During SPP’s Board of Directors web meeting last month, one stakeholder commented on the number of beards grown by fellow sheltered-at-home stakeholders.
“One thing about growing a COVID-19 beard,” said Dave Osburn, Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority’s general manager, “I hope I don’t look like Billy Gibbons before this is over.”
Osburn may yet give ZZ Top’s front man a run for his facial follicles. On Friday, SPP said it was extending its suspension of its business travel and face-to-face meetings until Aug. 1 at the earliest.
The action will convert SPP’s July quarterly governance meetings to virtual webinars, as happened in April. The stakeholder groups last met in person in January, with their next face-to-face meetings scheduled in October.
“We look forward to the day we can conduct our meetings in person again, but we won’t until we’re certain we can do so safely,” SPP CEO Barbara Sugg said in a message to stakeholders. “We’ve now proven we can facilitate our stakeholder process virtually when necessary.”
The move comes as no surprise to Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies.
“I find it hard to imagine people traveling for stakeholder meetings in July,” he said. “So many people call into these meetings that it would be hard to say having them face to face is essential or worth taking any risks about.”
On Monday, ERCOT followed suit and said that its stakeholder meetings will continue to operate remotely for “the foreseeable future.” The same timeline applies to visitors at the grid operator’s facilities, where only those employees who can’t work from home are in their offices.
ERCOT said it consulted with the Technical Advisory Committee and its subcommittee leadership. Together, they determined social distancing guidelines made it untenable to hold medium-to-large stakeholder meetings at the grid operator’s facilities without endangering the health of attendees.
TAC leadership has proposed procedure changes that will allow the committee to hold votes during conference calls. The group will discuss the changes during its May 27 information session.
ERCOT follows federal, state and local health agency guidance, along with epidemiologist recommendations in making its decisions.
SPP said it extended its suspension based on feedback from its member companies regarding their own pandemic response plans.
“The health and safety of our employees and their families remains a top priority for SPP and is key to our reliable delivery of services,” Sugg said, noting staff have not recorded any confirmed cases of COVID-19.
SPP staff have been working at home since mid-March. When it is safe to return to the office, as Sugg says, staff will do so in a staggered approach, a fifth of the employees at a time. (See “Sugg says RTO to Open Very Carefully in Months Ahead,” SPP Joint Quarterly Stakeholder Briefing: April 27, 2020.)
The RTO’s facilities and incident command structure teams will have personal protective equipment available and a supply line to restock when staff begin their phased returns to campus, Sugg said.
SPP’s systems remains reliable, though staff are tracking small but steady reductions in load, she said. Load is down 8 to 10% across the system compared to similar days and temperatures in recent years.
