I think it was on tribal and local communication.
-: Yes.
Could you give a little more detail about your coordination
and engagement with tribal and local government?
-: Great.
On that one, I'm going to see
if I have another speaker that can speak to that from SCE.
-: Okay, Katie, I think I can take that.
-: Thank you. -: So we're actually,
we're actually engaging with a number of tribes in our area.
There's 13 tribes in SCE's service territory,
nine are located in high fire risk areas.
And so we engage with them on a regular basis.
We've got SCE representatives that are assigned to each
of the tribal governments and regularly engage them.
We've held several workshops in 2021
specifically for the tribes where SCE provided updates
on our wildfire mitigation efforts,
PSPS Public Safety Power portal,
as well as information on customer care programs,
resiliency opportunities
such as self-generation incentive program
and resiliency zones.
And so that engagement will continue in 2022,
and yeah, we'll continue promoting those engagements
with each of those tribes as we move into the new year.
-: Thank you, and are you. -: Did that
answer your question?
-: And then do you have similar engagement that you described
with the tribes with the local governments as well?
-: Yes, we do.
Very similarly, we engage with local governments
as well as with our critical infrastructure customers.
We handle, we get together with them in workshops,
resiliency workshops, PSPS updates,
making sure that they've got information on the latest
and greatest that were working on in the PSPS space,
and hosting similar workshops with them as well.
-: Thank you.
-: Hey Michael, just one thing that I wanted to share
to build on that
with an emergency management engagement angle,
also both prior to events and during events,
lots of engagement with our county
and state emergency management officials county
at the operational area level,
really getting in and out and meeting
with those emergency management directors
to close the feedback, to help improve and refine
our engagement protocols.
And then the same thing with Cal OES,
the California State Warning Center,
also looking to standardize some create consistency
in how we respond and handle in-event engagement
with our state partners.
So just wanted to add that briefly as well.
-: Thank you.
-: Great.
And I'm happy to, slide 11.
I did want to do a quick, and make sure
we still have some time here.
I think we're at about one hour,
but we, I still have some functional needs
and then we have upcoming after that notification.
So I'll go ahead and con continue on that
because I'm not seeing anyone telling me to stop.
Thank you for that.
So moving on to slide 11,
we've made some good strides
in our Access and Functional Needs Program in 2021,
and I really just wanna take the opportunity to call two
of our team members.
You can see here Dani Anderson pictured
on our Government Relations Team,
and also Jennifer Ocampo on our Customer Care Team.
Danny and Jennifer have been both internal
and external advisors for us,
and Jennifer led a team that activated
an Access and Functionally Needs Liaisons
that I mentioned earlier
for every single one of our activations in 2021.
Jennifer's team engaged community-based organizations
like we've been talking about
and resolved urgent escalation issues from customers
with access and functional needs.
She was supported by our partnership with 211
to expand education and connect customers to resources
such as transportation,
meal delivery and shelter during PSPS events.
We've also expanded our customers
who receive escalated notification attempts
to all Medical Baseline customers and customers
who self-certify as sensitive while also expanding
customer enrollment in Medical Baseline by close to 9%.
We did this increase in Medical Baseline enrollment
through email outreach to 420,000 customers
and also digital advertising.
We still have some gaps,
and these are also addressed
in the AFN plan that we filed last month.
But in particular, we are contracting
with third-party vendors to prepare
and send PSPS notifications
and educational outreach materials in American Sign Language
and with English voice and text-accessible communications
for individuals who are deaf,
blind, deaf-blind and heart of hearing.
We are also continuing our efforts to increase medical base
even further CARE DERA enrollment,
which are our rate discount programs,
in addition to enhancing other service offerings.
So I will stop here for questions
before I hand it over to Michael William.
Okay.
I think we got most of the questions from the last slide.
So I will go ahead and hand this over to Michael
to discuss how we're informing partners and customers.
Thank you, all.
-: Sorry about that.
I think that was on mute.
Thank you for that, Katie.
And if you wouldn't mind moving to the next slide, please,
that would be great.
So thanks for the question early on,
because I think that provided a terrific segue into some
of the things that we're doing
based on our learnings in 2021.
First thing that I wanted to stress is we did do
a major overhaul of our notification process
and our content.
Turns out that we've done quite a bit of research,
and the research that we have done suggests
that the notifications that we've, the modifications
on our notifications have been better received.
And actually customer are saying
that they understand them better than what we had
in the prior duration.
So we'll be doing more research.
We wanna make sure we stay connected with our customers,
and we'll continue, if required, to optimize our messaging
as we get that feedback from our customers.
That's the good news,
but now I wanna discuss the room for improvement,
as Erik mentioned earlier,
that Thanksgiving period event,
it taught us quite a bit.
We didn't provide, it turns out we didn't provide
advanced notice to a number of customers of de-energization
to a number of customers.
And so we're gonna be providing revised numbers to that.
And frankly, neither the lack of notification
nor the data errors requiring revision were acceptable
to us or our leaders.
Given our approach to de-energization that is to continue
to de-energize as few customers as possible,
and only when it's absolutely necessary,
we don't pre-schedule the de-energization.
And that makes it a little bit more complex
to manage as Tom mentioned earlier.
Over Thanksgiving, as Erik mentioned,
we faced a lot of changing weather patterns,
and some that were totally anticipated.
So we had some data issues as well,
and we were working with our legacy notification system.
That slowed down the transfer of information.
The completion of the Foundry automation,
which we're very excited about, promises to support faster
and more accurate notifications going forward.
So we're looking forward to the full deployment
of that system and being able to use that this year.
The second issue,
which is the issue of the accurate post-event reporting
will also be addressed because we're gonna be codifying
the data sources.
Instead of having disparate data sources that we use
during the reporting process, information in the event
will flow directly into our operational system
and into our post-event reporting, which means
we'll have a single source truth,
and it means that we'll be able to generate
that information much more quickly.
One additional area that continues to be a challenge
in notifications, and also the web content,
is providing more specific estimated restoration times,
due to the time required for line inspections mainly.
And I think Tom touched on this a little bit
previously as well.
There are a lot of variables to consider in that.
We need to understand whether we're using truck patrols,
air patrols, or even occasionally hiking, on-foot patrols.
If it's late in the day, we've gotta evaluate
whether the patrol can be safely
and efficient, effectively done overnight.
And as many of you know, we don't fly helicopter routes
at night, and winds may subside at night enough to end
the event, but it could still be too windy to fly
in some areas.
We're looking at a variety of ways to increase
the specificity of our restoration estimates.
Based on historical data,
I think Tom mentioned some of the modeling capabilities
that we have,
but also looking at historical data and the frequency
of impacts to certain circuits should give us
better information on how to look forward
to where restoration times might be,
and to be able to deliver those more dynamically
so that they can be updated as the situation requires.
So we've been benchmarking quite a bit with SDG&E
on this, and we hope understand if their approach,
which is to focus on publishing information
to their outage page will work for us as well.
So let me stop for questions here for just a second.
Yes, Commissioner.
-: I have a question.
Can you describe in just simple terms
how you changed your message to be clearer or better?
-: Yes.
-: You got that feedback too.
An example of language you're using now
that made the notification better.
-: Well, in the simplest terms possible,
let me just say that what we were doing
was, in our notifications,
we were telling customers that they could be de-energized
and not explaining that because weather patterns
could shift, well, we let them know it
because weather patterns do shift.
There was a possibility that they would not be de-energized.
So they were a little bit more rigid, if you will, prior.
We actually hired a third party to come in
and help us evaluate that messaging
and evaluate customer feedback on that messaging
so that we could speak a little bit more plainly to them.
So an example that might help with this is for customers
who are re-energized, but where we know
there may still be a risk of weather patterns,
that could necessitate de-energization.
We put in additional language to help them understand
that we're trying to mitigate risks,
but we wanna also just keep them aware of the fact
that although they're re-energized,
they may be de-energized again.
But we created language that was a little bit more palatable
and better received.
And I think that's what created the improvement
and customer favorability to the messaging
that we've deployed going forward.
-: Thank you.
-: All right.
So if we can move to the next slide.
So we talked a little bit about our outreach,
and I was excited that we focus quite a bit on the question
that was asked earlier.
We focused quite a bit on increasing customer
and community resiliency.
So we ended up hosting eight resiliency workshops
for critical facilities
and critical infrastructure customers on topics
such as PSPS, emergency preparedness as well,
and Public Safety Partner Portal.
To assist the carriers in deployment
of their backup power resources,
we held one-on-one resiliency meetings
with the major telecommunication providers in our area.
This helped to identify circuits
and equipment locations that are at risk for PSPS outages.
Now, we realized this is an ongoing discussion.
and our commitment to them to the Commission
is that we're gonna continue to meet with them in 2022
to support their PSPS resiliency efforts.
We sent a targeted newsletter also to all of our customers,
who each received one of two additions.
For some customers in high fire risk areas,
the content focused on PSPS resiliency and information,
while for the rest of our customers,
it was more generally focused on emergency preparedness.
We'll be sending out our 2022 editions of the newsletter
later this spring.
Our advertising and digital marketing efforts
reflected this focus as well and directed our customers
to our website for additional information.
As Jill mentioned earlier,
we also held more than 100 meetings
with community members, partners and jurisdictions.
This included
11 wildfire safety community livestream meetings
with 865 attendees, 15 power talk meetings attended
by more than 500 customers, and 13 meetings
with county operational areas in our service territory.
Additionally, our Local Public Affairs Team briefed
or communicated with 125 local governments
and nine tribal governments and made presentations
to government and business associations
on SCE's wildfire mitigation efforts
and updates to help them prepare for PSPS.
So I'll pause there for just a second for any questions.
All right.
Seeing none, next slide, please.
So we've made pretty significant strides
in our website in 2021,
and I think the most significant is that we consolidated
our PSPS maintenance repair
and rotating outage maps into one.
Now, I like this because this simplifies
how people find the status of power at any location.
If I go into a map, I wanna be able to distinguish
between PSPS or other types of outages
that might be impacting me.
It's easy to get these things confused.
So we've tried to simplify this for our customers, that way,
they can make that distinction on the map.
We're gonna continue to enhance this, and in 2022,
we'll add the ability the search for PSPS online maps
and alerts using a meter number
and also to sign up for PSPS alerts
while turning on new service.
So we're undergoing a larger review and an update
to the sce.com PSPS pages with an outside agency.
This should also help with overall navigation
for our customers,
trying to make it a little bit more user-friendly.
Our weather awareness map was introduced in 2021
and currently shows a seven-day extended forecast
for PSPS weather by county, and this map allows
some pre-planning for customers
and partners by letting them know whether their county
will be in PSPS watch or warning status.
We still direct customers to the PSPS map
for more granular information
as we get closer to the event,
where we can provide information at a circuit level.
And then we'll also be tying our GIS data flow
into the Foundry automation product
that's been talked about so much.
This is gonna help to improve the flow of information
to the map and remove some of the manual steps
that are required to update our maps.
So any questions on that?
-: I just have a question.
A lot of the information you're talking about seems
to be web-based
or is being given to customers through some sort
of electronic means.
If they're in an outage and they need information,
how are they going to be able to get that information?
And are you, I guess they would be looking at relying
on cell phones potentially.
So just maybe go into a little more detail about your work
with some of the telco providers and just ensuring
that there's access to emergency services
if somebody is in an outage and isn't gonna be able
to access some of the online material.
-: So that's, I think that's a really good point,
and it's something
that we've talked quite a bit about,
recognizing that a lot of people are not accessing
their computers during an outage event.
We do take for granted
that they are probably in the cell phone space,
although we have additional outreach efforts
through our Consumer Affairs Group,
which will make sure that certain customers are contacted.
But I think what we're trying to do is address
and make as user-friendly the mobile platforms
that are available so that customers
who have access to their cell phones have got the ability
to get regular updates.
And then of course providing information
on where we can keep those cell phones charged up and ready
through our community resource centers.
Also the CCD vehicles that we dispatch.
So the customers have some longevity
with those resources.
And I wanna make sure I'm not missing anything.
So we are continuing to engage with our telco customers,
as I mentioned earlier,
and we are conducting engagement meetings focused on telco,
such as in our Public Safety Partner Portal,
critical infrastructure workshops
and including and the functional exercises to a system
in their resiliency efforts.
So I think those meetings are gonna continue
to provide ample information on the notification process,
the messaging types as well as addressing
public safety resiliency plans
and Rural Communities Public Safety Partner Portal training
and enhancements, and we also conduct simulations
with our telco partners as well.
And we invite them to be a part of those engagements,
so that we're ready and we can address some
of these challenges that you might be mentioning.
So these are good opportunities for them to provide feedback
and help us to shape the way
that we approach these situations.
And in addition,
it provides an opportunity for proactive engagement efforts
for our account managers that are available
during and before an event
and after the event to provide support
and to answer questions.
But there's a whole lot going on out there
and I like to say, we can cover every base,
and I think we're gonna continue finding ways and looking
for ways that we can make sure customers
get the right information in hand.
-: I'm just gonna add
on how customers are using some of this information,
'cause I think as Commissioner Rechtschaffen commented
on our earlier meeting this week.
Most people are worried about when that outage goes out
and may not be doing the research into some of these things.
So any further information you have
on and how you're assisting customers and making sure
they have what they need through the notifications
and during the outages, we'll greatly appreciate it.
And so thank you.
-: Oh, absolutely.
-: And I just wanna tag
onto that (clears throat) for example,
senior citizens who maybe their only contact
might be someone who's delivering a meals on wheels package,
no internet acumen.
Maybe they have a wire line phone
as far as what Edison is doing
to reach those, kinds of customer.
-: So- -: It'd be very.
-: Thank you for that question.
And in my experience,
and I'm not responsible for this particular area,
so I may ask, I think Katie probably has some insights
on this, but I know that we are engaging quite a bit
with the counties and coordinating efforts in conjunction
with the counties so that we can identify these types
of customers to make sure that we are conducting
or supporting the efforts to conduct in-person outreach
where we know that those vulnerable customers are at.
I know that through our Access and Functional Needs Program,
we're taking a more proactive approach
to identify these customers, encouraging them
to self-identify, but also engaging in that outreach
to make sure that we can cover those where necessary.
Katie, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.
-: Yes.
Thank you.
Thanks for that.
We are reaching out to customers in different ways
through our call center.
We actually have been working with customers
that call using the California, Service,
which is a sign language interpreter,
and we're using that in order to talk to other customers,
for customers that can't use some of those normal services.
Additionally, we do have a partnership with 211,
and those customers, customers
are being, for food, transportation and shelter.
And 211 is something that can be called
with a landline.
We do know that this is an area for improvement
and we are looking at other ways to communicate and talk
to various customers with different types of needs.
So I appreciate the question and the concern.
-: Thank you.
-: Hey, Katie and team,
I thought it'd be helpful to provide a couple
of case studies too
based on the Thanksgiving activation that we had.
So I was the Lead Coach on the Incident Management Team.
And just one example that I thought was worthwhile to share
was working with the independent living centers
to triage escalated requests for different types of things.
So having medically, customers reach out for example,
and ask for access to backup batteries.
I remember getting on phone calls
with the County Emergency Management Entities,
as well as with our Access and Functional Needs expert
on the Incident Management Team, to really triage and see
what we can do to help provide additional support
to those folks.
And in one case, we ended up dispatching
a vacuum generator out to that location so that that person
could have continued power
because relocation wasn't possible.
So I just thought that quick case study
would be a helpful example.
-: Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for that.
-: That's great input, Tom, and thank you for that.
And thanks, Katie.
Appreciate the question.
I know we need to kind of move it along.
So let me ask that we go to the next slide.
I'll talk a little bit
about our Public Safety Partner Portal.
So our portal was actually launched in mid 2021,
as many of you know,
and was used on PSPS events starting in June.
So this secure password-protected site is intended
to be a one-stop shop for our public safety partners
and critical infrastructure customers.
And we've been gradually increasing its features
and functionality as well as its enrollment to the site.
To date, we have 600-plus users.
For reference, we have approximately 40 users
on our legacy GIS-based platform.
So this is a pretty significant increase in utilization,
and we're really excited about that.
After a benchmarking session with PG&E and SDG&E to discuss
some of the key features and capabilities,
we added a weekly user group session to identify
and triage issues and get feedback
for future portal enhancements.
We wanna continue to develop this
and make sure that it's useful to our partners.
So for 2022, we're gonna continue to enhance the portal
by making in-event information more on the site
after the events have concluded and prior to being archived.
We also want to provide additional functionality to mimic
the previous legacy GIS-based platform
for telecom providers and public safety partners.
And based on feedback, we're starting
to introduce, feature
to reduce unwanted portal email notifications.
Lastly, we're doing some exploratory research to understand
how and if we should be expanding the portal to be available
for major all-hazard events as well.
So let me stop and I'll ask the questions there,
and if not, then we can move to close.
-: Okay, why don't I pick it up from here, Michael?
So thank you very much.
If you could go to our last slide, I wanna wrap, oh, sorry.
Back a back a little bit, one more, back.
There we go.
Thanks.
There we go.
So I wanna end really where we started,
which is just talking about our commitment
and very much our alignment with what President Reynolds
and Director Thomas Jacob laid out right
from the very beginning that our objective is to make sure
we are using PSPS only as a last resort to make sure
that we are keeping our customers,
all of our customers,
and especially our vulnerable customers,
front of mind, that we are deploying
every mitigation possible to us through partnerships,
through the tools we have, through the interactions
that we have with customers year round to make sure
that we are minimizing any kind of impacts
that last resort use of PSPS might have on our customers.
We at the same time are very realistic about the problem
that we are confronting, and I think it was brought up
in one of the earlier comments about climate change
and how extreme weather is here with us to stay.
It was just reported that we're in one
of the worst drought periods of, I don't remember
what it was, something like 1,000 years.
So we know we have to be very thoughtful about the realities
of the environment that we're operating in and make sure
that we are moving appropriately to manage and mitigate
the risks to all of our customers that comes from wildfire,
while every time we are using any of the tools
in our tool belt, that we are think being thoughtful
of the customers that are being impacted.
So that's why we really look at this as a year-round effort,
a year-round relationship-building with partners,
a year-round education effort with our customers,
to make sure that they're ready, and as Michael just said,
for all hazards.
I think we've made a lot of strides.
If you just look in from '21 to compared to '20 or go back
even another year from there, but as you heard
from, I think every single speaker, we recognize
we still have a lot of opportunity for improvement.
And so I'll give you my commitment that we know
what we can do better, and we know that we will do better
in our execution, and we are completely aligned
with the objectives to keep PSPS on a declining use
year over year and to a very targeted way
in the case where it is really focused on keeping
the community safe when that's the only tool
that's left to us.
So with that, I'll close up the SCE portion.
Thank you for allowing us to go a little bit over,
and myself and our entire team will be available
through the end of this program to answer any questions
that might come up later.
-: I wanted to thank the folks over at SCE.
I wanted to check with the panel,
do we have any additional question for SCE
in their presentation?
All right.
Hearing none, I would like
to turn it over to SDG&E.
Operator, can you give the folks at SDG&E access?
I think we're gonna start off with Kevin Geraghty.
-: I just wanna make sure.
Oops!
Hello.
Just wanna make sure I'm coming across loud and clear.
-: You sound great.
Thank you.
-: I'm sorry, can you hear me?
-: We can hear you. -: I can hear you.
-: Okay.
Thank you.
So sorry for the confusion.
Hey, good afternoon.
Hey, thank you for having the time to get together today.
Thank you, President Reynolds and respective Commissioners,
Cal Fire Chiefs and Director Thomas Jacobs.
My name is Kevin Geraghty.
I am SDG&E Senior Vice President for Electric Operations,
and I also serve as its Chief Safety Officer.
My remarks will be brief as we have quite a bit
of information to share and discuss.
Joining me today to share SDG&E's 2021 PSPS Experiences
is our team of leaders who I'm honored everyday
to serve with, and who are focused
on improving Public Safety Power Shutoff at SDG&E.
You'll first hear from Brian D'Agostino,
SDG&E's Director of Fire Science and Climate Adaptation.
He'll present on forecasting.
Zoraya Griffin, SDG&E's Senior Communications Manager,
will present on notifications to communications.
Danielle Kyd, SDG&E's Access
and Functional Needs Customer Strategy Manager, will present
on access and functional needs, including Medical Baseline
and tribal relationships and service.
Jon Kochik, SDG&E's Customer Integrated Solutions Manager,
will present backup battery programs.
Mona Freels, SDG&E's Emergency Operations Services Manager,
will discuss lessons learned from 2021.
And finally, Jonathan Woldemariam,
SDG&E's Director of Wildfire Mitigation, will discuss
our ongoing mitigations.
We're excited to be here today
and to share our 2021 Public Safety Power Shutoff experience
and what also will expect from SDG&E in 2022.
We did improve Public Safety Power Shutoff Programs in 2021.
We advanced our situational awareness continue
to make infrastructure more climate-resilient.
We integrated renewable energy solutions,
such as microgrids and batteries, and most importantly,
we continue to grow our partnerships with stakeholders
who serve our communities in high-fire threat districts.
SDG&E continued to find ways to improve in 2021.
And while 2021 was less impactful than 2020,
and SDG&E found ways to improve in all areas,
we are maintaining our relentless focus on improving in 2022
in order to create the best possible customer experience
while also managing the ever-increasing
and evolving climate change-induced wildfire risk
that we all face.
We have many new enhancements that we're excited
to talk about for 2022.
We'll share those with you today as well.
But finally, on behalf of Caroline Winn and everyone
of my colleagues at SDG&E who passionately serve
our customers and communities,
I want to share with you that the safety of our employees
and of our public remained as or value at SDG&E,
and that will never change.
And when SDG&E activates a Public Safety Power Shutoff,
I can personally assure you
that it is indeed as a last resort.
It's a last resort measure to protect the safety
of the community, and our focus remains,
and will remain to make de-energizations
associated with public safety power shutoffs smaller,
shorter and less likely.
Thank you.
And I'm just gonna move straight into our presentation
with Brian D'Agostino,
and he's gonna present on forecasting.
-: Yeah.
Well, thank you very much, Kevin,
and good afternoon, everybody.
I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today
to reflect back on our last PSPS season and some
of the steps that were taken to actually perform better
than we had the year before.
So if we get into the next slide, please,
we can start talking about kind of the overall story we had
with the previous PSPS season,
and it really started in September and October.
As we heard from SCE,
we had a big influx of monsoonal moisture
in the Southern California early in the season.
Now, this introduced some moisture that really prevented us
from getting to that point that we had
those real critiCal Fire weather conditions in October.
So we never really escalated to that point where the winds
and the dryness got us to the point
that we reached that last resort effort of de-energizing.
So we were feeling pretty good getting through October.
And then November, for only the sixth time in the history
of weather observations here in San Diego,
we didn't get a drop of rain.
So that really dried us out and set the stage
for the Thanksgiving Event,
which we've already heard quite a bit about.
So here in San Diego,
it was pretty evident about a week in advance
that we were going to be seeing
a moderate-to-strong Santana wind event on Thanksgiving,
but as we moved into the weekend the week before,
we were still very closely watching Monday and Tuesday
for potentially some rainfall,
and we were hoping that that rainfall was gonna be enough
that we weren't gonna escalate to these extreme levels
on Thanksgiving, but it became very apparent
the Sunday before Thanksgiving
that that rain was not going to materialize,
and not only that,
it was going to be a very challenging event
in terms of forecasting the winds.
So we did end up kinda getting together
that Monday morning right about three days before the event,
and that was when the decision was made
to initiate Public Safety Power Shutoff Protocols.
The National Weather Service did follow up by issuing
a red flag warning for the event, and overall,
we were aggressive with notifying customers.
And part of the reason
is, as we've heard from Southern California Edison,
this was gonna be a very challenging wind event.
We knew that it wasn't going to impact a lot
of the traditional areas because of how mountain waves
can form here in our complex terrain.
So we did notify almost 55,000 customers.
Out of those customers,
just less than 6,000 ended up experiencing
a Public Safety Power Shutoff.
The longest duration Public Safety Power Shutoff
was just over 42 hours, shortest was just under six,
giving us an average of just over 25 hours.
One thing that we're proud of with this event
is we really leveraged our technology and our FPI,
and we feel that we avoided
Public Safety Power Shutoff to almost 23,000 customers.
And what I mean by that
is these customers reached thresholds
where they were up around the 99th percentile wind speed
for that neighborhood, but what we did is we really enabled
30-second read observations.
We really got in close to inspecting what was happening
in those neighborhoods, and through close inspection,
a lot of those, we ultimately made the determination
that it was not a last resort type of situation,
and we ended up maintaining and keeping the system on,
not only through closely monitoring weather conditions
in that area, but by having field crews on the ground,
observing those circuits saying, no, we we'll be okay,
let's see if it gets any worse.
So because of that, we did end saving PSPS
to quite a few customers.
We did open three community resource centers
to support those almost 6,000 customers.
And then when we look at how the event played out,
we did have winds just a mile per hour short
of hurricane force here in San Diego with a peak gust
of 73, but then over six stations exceeded 60 miles an hour,
over 26 stations exceeded 50 miles per hour.
And then to the same point we heard from SCE,
we had 15 stations that met
or exceeded all-time records here in San Diego.
And again, this is part of the reason we were so aggressive
with the notifications was because we had mountain waves
that were surfacing in unusual areas during this event.
So before I move on to the next slide,
I just wanna pause and see if there's any questions
on that at all.
All right.
Moving forward, one thing that was very important for us
is that we looked at this year,
and as you've heard emphasized on the last call,
is the weather that we see in any given PSPS season
will ultimately determine the impact.
So we really over the last year tried to strive
to develop a way to normalize the season,
and normalize how we use Public Safety Power Shutoff.
So to explain that here,
I wanna start with the equation
up at the top of the slide.
And it says, "Our Public Safety Power Shutoff score
"is made up of three different factors."
Right?
One is a determination
of how strong the Santa Ana wind actually is.
So the way that we gauge that in our meteorology group,
and the way that we're sharing with you now is we take
the top 20 windiest weather stations that we have,
and we average that,
and that gives us a score for how strong and how windy
an event actually is.
Then next factor in this equation is really how we determine
how widespread an event is.
And that is how many of the weather stations
that we operate?
For us it's 221.
How many of those exceeded the 95th percentile in terms
of historical Santa Ana wind speeds?
So that tells us how widespread the event is
across our service territory.
And then the last factor is where we take our FPI component,
which is our fire potential component,
and it tells us how risky the event is.
Now, when we run every PSPS event through this equation,
we get a score, and then based off that's score,
we can compare it to how many customers were impacted,
so then we can really measure,
are we improving year in and year out?
And that's how we are measuring our improvement.
So I wanna start with the table on the left.
And it was a very active year, as we all know,
the PSPS season of 2020.
We know it even went into early, early 2021 for many of us.
And those are all the events where PSPSs were activated.
And you can see the column on the left is an indication
of how strong the event was.
The second column is how widespread the event was.
And then there's the FPI.
I wanna draw your attention down to December 23rd
and 24th, because that event was actually very similar
to the Thanksgiving Event that we had last year,
not only because it fell on a major holiday,
but if you look at the how windy it was
from the top 20 wind gusts, it was identical at 57.
If you look at how widespread the event was in terms
of the number of our stations and the percentage
of our stations that exceeded the 95th in both cases,
right around 80%, and in both cases,
the fire potential was on that high end
of elevated, just shy of those really extreme levels.
So you'll notice the overall PSPS score was very comparable,
but we actually ended up having less customers impacted
in 2021 under a very similar scenario.
So that's one of the ways that we're measuring
our performance and we're showing
that we are coming in better in a very similar situation
than we have before.
So I graphed this in the bottom right.
And you'll look at that red line.
And that red line is our performance in the 2020 season.
And it shows our PSPS score versus the number
of customers impacted.
So when we started looking at the 2021 season,
we needed to come in below that red line, right?
And that shows us, hey,
we have performed better in 2021
than we did the year before.
And we'll continue to hold ourselves kind of accountable
using this so that we can compare every event
to really show that improvement as we move forward.
The last slide that I wanted to share with you was give you
an update on our forecasting enhancements
and our meteorological advancements.
And we still maintain our culture of continuously improving
every bit of our situational awareness platform,
from expanding our weather network,
to increasing our capability of the mountaintop network,
updating the FPI,
enhancing the Santa Ana wildfire threat index,
there was not a tool that we had that went untouched
or unenhanced last year,
but there was a main theme last year,
and that was really around the data.
So the first thing was we have 10 years
of historical data now,
and how do we leverage that and use it?
Two of the biggest impact events we had last year
was the full-scale implementation
of the AI Forecasting System.
We've heard that that's something
that performed very well for us last year,
and even in a challenging event like Thanksgiving,
it did help us anticipate the event coming the size,
the scale and some of the challenges with that.
We've also used the data and implemented
full wildfire detection from all the mountain tops
in San Diego, and we've also found that
to be very effective, but not only enhancing
and using the data, but sharing the data
has been a huge initiative in 2021.
Working with the San Diego Super Computing Center,
we did develop a data-sharing platform where all the data
that we generate everyday,
almost 200 gigs, is available to any researcher
in California, Australia,
anywhere who wants to work on this data.
And then even the image you see on the right is part
of a new mapping system that's tied to all of that.
So we know the National Weather Service
in San Diego is using it.
Even the numbers that you see on that map
are our-AI based forecast, for all of the circuits.
So it's all made available.
Even fire agencies now are using this for fuel information,
and we're just continuing to share and promote
the distribution of a lot of this information
really is an innovation enabler moving forward.
And on the topic of moving forward,
we will continue to build and expand all of our products.
The Weather Network, we're adding air quality sensors.
We are going to be updating and replacing
our Supercomputing Platform in 2022.
So we will integrate lots of lessons learned from SCE,
so thank you for helping kind of drive a lot
of that initially.
And then also our AI-based Forecasting System
will continue to learn and retrain based off all
of the challenges and lessons learned in 2022.
So for any questions, I will conclude there,
and I will hand it onto our next speaker.
Oh, I do see, I see a hand.
Yes, Commissioner.
-: Brian, I just wanna confirm something with you.
If you go back one slide (clears throat)
the metric you're using for success is based a lot
on system-wide average, system-wide averaging,
gust-averaging stations above the 95th percentile
and so forth.
And I wanna confirm that one
of, as I understand this from briefings
you've given us in the past, one of the things
you really focus on and have focused on over the years
is having much as granular data as possible
based on individual, individual wind speeds
at very small geographic intervals.
And maybe that's the reason why last Thanksgiving,
you were able
to avoid doing, de-energizing 20-plus thousand customers
who are otherwise in scope.
So I just want you to explain that
or talk about, is that in fact true
that your continued focus
is to be as micro-granular as possible
in each your decision to de-energize, even though here,
you're talking about a system-wide impact average?
-: Yeah.
When we end up scoring the intensity
of an overall weather event,
we do it across our whole service territory, right?
We could bring it down more granular and say,
how intense was this storm for this neighborhood
and that neighborhood?
But right now, for the purpose of normalizing
kind of the overall strength of the event
and the overall impact on our service territory,
that's why we take this approach.
But the other question, we continue to focus
on that granularity.
And yeah, the short answer is the granularity is a big part
of what enabled us to keep the Thanksgiving Event last year
so targeted to a particular neighborhood.
And then the historical data, which we had as well, right?
Because just like we saw up at SCE,
we did have these wind surface in a very unusual place
in San Diego County.
And that's part of why we thought
even with 10 years of data,
we had 15 weather stations that reported
the windiest event that they'd ever had.
Right?
Just because it was very unique type of event.
But the granularity really enabled us to target
just that small area that was seeing those winds,
and it didn't end up becoming a widespread event.
We very much targeted where those wins did surface.
-: Thank you.
-: Yup.
-: I have a question.
(Genevieve clears throat)
Oh, let's see.
Your 2022 planning (clears throat)
replaced, let's see,
replaced Super Computing Platform enabling (clears throat)
next generation, where processing analytics.
Now, you did say you've got 10 years of weather data.
I know you've been able, has had
a pretty extensive weather station network,
and what have you, we heard
from, Edison about pulling in
a European weather modeling tool,
and is that something that you all are doing as well?
-: Yes, in a slightly different way.
There is Scripps Institution of Oceanography
here in San Diego, and they actually have
a Center of Western Weather Water Extremes
that accesses this European weather model.
And we have partnered with Scripps
that they're actually taking a lot
of their atmospheric river work,
and we're going to extend it.
It normally starts in December,
and we're working with them now to back up all of that work
to start in October.
And one of the benefits there is that having that,
that will be for the whole Western United States.
It'll be a 200-member European ensemble,
which means they're gonna use the supercomputers San Diego
to run 200 versions of the European model
and then make it publicly available
up and down the West Coast.
So it will be available, not only here in San Diego,
but it'll be available to the entire state
and even Pacific Northwest Utilities
that are dealing with this now.
So yeah, we certainly see the you of the European model
and look to, to integrate it
and expand some of that as well.
-: Okay.
All right, thank you.
-: All right.
Not seeing any other questions,
I will, now happy to introduce Zoraya Griffin,
our Senior Communications Manager,
to talk to you more about notifications.
-: Thank you, Brian.
And thank you, everybody, for the opportunity to share
with you, not only some of the lessons learned,
but also some of the planning that we're gonna be,
that we have in place for our PR, our notifications
as well as our public education and outreach for 2022.
I first of all wanna just set some context in the sense
that following the very impactful 2020 events that we had,
we decided that we were gonna start 2021 by really going
to our customers and our stakeholders,
and, 'cause I have the next slide, please, by the way,
and really start learning from them them
what worked in 2020,
and what we could frankly do better in 2021.
And how did we do that?
So all of us SCE, PG&E and us, we all did
very extensive post-event surveys,
but we went a little bit further than that,
and what we did was we, the first 90 days of 2021,
we hosted online focus groups,
online chats with our customers,
especially the ones that were affected the previous year.
We continued to do monthly customer opinion surveys
with some of our customer that were affected during the year
where we really vetted and tested some of the changes
that we were gonna be doing,
particularly some of the language
that we were gonna be changing in our notifications,
just to make sure that we will work that
with our customers and what they really wanted and needed
from us during a PSPS event.
So with that,
I think that really was a driver for some
of the high customer satisfaction rates
that I'm gonna be talking to you about
regarding our notification.
So in addition to the 70% of our surveyed respondents
were overall satisfied with our notification process,
primarily because they really truly
did help shape it for 2021.
But additionally,
over 80% recalled receiving multiple notifications
from us and felt that the content was accurate, relevant,
meaningful and provided information
that that was useful to them.
Additionally, we have over 70% customer satisfaction rating
in our in-language communications,
something that we are especially proud of because last year
we really focused on using language that was relevant
in our 20, excuse me, 22 prevalent languages.
We also expanded that to American Sign Language as well.
Every notification that went out
included American Sign Language video associated with it,
which led to 100% set customer satisfaction rate
with our AFN Community that that were notified.
So we also launched our PSPS App.
And as you see here, we've had over 38,000 downloads,
but last year, we did a targeted public education campaign
bringing much more awareness to the PSPS App, and going
into of 2021 wildfire season,
we have well over 15,000 additional download apps.
So one thing that we are especially proud of however,
and this goes back to the question
that was asked of the Edison,
and we heard this loud and clear from our customers,
especially our customers that are not particularly fond
of using the technology,
and that is that we started using in-community Marques
at churches, at some of our casinos,
that, some locations that were strategically placed
in our affected HFTD.
We also used over 31 portable electronic road signs,
again, strategically placed in areas that we went out
and we tested and measured what the high traffic volume
during fire season.
And then we also sent out in-community flyers
to our communities that were posted in areas that we knew
were high traffic areas,
that we used to also provide information.
Additionally, this year we launched
our Public Safety Partner Portal,
which I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail
because my colleague, Mona, is gonna be talking more
about that, but basically it's the one-stop shop
of information of everything
that our Public Safety partners need,
and there was an 87% customer satisfaction rating in the use
of that Public Safety Portal.
And in addition to the things that I've talked about,
we also leveraged
about 200 or so community-based organizations,
and what's important about this is these
are the most trusted organizations,
especially by our vulnerable populations,
our community-based organizations that they go to,
probably more so than coming to us for information,
and they not only amplify our messages,
but the organization like 211,
they actually mirror everything that we have on our website,
all the information, they mirror,
and their call center also serves to a large degree
to augment our call center.
So that is one of the key ways that we went out
and continued to reach a lot of these customers
that probably would not have contacted us.
Right?
But they felt comfortable in contacting 211
to get accurate information.
As far as lessons learned,
we augmented the capabilities of our notification system
so that now we can issue
approximately 100,000 communications in under an hour.
That was a lesson learned from previous years,
and so we strengthened our notification system,
and we are continuing to look at the framework
and improving the hardware of that notification system
so that we can continuously improve that system.
We did have a pretty significant lesson learned
with our notifications, and that is that some
of our carriers were blocking our calls,
our notification calls as spam.
So we are meeting with our telco carriers
to get that coding issue fixed on their end and anticipate
that we will not be having that same issue this coming year.
And then there were some customers
that we did not have accurate information,
or, we just didn't simply didn't have information
in our notification system or as part of their account.
So we have issued them letters.
We're pressing them to please update their information.
And we continue to work
with our, this strong partnerships that we have
with the media and our TV and radio,
they are fantastic at amplifying our notification messages
during our PSPS events as well,
as do our trusted CBO partners as well.
Next slide, please.
Unless there's any other questions,
I can certainly move on to our public education and.
-: Ms. Griffin, I have a question.
-: Sure.
-: Go ahead.
-: Oh, thank you.
So on the 70% respondent satisfied notification,
can you walk us through the numbers of just how many people
got the survey, and then what the response rate was?
And to me, honestly,
70% actually seems really low in terms of satisfaction.
So I was curious what actions you guys are taking
to improve that satisfaction rate.
-: So, yes.
So we reached out and issued our survey to everybody
that, to all of our customers that were affected
by the PSPS event in Thanksgiving,
and we got about a 10% response rate,
which is actually a little bit higher than we have gotten
in previous years.
Previous years, we've been averaging anywhere
from six to eight, a six to 8% response rate.
So, and believe it or not,
while that 70% customer satisfaction rate may appear
to be low, it's actually,, in the statistical world,
I learn, a pretty high customer satisfaction rate,
and especially from our previous years
when we were hovering under 50%,
and sometimes even lower than that.
So a 20% increase for us was pretty significant
from one season to the next.
-: With regard to your calls being marked as spam
by telecom carriers,
is that something that other utilities encountered
in your discussions about PSPS performance
with the other IUs, and can you provide
a little bit more color on the status
of those discussions with telecoms?
-: Yes.
So we have in our joint IU discussions,
the other IOUs have said that yes,
that there have been instances where they too are having
to work with their telcos for this.
And I will invite somebody from one
of our, my colleagues from, that's working directly
with our telcos, they may be on the line, to provide
a status update on those communications.
I believe that they're gonna be taking place
with, they were gonna be taking place
within the first quarter of this year.
So they may not, they may be scheduled
for later this quarter.
-: Zoraya, this is Mona.
I spoke with our business services prior to getting
on this call, 'cause that was one of the lessons learned.
We have received confirmation from at AT&T
that they have changed the flag on our 800 number
that is associated with our outbound dialer.
So it will no longer be flagged as spam with AT&T.
We have made the request of all of the other carriers,
but haven't yet received the confirmation from the others,
so that they're continuing conversation
that our account executive will be having.
-: Thank you, Mona.
-: Thank you.
-: Question follow-up (clears throat)
and actually I had the same reaction
that Director Thomas Jenkins had about the 70%.
Now, improving from below 50% of the 70%,
it is really excellent,
but do you have a goal for the next go around
to raise that in terms of residents being satisfied
or to get a higher than 10% response rate?
You look at what would it take
to get a higher satisfaction response?
And I know from screen, it takes resources and money
to do that, but are you looking
into (clears throat) how to increase that?
-: Yes, we absolutely are,
and in fact, those focus group
and chat circles that we had last year,
we're going to increase those and be much more deliberate
in working in partnership with our customers to try
to identify specific areas
where we can improve that notification,
our overall notification process.
So where we really do leverage our customers
to help us inform our approach,
on not only our notifications,
but also our public education and outreach.
-: And, and Ms. Griffin, I can definitely hear
your commitment, your feeling of responsibility,
the customers of the, of really doing right
by your customers.
I'm just curious, are you also at all involved
in customer engagement in signing up for care
and, income and medical rate?
-: So I am preferably from a public education perspective,
but I do not wanna steal any
of Danielle's Kyd's great discussions she's gonna have,
because she's gonna inform you
about the work in that area.
So I will refer to Danielle who will follow me shortly
to share some of the great work that her team is doing.
-: Thank you.
-: And if there are no other questions we can move on
to the public education and outreach efforts that we did.
So again, as we did with our notifications,
we really do consider our public education and outreach
a partnership with our customers,
especially our customers that are most affected
in our high-fire threat districts.
We continuously vet ideas that we have.
We solicit ideas from them continuously.
We test those ideas on a monthly basis,
and that really does allow us to be nimble
in our approach as we decide to roll our campaigns up.
But this year, this year we had
over five wildfire safety webinars with over 300 attendees,
and those were supported
not only by our internal subject matter experts,
but we also had agency partnerships, such as Cal Fire,
that joined us to also participate in those.
We expanded our wildfire safety fairs.
They were drive-through prayers because of the pandemic,
so we did five that were in the areas of highest fire risk.
And we also had our first Joint Wildfire Safety Fair
with our tribal partners.
So we do work
with about 18 different federally-recognized tribes
here in San Diego.
So for us to be able to have our first joint-hosted fair
was a big accomplishment for us.
We, typically in 2021,
we had about 11 separate public education campaigns
that we were running many times simultaneously
throughout our entire service territory.
So that's one thing that we did in 2021
that was a lesson learned where we used
to only primarily focus in the HFTD, but now we are focusing
across our entire service territories, and our campaign now,
rather than starting in the summer
right before wildfire season
is now truly a year-round campaign.
So we are getting ready to launch that now,
and that will run through the end of the year.
So with that, we've achieved
over 300 million marketing impressions
or touchpoints or engagement across our service territory.
And we leveraged over 20 diverse platforms
to help us achieve our public education.
As you'll see here, our favorability rate was 88%,
which in the statistical world is a very high percentage.
And that was about a 25% increase from previous years.
We added the Spanish-speaking statistic here.
We had an 84% overall favorability.
And the reason for that is because Spanish speakers
is one of our most significant prevalent languages
with over a third of our population
in the service territory being Spanish speakers.
This year in 2021,
we also launched a customized public education campaign
for our customers with Access and Functional Needs.
And again, Danielle will speak a little bit more
as far as what was accomplished through that effort.
So what did we learn going into 2022?
Well, we learned that we need to continue to build
on our wildfire safety fairs
because we had more than 2,500 community participants
in those fairs,
and so we are planning to do those again this year,
and depending on what the pandemic situation is,
we're looking at potentially integrating
in-person town hall this year as well
in our areas of highest fire risk.
This year, in addition to our customized campaign
for our access and functional needs customers,
we are working with tribal councils and several focus groups
within our tribes to real help us develop a customized
and culturally appropriate public education campaign
that's gonna be meaningful and relevant to our tribes,
because what we've learned
is that our public education campaign is not,
that we do for the general public,
there's a lot of room for opportunity
to make that a little bit more culturally sensitive
for those customers.
We're also going to expand
our multi-channel engagement strategy.
Primarily one of the things
that we're looking into exploring is building
a strong public education and communications partnership
with our schools that are in our HFTD,
and really leveraging that partnership.
And also we're looking
at other community-based organizations
that we can partner with,
and then looking to see, and also exploring
what other in-community signage avenues there are for us
to really be able to further strengthen
our communications, with some of our customers
that frankly just are not technology,
do not appreciate technology, or use it or rely on it.
So, and then we're gonna continue throughout the year,
these listening sessions and working groups,
not only with our customers, but with our local government,
our tribes, public safety partners
and critical facilities and infrastructure
of account holders as well.
And they're gonna be
like a customer-listen type of engagement.
We're really going to continue try to be as nimble
as we can be so that we can have
a meaningful public education
and outreach campaign this year.
So are there any other questions that I can help answer?
-: Yeah, I have one question on the wildfire safety fairs.
You said you had six drive-through.
Can you just talk a little bit about where those were
and the coverage regarding the relevant areas
that have the most PSPS?
-: Yeah.
So they were all in our high-fire threat areas.
So Brian, I saw you, you pop in,
if you wanna elaborate a little bit more on that.
-: Yeah.
We started off with those six main communities where we did
the town halls after 2007.
So if you go down to North County,
we did Tribal Nation there, but then also Valley Center,
which is our biggest population up in North County.
And then as you start heading south, we did Ramona,
which is in the foothills.
Then if you start going up the hill,
we did Julian up there, then down in Alpine,
which is getting down into kind of further south,
but then all the way down
towards the Mexican border in Potrero.
And then we actually went out east towards Mountain Empire.
So we really tried to cover kind of foothills and mountains
all the way up from North to south
across the service territory.
-: Great.
So are there any areas, that I'm thinking
about transportation distance,
folks that might have a struggle with getting
to those locations, are there any additional pockets
that you feel like you guys need to cover this coming year?
-: This year, I feel like we did try to be very thoughtful
with that by even putting them right on the eight
to get them very, very close and easily accessible
across the whole service territory.
But I feel like we have good coverage,
but we will continue to keep that kind of very close,
and we'll be thoughtful about that,
especially as we continue to expand onto the tribal nations,
as we expand, we're almost looking at it's catching on
and there's so much interest in this that we're looking
at almost micro-fairs and smaller community levels,
and we're really gonna expand this concept and continue
to build on it this year,
really being more aggressive of getting
into the communities themselves.
So, but yeah, we will keep that.
Thank you.
-: Thank you.
-: If there any no other questions,
then I would like to invite my colleague, Danielle Kyd,
who is our Access and Functional Needs Strategy Manager,
to share some of the great work that her team is doing
around Medical Baseline, tribal and our AFN customers.
-: Thank you, Zoraya, and thank you, everyone.
I'm very excited to be here today
to talk about this wonderful subject and building on a lot
of the summaries that Zoraya started to talk about
with our public education campaigns.
Could we go to the first slide, please?
Thank you.
I'll briefly go through kind of our broader support
of individuals with Access and Functional Needs,
our Medical Baseline, our tribal,
and then the second slide will be honed in on the specifics
around the Thanksgiving Event.
So I want to briefly start by noting that this area
is really heavily shaped by our partnerships
through our statewide and our regional councils,
and in particular, we have a group
of very engaged AFN executive stakeholders,
such as the State Council for Developmental Disabilities
and several other members,
and what's so critical about that is they're really involved
in the planning and the evaluation of solutions
for individuals with Access and Functional Needs
throughout the entire process.
So that's a channel and a really key resource
that we leveraged heavily in 2021,
and that we're gonna continue
to leverage very heavily in 2022.
I'm gonna briefly touch on a couple points
for Medical Baseline, but I do want to note that our efforts
are really more broadly focused around all individuals
with access and functional needs and not limited
to Medical Baselines specifically.
However, as far as some efforts with that program
in particular, I think Zoraya briefly touched on this,
but a key focus was getting out there prior
to the wildfire season and making sure
that we had updated contact information
for our customers that are enrolled
on the Medical Baseline Program.
We took that a step further though,
and we really went out to a much broader group
of individuals with Access and Functional Needs to make sure
that we had updated account information,
as well as inviting them to self-identify
as having an Access and Functional Needs
so that we can use that for targeting and solutions.
Additionally, we did work, again,
through our statewide council and a lot
of these partners to promote at statewide level
the availability of the Medical Baseline Program.
And I'll just call out one example
we have listed on the slide,
which is a joint effort we did with the, sorry,
the IHS Act and a regional center where we developed a flyer
promoting Medical Baseline in 11 languages,
and we were able to leverage distribution channels
through those partners to get that out to a broader reach
than we would normally have necessarily
as the three.
And I also just wanna mention
that we didn't continue our Enhanced PSPS door knock
for individuals enrolled on the Medical Baseline Program.
And what that means is that when we go
through our notification process,
if we're unable to confirm receipts by individuals enrolled
in that program,
we will actually go ahead and send a truck to their home
to check on them and make sure they're aware of the event.
With that, I wanna move into the broader focus
on individuals with Access and Functional Needs.
So really the Cornerstone of our support program
has been partnering with 211 San Diego
and 211 Orange County
who serve as a centralized resource hub for us around PSPS.
So they bring together about 1,000 different CBOs
across San Diego and Orange County
in our service territory to connect customers as Verizon,
that maybe wouldn't call us, but we'll call 211,
connect them with available resources.
But what we made some significant strides in
in 2021 was really enhancing the services available.
So we put in place direct partnerships
around accessible transportation through FACT.
We put in no-cost hotel states with the Salvation Army.
We really enhanced the available food support,
both from a warm food perspective
and from like a food bank distribution perspective
to support individuals during a PSPS.
We also launched, and Jon will talk about this more
in the next section, but we launched
an Emergency Generator Backup Battery Program.
So what that means is if we are in the middle of a PSPS,
we have customers who are calling 211
or SDG&E needing assistance, and the hotel,
transportation, food, resiliency items,
if the combination of those services
are still not sufficient to meeting an individual's needs,
we actually have the ability to dispatch a generator,
usually within one to four hours,
typically a little bit closer to one hour,
depending on how many customers are in need.
But we use that broader suite of solutions to help customers
during a PSPS.
I also wanna talk about our CBO partnerships,
and Zoraya started to touch on this,
but I can't overemphasize how critical that is.
And we do have a network
of 200 CBO partners that we work with all year round
on preparedness and enduring PSPS events.
In 2021, one of the areas of enhancements that we undertook
was we identified 40 specific CBO partners
that served individuals in the high-fire threat districts,
and we provided them with additional training and resources
to really go out and help us prepare those areas in advance
of the season, but also to amplify our notifications
and services during a PSPS, to build on the awareness
of those available services.
Let's see, one critical aspect I wanna highlight
is we do have it dedicated tribal liaison who meet
with their tribal leaders year round to understand
their needs and incorporate that feedback into our program.
A couple examples of that,
we do have partnerships with the Indian Health Council
and Southern Indian Health Council,
which represent all the different tribal communities
throughout our service territory.
And why that's really important is it gives us
that direct link in providing services.
So for example, prior to the season,
with those two partners to identify needs,
and the two that we really heard
were resiliency items and generators.
So in advance of the season,
we did go out and we distributed
all the requested resiliency items for those communities.
But the generators, I think,
was a really eye-opening moment for us,
where we realized we needed to streamline
the delivery process specific to tribal communities.
So we partnered with, again,
the Indian Health Council
and our Generator Delivery Organization
to allow the Indian Health Council to direct
where those generators should go and kind of streamline
that enrollment process to make it easy.
So again, we will continue to work very closely
with our partners in the tribal community going forward.
I also just wanted to build,
we did have the opportunity to also in addition
to our wildfire safety fairs host
a joint event with the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians
back in July, which we were able to go
to their community center and to engage
with their community, to provide resiliency items,
backpacks, education, and we're very much looking forward
to continuing those types of efforts, as Brian mentioned,
really going into a broader space.
I do wanna briefly talk
about our Emergency Operating Center.
In 2020, we created a dedicated
Access and Functional News Unit,
where our entire purpose is really to be there
to address any customer concerns that come in
during a PSPS event.
In 2021, we moved that to report directly
to our Incident Commander,
and we also doubled the bench strength of that.
So wanting to make sure that we're there
during PSPS to support.
We also added a couple other support channels in place.
One of them is an email address.
So we do have an ASN email address.
We do try to get the word as much as possible,
where we're able to directly receive inquiries
and help address any kind of concerns that come in.
So we've seen questions about generators,
around medical baseline enrollment, around planned outages,
and we've been able to kind of directly work with customers
to resolve those.
The other one, though, I wanna mention is we have
a new AFN landing page.
And what that means is we wanted to take all
of the different solutions that are available
to an individual with access and functionally and put them
in one place on our website to make it easier to find.
So that has been a useful tool as well.
Let see, I'll finish a couple more points.
I do wanna talk a little bit around targeting
of outreaching solutions.
The course, a key element of our plan has been to make sure
that individuals are aware of what services
are available to them.
Zoraya did a fantastic job of really doing
a dedicated campaign around 211 and driving individuals
to call 211 for assistance.
But another component that's been, a key focus of ours
since last year has been around AFN identification,
and really proactively going out there and trying
to reach out to customers, first off,
allow them to self-identify, if they're interested,
but then we can send
specific targeted preparedness materials, communications,
and also solutions like generators out to those customers.
Let's see.
And then I'll just finish on community resource centers.
So community resource centers were a key focus, again,
this year will continue to be,
but really around ensuring that they're comfortable
for individuals with Access and Functional Needs.
So some of the enhancements we put in there this year,
and a lot of these stem from feedback we received
from the Statewide Council and our other stakeholders,
were around privacy screens, around enhanced signage,
dedicated parking,
and then onsite American Sign Language translation,
which is done through a tablet.
So if there's an individual who needs assistance,
any of our representatives that are working
at that Community Resource Center
have the ability to pull up their tablets and do
a direct translation.
So on the next slide,
I'm gonna cover more on the Thanksgiving Event specifically,
but why don't I pause there in case there's any questions
or comments on this slide?
Yes, please go ahead.
-: I have a question, Danielle.
We talked to Southern California Edison a lot
about their Battery Program,
and I heard your description
of what sounds like it's Generator Program.
Is that, are you using that term to refer
to batteries as well, or are these gas generators
or so, and also, I guess my question, the second part,
which is a lot of what you seem to emphasize
was delivering generators during an event.
And so wanted to know a little bit more
about as backup power supply options that could be put
into place prior to an event.
-: Thank you, President Reynolds.
Most of that, again, I don't wanna feel
my colleague Thunder,
but Jon Kochik on the next section is gonna go into those
in detail, but thank you for the question,
particular around generators versus batteries.
I am specifically referring to rechargeable batteries
that we send out for our individuals' Medical Baseline
and Access and Functional Needs,
but Jon is gonna spend some time going through kind
of all the programs available
and going through more specific numbers and goals
in the next section.
-: Okay, got it.
So that term means backup energy generation,
not gas generators, and it's meant to include batteries.
Okay. -: Yes, thank you.
Some of them are not gas generators.
Okay.
Can we go ahead to the next slide,
and I'll talk a little bit more
about our Thanksgiving Event?
Thank you very much.
So we're all well aware that SDG&E's only event last year
did unfortunately occur on PSPS, I'm sorry, on Thanksgiving,
and we worked very closely
with our local AFN resource partners,
including 211, FACT, Salvation Army,
the San Diego Food Bank, our tribal communities
and many others to revise the course
during that PSPS activation.
Again, we did have no cost hotel stays,
accessible transportation and other forms
of support available.
In total, 211 received about 35 calls related to that PSPS,
of which five of those were requests for services.
Of those, one customer requested
round-trip transportation,
and four hotel nights were provided.
We did have emergency backup batteries on hand,
but we did not receive any requests
for those during that PSPS.
One opportunity that was key is we did leverage
San Diego County Partner Relay Network
as well as our energy solutions partners
that we've been talking a lot about to provide daily updates
for support and coordination
and to help amplify our messaging,
and we were able to reach about 725 AFN partners
through that about the PSPS.
This does also include frequent updates
to our supporting partners like 211, FACT
and Salvation Army,
as well as our network of paratransit agencies and a lot
of other key partners, including those 40
I mentioned that specifically support
the high-fire threat district.
We did have three community resource centers open
in a drive-through format for that PSPS
offering resiliency items,
again, the same solutions, no cost with health stays,
backup batteries, et cetera.
And I did wanna share with this team though,
our biggest challenge that we face on the AFN side
during this event, and that was around warm food.
So we had planned to be able to provide warm food as needed
during a PSPS, and we had contracted with a couple
of different catering companies in advance to be prepared
to do that.
However, it turns out it is very difficult to get
a large amount of meals delivered on Thanksgiving
out to a lot of these communities.
So we, luckily we were able to,
we were able to make a lot of calls
and get about 600 meals delivered
to our community resource centers
and also to one impacted community, that needed them.
So we were able to get those on both the Thursday
and the Friday.
What we actually found
was that we didn't need nearly that many meals.
We only saw, I think about 20 consumed
at each of the, season in that neighborhood.
So we had a lot of extra food on hand,
and luckily we were able to donate that
to a food event with the Filipino Veterans Association Hall
the next day was a senior food distribution.
But I think two key lessons that we learned from that, one,
we need have a much deeper bench strength on food support,
just in case the worst case scenario does happen
and we have a PSPS on Thanksgiving,
so we'll be prepared for that.
And then the other key lesson
was really around sustainable strategy
for food waste, right?
Again, we were fortunate to be able to connect
with some partners and put all of that food to good use,
but that's something that we are going to streamline
for the future as well.
So that is the end of my presentation.
Why don't I pause there for questions,
and then I can turn that over, if there are none,
to Jon to talk about our Backup Battery Program.
Okay.
I'd like to introduce Jon Kochik.
-: Thanks, Danielle.
Hi, everyone.
Thanks for giving a chance to dive a little bit deeper
into our Backup Battery Generator Program.
So you can flip to the next slide, please.
So I'll walk through each of these three programs
so that you get a better sense of these.
And I'll with the one on the left,
the Generator Grant Program,
and for context, this one is pretty consistent
with Edison's Critical Care Backup Battery Program.
It provides those backup battery, portable batteries
to our most vulnerable customers,
meaning those that are on Medical Baseline
and have access and functional needs and live
within the high-fire threat district.
The battery unit is provided at no charge to ensure
we help these customers. When they experience PSPS events.
(Jon clears throat)
Looking at 2021,
we delivered 2,310 batteries to this audience,
exceeding our target of 2,000.
Program went live in 2019, and to date,
we've delivered almost 3,800 batteries to this audience.
The number that we've delivered has increased each year,
and the program continues to be highly valued
by our customers, as you can see, the customer responses
on customer satisfaction and preparedness.
We also, and Danielle touched on this,
partnered more closely this year
with our Tribal Relations Liaisons
and Indian Health Councils
to make sure that they had information and can spread
the word on these programs to make sure
that those vulnerable customers
in the tribal communities could participate.
For 2022, we are increasing our target from 2,000
to 3,000 battery deliveries
to reach another significant portion
of these vulnerable customers.
We look closely at the customer data to proactively identify
these customer who meet the criteria program and reach out
to them to schedule the delivery.
So we do, we schedule them
and deliver these proactively, in addition to what Danielle
was talking about, so we kind of hit it from both sides.
We make sure they have them when they're ready,
but then if there are some that don't, when they need it,
we're able to deliver on demand,
fully charged within the one to four hours at the most.
So our goal is to reach all of those customers
in the high-fire threat district that enroll
to Medical Baseline and qualify as AFN
while we still do prioritize those who experience
the most PSPS events.
But I wanted to kind of summarize this progress and plan.
I know that, I'm sure Rechtschaffen had questions
on that before in terms of what is the total number.
And so our total number is about 11,000, and so far,
we've delivered about 3,800, and then as we plan,
so this is about third, and then if we add another 3,000
on top of that, we'll get pretty close to 60%
of that total 11,000 or so of customers.
And then in terms of continuous improvement,
we have a bullet there continuing
to evaluate proposals for program support
that we're in our, beginning our fourth year really
of delivering this program, and so it seems prudent
to just be looking at proposals that focus on making sure
we're looking closely at costs well,
continuing to ensure high quality service.
So, going to the next one, the Generator Assistance Program,
this is where we offer a rebate program
for portable fuel generator and backup battery
or portable power stations for qualifying customers
in the high-fire threat district.
It's a $300 rebate for those customers,
plus if they are a care customer,
they get an additional $150 to offset the cost of those.
In 2021, we provided 735 rebates,
which was a little less than our target,
which was based on 2020,
were fewer activations last year,
we're thinking that probably drove less participation in it.
To date, the program has provided over 2,000 rebates
in the last two years, with a solid level
of customer satisfaction with the program.
The program will continue into 2022,
and we're gonna target 1,250 customers again,
and are updating our rebate process to seek
to allow purchases at a wider selection of retailers,
and identify more models that qualify for rebate
while still meeting safety requirements
to make sure that inventory is isn't an issue,
and that customers have flexibility
in the generators and backup power options that they choose.
Going to the right hand,
when the Fixed Backup Power Program,
this is the one that provides a permanent generator
to those customers who have experienced a high number
of PSPS events and are not really able
to be feasibly reached by grid hardening events.
In 2021, the program continued to serve
a growing number of customers,
with over 465 formerly agreeing to install a generator,
and over 350 operational by the end of the year.
The program also began installing
solar plus storage backup power solutions
for two mobile home parks,
providing a cleaner option for resiliency for customers,
and the team will continue evaluating
non-fossil fuel options into 2022.
Total target for this coming year is larger than it's been.
We keep trying to expand and increasing each year.
So it'll be 470 generators,
and installations are already happening in 2022.
And in addition to the plans to help residential customers
with this program,
the team is identifying additional mobile home parks,
schools, community resource centers
and other critical facilities, for this program.
So I'll pause there.
-: Jon, thank you for anticipating my question
about the denominator.
-: You bet.
-: The portable batteries,
they are sized to power
some medical devices and other appliances
that they're not power walls or things like that,
I assume, right?
-: That's right.
That's right.
3,000 watt hours of storage.
That's right.
It's not a permanent power wall.
It's mobile portable, it's on wheels.
Yeah.
-: Okay.
But (clears throat) it's portable,
but once a customer gets it,
it stays with a customer.
It's not a shared backup the way that some
that you were refer to
which are dispatched based on someone's need
at a particular community resource center
or something like that?
-: Correct.
That's right.
It stays with the customer, and really it's intended
to be inside.
So that's why it's meant to be portable
so people can move it if they need the refrigerator
to be charged or their medical device.
And so it's sized to be able to do those,
but yet still be able to be moved around.
-: Got it.
Thank you.
-: You bet.
-: And could you talk a little bit more
about the fixed backup option?
I wanted to make sure I understood
the, what is the, is there subsidy provided there,
or is this just kind of matching these with customers?
So what is the assistance that you're providing,
and then who would be eligible for those?
-: So those that are eligible,
and we use our risk spend efficiency model
to figure this out,
we look closely at those customers
that have traditionally seen a high number of PSPS events,
and in looking at our grid-hardening events
on circuits or, devices
that are not likely to be able to be reached
by hardening efforts in a near future.
And so the idea is they are provided
a large diesel generator that is installed at their home
for the residential customers,
and it provides them a full backup power resiliency
during PSPS events.
And then as well, looking at some mobile home parks
in the high-fire threat district and some schools as well
so that those, more community centers
have resilient backup power.
-: Okay, thank you.
-: You bet.
-: Could you speak a little bit
to the size of the mobile home park solar
and storage systems that you've installed?
-: That is a good question.
And I might want to see
if Brian D'Agostino was still on the line
and have a little bit more information, on-
-: Yeah.
Thanks, Brian.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
And you know what we went with is when it comes down
to the exact size, I would have to get back to you
on the exact specs, but in, with Generac,
you see here that we had these generators.
And really what we focused on
is not only with the mobile home parks,
but also with Ramona Elementary,
Potrero Elementary,
several of our community resource centers,
some very critical water pumps.
We're finding we're using Generac battery wall,
in the particular case of one
of the highest impact mobile home parks, which is on one
of those free impacted circuits,
it's, we're actually looking at solar panels
and two battery walls, is what it actually took.
And four years ago
when we were originally assessing this,
there was a much bigger cost differentiator between a lot
of the generators that you see in the picture there
in the battery walls, but becoming much more cost-effective,
and it's becoming, it's starting
to, we're looking at integration of more and more
of the battery walls into this program moving forward
for numerous reasons,
but we'll have to get back to you on the exact size
of that generator.
-: Appreciated, thank you.
-: Yes.
-: Okay.
Thanks so much.
If there aren't any other questions, I can hand it over
to Mona Freels.
-: Great, thank you very much.
And thanks for the opportunity to present a little bit
about our lessons learned.
And some of our team members integrated some
of the lessons learned for the season
throughout the presentation.
I wanted to share just a few additional operational
or logistical lessons learned,
and maybe expand a little bit on some of the ones
that they mentioned.
Can we get the next slide, please?
Thank you.
So one of the things that we looked at
was really the increased number
of our new Emergency Operations Center responders.
So we have an average of about a 40% annual attrition rate
with EOC responders,
and that is responders are mobile in terms
of they may take another position within the company,
but no longer provides them that EOC response opportunity,
or they may leave the company, they may retire.
So for a number of reasons, we average about 40%.
And so with the continuous improvement that we have
in our Virtual EOC Environment,
which is currently our primary EOC response tool
due to COVID, that training
is a continuous, ongoing process that we're looking at,
and we really have had to diversify
both the training methodologies
as well as our delivery modalities in this virtual world
that we've been living in.
So one of the things that we've done is in 2021,
we invested in actually developing
a Training and Exercise Division
within Emergency Management,
and we've hired training specialists.
So FEMA Master Training and Exercise Practitioners,
as well as curriculum instructional practitioners,
and really what we're hoping is that by making this a focus
on training and exercise,
we can enhance both the development
of, and the focus on our training, our exercising,
as well as the tracking of all of that.
And so as we lean towards the credentialing
for, for some of our EOC responder,
ensuring that we have that really formalized as a process.
Additionally, our Public Safety Partner Notification System,
we recognized in the Thanksgiving Event,
we had a safe-coding issue.
So we recognized that, or we identified
that there were eight individuals
who did not receive their initial notification.
And that's not to say that the organizations
were not notified,
it was eight individuals within organizations.
So for example, the City of Poway,
the senior and elected officials were notified,
the Fire Chief was notified.
The one individual, the Emergency Manager
did not get their initial notification.
Because we have great relationships with our partners,
she immediately was able to bring that to our attention.
We went through with our IT Department, looked at the flags,
found eight individuals that were incorrectly coded,
and then corrected that issue and then resent
those initial communications to those eight individuals.
But again, the organizations themselves,
other individuals were notified.
We have since looked at all of our flagging
within our Public Safety Partner Database,
found that the reason for that coding
was there was a duplicate flag,
so we deleted the duplicate flags
for any of our partners.
So that issue has been remedied.
The next one was looking at our caterers.
And I think Danielle had mentioned earlier with our AFN
that on Thanksgiving, it was very difficult
for our primary caterer get, to provide those resources
that we needed.
Luckily, our Logistics Department
and our Supply Diversity teams
were able to leverage their relationships
to fulfill those gaps.
So ultimately, there was no impact
to our AFN support programs to ensure
that they received the meals that they needed.
And then lastly, had mentioned,
the customer notifications received spam calls.
And so, often we find the telco partners don't even know
that our number has been flagged in spam in their system.
So in working with them, we have, as I mentioned earlier,
received confirmation from AT&T that the phone number
that we use in our auto dial has been removed
from their spam filter.
And we anticipate the same will be true
for the other carriers as we continue
to follow up with them.
Additionally, I wanted to expand a little bit
on, Zoraya had mentioned our Public Safety Partner Portal.
And so I wanted to talk about some additional enhancements.
So we have currently over 900 registered users
to our portal.
Some enhancements that we've already put into place
since Thanksgiving is our a portal lists all
of the communities that are either potentially
or currently impacted.
For each one of those communities now,
we do have a color kind of a slide bar next to it
that has a color indicator and a percentage in terms
of what percentage of that community is impacted
or potentially impacted,
and then can click on that community and it drops down
and it'll bring you all of the sectionalizing devices
that are within that community and their current status.
So that's a feature that we heard from our focus group
of partners that would be helpful for them.
So that enhancement has already been created
and is in place.
Future enhancements for our portal in 2022.
Next week, we will be reengaging the original focus group
that we put together for the portal to figure out
what additional functionality they think would be usable.
The one thing that we have heard from our partners
is that they want the portal to have
the better functionality out in the field.
So with that, in addition to the web-based portal,
we are adding a mobile-based, a mobile app,
and that mobile app will give us the ability
to do push notifications.
So one of the things that we heard from our partners
was that during off hours, whether it's weekends
or after hours, that they don't always have access
to their work email on their mobile devices.
And so sometimes the notifications that we you're sending,
they're not receiving until the next day
when they're in the office.
So with having a push notification on a mobile app,
they will always have that ability
to get those notifications realtime when we send them.
So that is currently in process now
and will be in place later this year.
With that, are there any questions
regarding either of the lessons learned
or our Public Safety Partner Portal?
Okay.
Seeing no questions,
I'm gonna turn it over to Jonathan Woldemariam,
the Director of our Wildfire Mitigation Department.
-: Thank you, Mona.
Good afternoon.
It's good to be here,
and we'll start with the next slide, please,
and talk about our Microgrid Program.
We have had the chance to use our micro grids course
in 2020, where we have four sites,
mostly desert communities in our Eastern County areas.
We deployed the microgrids in 2020 in Shelter Valley
and in Butterfield Ranch,
which are remote desert communities
using conventional generators,
and we have the same opportunity to use those microgrids
in 2021 during the Thanksgiving PSPS Event,
that affected around 400 customers that we were able
to reduce the impacts of PSPS in those two areas.
We also have used the microgrids
in the Ramona Air Attack Base,
which is a critical airport and has been used
by Cal Fire every year for the air attack missions
when fires occur.
And so we have used that as our microgrid also.
And then Cameron Corners is a Eastern part of our community
where we have used the microgrid to power up
some critical infrastructure, like a Cal Fire Station,
like the medical station,
that medical hospital that's there,
and as well as some convenience stores
and the Border Patrol Station.
And so all these critical facilities are powered up
by a microgrid during PSPS events.
Now, all of these have been deployed
using conventional generators,
but our focus in 2021 was to try and start to transition
over to renewable solutions.
And so, especially with the Ramona Air Attack Base,
we were busy installing energy storage,
going away from a conventional generator,
and we have completed that in January of this year
with that being Commissioned at the end of January.
For the Cameron Corners, it will be completed,
the transition from the conventional generator
and putting in solar and energy storage,
that transition will be completed by the end
of this quarter, this 2022 quarter by end of March.
That top left picture is actually a picture
of Cameron Corners with the solar panels that you see there.
And as you continue down the solar panels towards the North
of that picture is where the batteries will go.
And it's a different battery
from the normal lithium batteries.
It's a iron flow battery.
And this particular battery that we're using is the first
of its kind that's been commercially deployed.
We do have experience with flow batteries that we have used
in our service territory with a vanadium redox battery
outside of the HFTD.
So this was a next generation, if you will, of technology
that we're using
to help our customers mitigate against PSPS.
In 2022, we plan on finishing our deployment
of and the Commissioning of our renewable solutions,
and also continuing that effort in Butterfield Ranch
and Shelter Valley, those two sites,
desert sites that I talked about
that have about 400 customers that can benefit
from the microgrid, and they have been using
our conventional generator, now we're going to transition
over to solar and energy storage.
And so we are exploring other solutions as well.
That bottom left Corner here on the picture,
what you see there is a mobile energy storage device
that we used in 2021 during the Thanksgiving PSPS.
And one of the areas we're using it
is at Feed America Station to keep the food there
for emergency purposes refrigerated,
as well as in one of our community resource centers
where we do deployed this portable energy storage unit.
And so we're leveraging technology
and continue to do that.
And we are planning
on using these mobile energy storage units
also for EV charging out in the HFTD areas
where customers are, so customers are able to charge
their batteries on their vehicles.
So with that, I'll pause and see if there's any questions.
-: Hi, Jon, this is Caroline.
Quick question on the Cameron Corner is I know
that the battery, I think for our last conversation,
it was a supply chain issue and back-ordered, correct?
'Cause some of the global slide issues
is do you have a target date now for that?
'Cause I know it says for 2022 planning,
but do you have some timeframe?
-: Yeah, it's actually been fully delivered.
So yes, you're right, Caroline, there was a delay,
and that's why we were unable to complete that in 2021,
but now it's been fully delivered in January
and we've been busy setting it up and installing it,
and so we will see that Commissioned here mid-March.
-: Great.
-: I got a question on the mobile EV charging
at your community resource centers,
and I suppose also
with your mobile battery energy storage units.
I'm curious, what sort of prompted that kind of service?
Are you hearing from a lot of customers who are concerned
about TV charging in PSPS events or other outages?
And then kind of as a, I apologize
for the compound question, but how do you balance investing
in that kind of service for customers
versus additional batteries
for Medical Baseline customers or others
who may need medical equipment?
-: Yeah.
So we are trying to balance the different needs
of customers, right?
And that's a very good question
with the the mobile energy storage unit.
Why do we go with that technology?
Why do we select that service?
Part of it was what was brought up in discussions
during the PSPS, from the Commission, from CPUC.
The other part of it was just hearing from customers, right?
That aren't able to use their vehicles
during these PSPS events.
So we're trying to balance the deployment
of more battery solutions, portable battery solutions
to customers of Medical Baseline.
And we definitely will continue with that,
and we have quite a fixed program for that,
but we were also trying to at the same time kind
of balance it out with, okay, are other needs
that customers have and, and trying to match that as well.
-: Jonathan, while we're on this topic,
if I could please follow up on a question
that was asked earlier regarding the size
of the battery walls at the Heavenly Oaks Mobile Home Park,
we did get that information.
It is two 17.1 kilowatt hour battery walls.
So it looks like 34.2 kilowatt hours altogether.
And then there are 36 rooftop panels
that are feeding those battery walls.
And there's about 100 sites.
So it's about 100 folks that now have kind
of a devoted, fully energy-resilient clubhouse there
at that mobile home park.
-: Great.
Thanks for your speedy follow-up.
-: Okay.
Thank you for the questions.
Well, if there are no more,
we'll go forward to our next slide,
and we'll talk about our progress in the mitigations
in terms of the grid-hardening programs that we have
as well as the inspections and some of the things
around situation awareness,
so some general progress report here.
I wanna start on the top left and just orient you
with this slide, that the first box
you see there on the left is the 2022 target.
So 65 miles for undergrounding, for example, for 2022.
In the middle is our 2021 progress, almost 26 miles
of the 25 targeted for 2021.
And then the 56 miles is what we installed over two years
with the WP cycles, so 2020 plus 2021 gives us the 56 miles.
And that's how the whole slide tracks
throughout the different initiatives.
For example, the covered conductor,
we're targeting 60 miles this year and 21 miles
that were completed last year, and then 22.5 miles overall,
the two that we completed.
And when we are looking at these programs,
we are really also not just considering the wildfire risk,
but also addressing areas that have the high frequency
of PSPS so that we are trying to balance
the two risks, right?
The wildfire and the PSPS risk.
And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that as we go
into the following slides, but not just yet
because we'll both talk about some
of these additional targets and how we do the risk modeling.
We, I wanted to just move over to the next,
to the right of this slide here,
where we have the situational awareness.
We continue to improve, as Brian talked about,
our insulation, not just of additional weather stations,
but also enhancing those weather stations
with various capabilities, right?
The 30-second reads, as well as the field moisture reads
and having that additional technology with that.
With the aerial fire suppression,
we just wanted to share how much has been dropped
right during the efforts for fighting fires.
So the total of 1.6 million over two years,
and then the 793,000 gallons of water dropped in 2021.
So our aerial fleet is really going to work and helping out
in the community here.
I'll talk about the inspections now.
The three that I'm gonna talk about
are the enhanced vegetation management,
the distribution inspections
and the transmission inspections.
The enhanced vegetation management is going above and beyond
our regular inspections and vegetation management.
So for our regular inspections,
we have over 460,000 trees that we manage every year.
We inspect them, and then we are trimming
up to 12 feet, 10 to 12 feet for our clearance
away from the power lines.
So we are meeting 100% of our compliance and doing that
on an annual basis.
In addition, in the HFTD, we go in and inspect
an additional time.
So twice a year in the HFTD, over 250,000 trees,
and every one of those meet
the compliance requirements, right?
We're trimming those back 10 to 12 feet.
Now, what we did though
with the enhanced vegetation management a couple years ago
is started looking at five targeted species and looking,
doing a more enhanced clearance.
So going up to 25 feet of additional clearance.
So we started with the target of 83,000 trees,
and that's based on the targeted species,
and we thought we could do 17,000 of these each year
based on just the population, based on understanding
of how many trees would need that 25-foot clearance, right?
That additional clearance up to 25 feet.
But what we found as we learned from experience by 2020
and 2021 is that we really weren't getting 17,000 trees
that needed that.
We were only found 12,500 trees in 2021 that needed
to be trimmed up to that level.
So that's why you see
that we didn't take it all the way up to our target,
but we did meet the full compliance there
that we wanted to in terms of what was targeted.
And then in our distribution inspection,
similarly in 2021, we had 168,000 inspections
of the 169, and we fully met our compliance inspections.
So what we're doing here is taking all of our inspections,
that drone inspections, the infrared inspections, right?
The additional patrols and aerial helicopter patrols
that we do.
And so taking all of that combined
is what we're showing here.
And we ran into a problem on the inspection
on distribution, where property owners weren't as willing
to give us access in certain areas.
So we, that's why you see we didn't quite reach
the 169,000 that we targeted,
but in terms of overall compliance of inspections,
we've met that 100%.
Same with the transmission.
We've really met our compliance inspections.
The reason why you see a difference between the 17,000
and the 19,000 is really the newer inspections
that we started with the program.
So just zeroing on the what's that right total
for infrared inspections that we can do
as well as the drone assessments and our aerial patrol?
So that's why there's a little bit of a lag there,
but we've met all the compliance inspections.
I'll pause there for questions,
and before we transition over to the next slide,
which is the risk modeling.
Okay, we'll go to risk modeling now and talk
about how we have advanced the program
around how we view risk, and really in 2020 and 2021,
we worked really hard to advance
our risk-modeling capabilities by not just looking
at wildfire risk, but looking at PSPS risk.
And that was for, on the left, the grid planning
or the how we select our grid-hardening solutions.
Power conductive versus undergrounding versus generators.
And so we look at a variety of things, right?
When we think about wildfire risk,
it's the likelihood and consequence.
So a lot of the inputs that go in there around weather
and around the assets and what vegetation
we might come across on the various segments of circuits,
but we do the same on a PSPS side, right?
We have the types of customers and how much,
how frequently they can be impacted from PSPS,
and put that in the model.
So when we're looking at mitigations,
we're weighing the wildfire risk score
as well as the PSPS risk score,
so that we're looking at both
when we're implementing mitigations.
And in 2021, we really stepped up our risk modeling
so that we automated more.
We also made it more granular where we identified
a circuit risk index that we actually put
in our PSPS dashboard for that additional knowledge
and having that situational awareness
of what our circuit segments were risk is.
Right?
And that includes the type of a assets that we have
in that particular segment, like the conductor size,
as well as the the vegetation amount, right?
So how many trees,
how many, what's the tree strike potential?
And so on.
And so now we're moving towards even more,
we started a little bit in 2021,
but migrating to the Cloud and enhancing
our modeling capabilities.
On the right there though,
I do wanna highlight the fact that we also used WNGS,
which is our Wildfire Next Generation System, right?
The same risk model,
but we created the operational model that we are going
to use in more of a planning and a decision-making criteria
for PSPS so that we're gonna be able to use that same type
of knowledge or that same type of data that we're leveraging
for planning for operations in that we're going to be able
to look at wildfire risk and PSPS risk and use that as one
of the inputs for our officers in charge
that are in the LSE making decisions
on whether we should shut off power or not.
This is gonna be an additional tool to everything else
that we use.
Right?
The we use the field input, we use the wind speeds, right?
We use the weather data,
but we also are going to use the risk modeling here
to understand what is that impact that we're gonna have
when we're making that decision of wildfire risk
versus PSPS risk for PSPS events?
So I'll pause there for any questions before we move on.
-: Can I ask you a question?
Is the tree strike?
I can't quite read the, is the tree strike.
-: Potential, mm-hmm?
-: Is tree strike potential, sorry, I can't see,
is that comparable to the PG&E overstrike pool
or the overstrike input that PG&E is now using,
and they talked about a couple days ago?
-: Yes, it is comparable to that.
-: And did, is that something you had?
'Cause they're implementing it just the past year or two.
Is that something SDG&E had done historically,
or are you, is that a new input for you in terms
of assessing risk?
-: We, yeah, we've used it in the field.
Right?
We do, as part of our vegetation management inspections
in the field, we've always looked
at the tree strike potential,
and we looked at as part of our inspections, right?
Beyond just how close is the tree to the power line,
but even if the tree is away,
what's that potential for the tree to fall or a tree branch
to break off and strike the line?
So we've always had that in the field,
but now we're implementing it into our models.
And we started with a vegetation risk index
over two years ago, which told us the historical impact,
the outages historically from tree,
but also the various indications that we have
at our database, the tree growth rate,
the amount of tree-trimming that we've done
in the past, historically, all of that was put
into our vegetation risk index.
Now we're including a tree strike potential into our models,
which is a little bit more enhanced.
Hopefully I answered your question.
-: Yeah, thank you.
-: Okay.
With that, we'll move over to our next slide,
and we're gonna talk about the PSPS mitigations
that we've been able to achieve here.
We know that, I've talked
about all the inspections, all the grid enhancements
that we did, but we also specifically put an effort
into the PSPS mitigations and looking at how much,
how many of the customers could benefit from that?
So in 2020, we, for example in the PSPS sectionalizing,
and these are switches, we add into our grid system,
into our circuits to reduce the scope of the outages
or the scope of the shutoff that impacts customers,
because by installing the switches,
we can really segment what customers are impacted.
So in 2020, we installed 23 switches,
and we were able to reduce impacts
to over 12,000 customers.
And then the way the tables read is in 2021
was an additional 9,700 as a result of 11 switches
that we added.
And then 10 more switches is what we're gonna add in 2022
to get over 4,600 customers
in addition to what we were able to benefit
in 2021 and 2020.
So that's how the chart goes,
and with strategic undergrounding,
that's what we're doing as well, right?
Is the 15 miles helped us
to achieve benefits to 276 customers,
and then so on, right?
65 miles, we're gonna be able to help customers
that mitigate against for over 2,500 customers.
So with microgrids, it's similar, right?
We're going to be able to have the same.
And there's an error in our slide here, in 2020,
we actually were able to mitigate for 578 customers
using six microgrids,
and the reason why we chose zero in 2021
is because we're really working and focused
on changing those microgrids,
four of those, to renewable solutions, right?
So we're not adding any new in 2021, but in 2022,
we'll see some new additions.
It's the same with the generator programs.
We talked about how we were able to help mitigate customers
by helping them ride through these events.
And so the totals are up on top, over 39,500 customers
that have benefited right?
That we've been able to save from PSPS impacts.
And this is the plan, right?
It depends on how the weather hits,
it depends which circuits are shut off,
and that's what will lead
to which customers actually get benefit
from these mitigations.
So each weather pattern and each weather event is different,
but this is the planned mitigation reduction.
I'll pause there for questions.
If not, I'll go to our next slide.
That's our last one.
I apologize for long here.
On our just summary slide here,
we are committed to continuing the reduction
of PSPS impacts to our customers.
We're also going to be very focused on wildfire risk,
and this is gonna be done through the various activities
that we do, right?
That we've highlighted already,
the continued preparation, right?
We're gonna focus on EOC exercises, the public education,
the partnerships that we have in the community.
We're gonna increase our risk modeling because we feel
that's a key to having a structured approach for mitigation.
So that risk modeling is very, very effective.
Then the continued grid hardening will help us
actually implement what find through the risk-modeling,
and then increasing our customer support.
Right?
During these PSPS events,
we know it's critical for our customers to have power,
and we're going to do everything in our product
to support them.
And that there's some staff there on the left that help
just understand what we've been able to achieve so far with.
And one of the things we're most proud of
is that we are able to reduce the fault rate
on the transmission, 84%, which means that we're also able
to reduce the ignitions that way.
And so I'll end there by saying, thank you
for the opportunity to speak today
and share with you our PSPS mitigations
and all our preparation and activities
around public safety power shutoff.
-: Thank you.
I wanted to open it up to the panelists and see
if they have any last questions for SDG&E.
-: Question.
Thank you so much for the whole team
for very thorough presentation, both you and.
For San Diego Gas Electric, do you have any experience
with the enhanced power line safety settings?
The, refers to, in terms of equipment on power lines
that allows and then to turn off
and within one 10th of a second of a tree branch,
where object strikes the line,
it was a mixed (clears throat) experience
for PG&E last year,
but are you using any of that in San Diego?
-: Yes, we are Commissioner.
We did start very early with this technology
of, we call sensitive profile setting.
And what we do is we turn off the sensors from re-closing
or re-powering, and we've done that
for some time now.
So we, what that helps us do is for any kind of fault,
any kind of potential for ignition,
that quick, the system quickly reacts,
our sensors quickly react and are able to keep
from having additional damage, right?
So it will shut off power right away.
The other thing though that we leverage
is the falling conductor protection technology
that we've talked about in the past.
What that is is when there's a break in our wire
or any potential break in our wire,
the power will shut off before it hits the ground.
So in less than 1.3 seconds, right?
In less than a second, it's going to shut off power
before the line even hits the ground.
So we have been deploying that technology
as we enhance our circuits.
When we talk about grid-hardening,
that's part of the sensors and the technology
that we installed.
And then one more technology I'll mention,
and it's really going to be a further enhancement
that we're installing and we've installed it
on a few circuits so far, and it's the early detection,
early fault detection, EFD.
And what that is is it's a matter of looking at things
even before they fail.
Instead of waiting until a wire breaks, right?
Maybe you have freight wire,
maybe you have a tree branch that's momentarily touching
a wire, so the technology will allow for that detection
and pointing to a problem
so we can send people there and detect
and figure out where the location is electronically
or remotely, but then address it.
-: Okay.
Thank you.
-: You're welcome.
Any other questions for SDG&E?
Okay.
Let's move to public comment.
Operator, do we have any members of the public
that would like to speak?
Operator: Thank you.
And at this time,
if you would like to make a public comment,
please unmute your phone, press Star, One
and clearly record your full first and last name
when prompted so I may introduce you.
Again, that is Star, One if you would like
to make a comment.
And it may take a few more much for comments to come in.
Please stand by.
And I have no one in the public comment queue at this time.
-: Okay.
Hearing that there is no one in the queue,
let's move to the Commissioners and Director Caroline,
Thomas Jacobs, and Chief Frank Bigelow for closing remarks.
-: I'll just briefly thank all of the presenters
that we had today, both Southern California Edison,
San Diego Gas and Electric.
I appreciated the reports that were made,
not just for bringing forward accomplishments,
but also identifying areas for improvement.
I think that part of this presentation
was critically important because we need to see improvement
from past mistakes.
We still heard examples of outages for multiple,
multiple outages in one season for the same customers.
We heard about significant missed or delayed notifications,
and also really the need to prioritize mitigation measures,
not just for welfare mitigation,
but also for reduction of PSPS.
And so I appreciated the work that both the utilities
that spoke today are doing on that, in those areas.
The other thing that I wanted to note
is that it was interesting to me to hear all of the efforts
to provide backup power,
and I was pleased to the movement towards cleaner sources
of backup power.
And I think that even the comments
that you made today about continued efforts in that area
will be very helpful to make sure that customers
are protected in the event of outages,
especially access and functional need customers,
critical care customers,
all of our most vulnerable customers.
And the other reflection I wanted to make
is that there was some discussion on the fire season
being year round, and just the dryness
that we're seeing
with potentially unprecedented drought conditions,
and just the uncertainty that climate change is giving,
is bringing to our state with respect to fire risk.
But I also appreciated the recognition
that, and I hope this is something
that you all are embracing,
is that it's no longer a surprise to us
that we are seeing unusual conditions,
that we're seeing conditions are unexpected, unprecedented,
record heat waves, to record dryness,
and really that the models and the measures
that are being used need to adapt and be ready
for the unexpected, and really just the recognition
that that's something that we know is happening and we know
will continue to happen.
So with that, I just wanted to, again,
thank the presenters.
There was a lot of information here,
but I think as you could tell by the questions you got,
we're all very interested in the details and very interested
in your continued progress.
Thank you.
-: I had just a couple closing comments, if you don't mind.
One, also just wanted to extend my thanks
to everyone that presented.
It's a lot of information, a long afternoon.
Really appreciate the work
that everyone's doing around this.
And to President Reynold's point,
I think it's important to call out
that while we may not have had any public commenters
on this, all of us on the phone,
that this, the urgency around this is continuing
to escalate, not decrease,
and so that the pace and the effort and focus on it needs
to keep increasing with the threat that we've got
given continued climate change and impacts.
So really appreciate the work everyone's doing.
I know we, literally, while we're on the phone here,
we just got PG&Es, we got San Diego's
and Edison's, last week and the week before.
So our team is already digging into those,
and look forward to continuing to work with all of you
to evaluate those and keep doing this important work
to get ahead of this risk.
Thank you.
Operator: And my apologies, this is the Operator,
we did have one participant queue up to make a comment.
Would you like to hear that now?
-: Yes, please.
That would be great.
-: Yes, please.
Operator: Okay.
One moment.
Melissa Kasnitz, you may go ahead.
Melissa: Thank you.
This is Melissa Kasnitz
from the Center for Accessible Technology.
I'll note that the phone number wasn't posted
on the computer screen,
and so I had to go look up the phone number
because I was watching on my monitor,
so there may be other people who were delayed in trying
to access the public comment line.
I'd like to repeat a point that I made the other day
with regard to PG&E and the Small Utilities presentations,
which is I very much appreciate all of the wildfire analysis
and work that's taking place by the various utilities,
but I strongly encourage similar work and analysis
to be done in investigating the harms that people experience
during power shutoffs.
The mitigation efforts that have been presented
are definitely a market improvement
since the Power Shutoff Program began,
but it's unlikely to ever expect that mitigation
will reach all customers in need and all customers
who are experiencing risks when the power goes out.
And at this time,
the analysis of that harm is very superficial relative
to the analysis of wildfire risk.
I strongly encourage the Commission and the utilities
to pick up that element of the work and really take
into consideration what happens to people,
and especially vulnerable people when the power goes off.
Thank you.
-: Thank you for your comment.
Operator, do we have any other members of the public
that would like to speak today?
Operator: And no other members at this time.
-: Okay.
With that being said,
I'd like to get back to closing remarks with the rest
of the Commissioners.
-: I'll go next.
Again, thank you to all of the utilities,
the teams that presented, including the other day
from Pacific Gas Electric, Liberty and PacifiCorp.
And I just wanted to also add (clears throat)
that the presentations are given
to the Low Income Oversight Board
on the impacts of PSPS on low-income customers,
and I very much appreciate the effort made.
The next meeting is on March 24th,
and throughout (clears throat) these past few years,
it has been very helpful and informative to the volunteers
in the Low Income Oversight Board to hear what the utilities
are doing (clears throat) for these communities.
Thank you.
-: Thank you.
-: I just wanted to echo the comments
of my fellow Commissioners and thank everyone
for their presentations today.
That was a lot of information, and I look forward
to seeing the progress and outcomes
as we move through the year.
So thank you.
-: Can I also echo the, so thanks to the presenters,
and the comments of my fellow Commissioners.
Thank you.
-: Me three or me four,
I wanna thank all of you for your presentations.
And as President Reynolds said,
your willingness to learn and continue to improve.
I do think we should take very seriously to heart
what Melissa Kasnitz said,
which is it's harder to analyze the impacts
of PSPSs, quantify it, monetize it,
whatever, but it's as important
and it hasn't been done nearly to the extent
that we've analyzed the utilities,
have analyzed other technical aspects of this process.
So I do urge you to think hard
about how you can do what she's suggesting.
And it parallels to some degree
the harder work that is necessary,
but I'm gratified to see that what the utilities
are doing, which is how to engage with community,
how to improve communication,
how to have more responsive community resource centers,
meet the needs of people for support and backup or food,
it, that don't lend themselves to simple solutions
by simply standing up a resource center at a fair ground,
but maybe dispatching a portable battery to someone
who's at a hotel or someone with special dietary needs.
And I did hear from both of the utilities your commitment,
and it's clear that you're looking hard
at those more difficult, more, I won't say more intractable,
but less obvious, a somewhat more difficult problem
that don't lend themselves to automated solutions
or another supercomputer crunching out the data.
So in any case, it, maybe we were lucky last year.
I, you certainly,
we certainly saw some improvements in reductions.
I hope it's, as much as a result
of the targeted mitigation measures
that you guys both outlined as it was because of breaks
in the weather, we'll knock wood,
we'll see this this season, but it's certainly encouraging
to see your commitment to continue to improve
and refine this program.
Thank you.
Frank: Sorry.
This is Frank Bigelow with Cal Fire.
I apologize, with all the talk of technology,
I had lost my internet connection,
thus losing my video feed.
First, I just wanted to thank President Reynolds
and the Commissioners for allowing Cal Fire to participate
in today's event.
This is a very important topic,
and we're already, just as a reminder, in fire season.
Across the state, we've seen close to 4,700 acres burned,
and we're only in February.
So we've seen Santana Ana wind conditions already
in Southern California,
and we are slowly seeing the fuel start to dry out.
And we just want to emphasize and reemphasize the points
that have been made today that we feel PSPS is a measure
of last resort and that we really can't lose focus
on the required vegetation management
and grid-hardening tactics that have been employed thus far.
And we look to see continued efforts from all the utilities.
So again, from Cal Fire's perspective,
thank you for allowing us to participate today.
-: Thank you, Chief Frank Bigelow.
Do we have any other closing remarks?
Hearing none, I will turn over to the Operator
to check one more time if we have any public speakers.
Operator: And again, if you would like to make a comment,
please press Star, One unmute your phone
and record your full name when prompted.
-: All right.
Hearing none, I would like to close out today.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us
on this Friday afternoon.