In a recent interview with the American Public Power Association, Andy Fusco, Chief Strategy Officer for ElectriCities of North Carolina, details how ElectriCities has utilized APPA's Reliable Public Power Provider and Smart Energy Provider programs to help its members improve their operations using these two assessments as a benchmark.
ElectriCities provides power supply and related critical services to over 90 community owned electric systems in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Andy, thanks for joining us.
Fusco, who made his remarks in an episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast, was asked to discuss how ElectriCities engaged with its members once it decided to utilize the RP3 and Smart Energy Provider programs as key assessment tools.
“I think that's the most interesting part of the story—how we engage with our members. ElectriCities and its members across three states have been long time participants in RP3. North Carolina always has some of the largest numbers by state in terms of participants and awardees in RP3 which is good,” he noted.
“However, SEP being a new program and something less familiar to ElectriCities and our members, we have not had as high of a level of engagement up until we made some changes. We had three or four members that were consistently participating in that program, but what really got us traction recently was how we tied the programs to our strategic planning process.”
In 2022, ElectriCities “went through a process where we developed a new strategic plan and went through the process of coming up with a vision, a purpose, and values. The next step in that process was to evaluate and measure how we were performing relative to that strategic plan and our vision. Basically, our vision gets to the fact that we want to be the best in terms of utilities in our region,” Fusco said.
“We want to be better than the co-ops. We want to be better than the IOUs. We want to perform better than they do, and we also want to be recognized as better than they are, so to that end, we put in two top level measures.”
One measure was on customer satisfaction “and that’s about being recognized as the best. We want to be ranked as number one in terms of customer satisfaction.”
The other side of that is the operational side, “how we are actually performing relative to other utilities in the area and across the country. That's where we tied our strategic plan to both RP3 and SEP, and our top level measure there was simply how many of our members were participating in both of those programs with the intent especially on SEP, but in both to grow participation and have our members go through that process and really use the programs as tools for improvement,” he went on to say.
So what ElectriCities did was to institute those measures “and then in some of the secondary measures in the strategic plan, we zeroed in on specific questions in each one of those programs and what we could do to better analyze and understand what specific areas we need to improve on.”
He said the key takeaway “for us was tying this to a longer-term objective in the strategic plan to get traction and also improvement across our members.”
In the interview, Fusco also discussed the specific steps that were taken by ElectriCities to help its members improve their operations using the Smart Energy Provider and RP3 assessments as a benchmark.
“I characterize those as three areas. One is assistance in applying, two is analyzing the results, and then three is making program adjustments both at ElectriCities and with our members,” he said.
These assessments “take a lot of effort to just fill out the application, to be quite frank,” he noted.
RP3 is very involved “and especially if you're a smaller utility—that's a big endeavor. It takes a lot of resources that sometimes utilities don't have. So, if there was any way that we could assist them in that application process, we would do that.”
A few things “that we did was communicate the deadlines to our members, make them aware of the tool, and ensure that they were planning to apply. We also provided our staff as points of contact for assistance with the two assessments,” Fusco said.
“And then as you get into the details of the assessments, they ask for particular data. In some cases, ElectriCities happened to be housing that data, so if we did have that data, we tried to make it very accessible and easy for the members to get a hold of so they could just copy paste it into the application.”
ElectriCities offered application review “if our members had filled out an application and wanted a second set of eyes on it. We also published a best practices guide for our members for applying for RP3 and SEP so they knew how to interpret questions and what sorts of information APPA was looking for.”
Fusco noted that Rocky Mount, N.C.—an ElectriCities member community—has the most platinum level designations for RP3 among the membership of ElectriCities. “We encouraged the folks from Rocky Mount to host a tabletop exercise with the other members to pass along their learnings and understandings of the assessment and that process,” he said.
Once the decisions are posted, “analyzing your results is equally as important. So especially this time around, we focused a lot after the publication of the strategic plan to analyze the aggregate results for both SEP and RP3 for our members.”
What ElectriCities “really wanted to do was identify opportunities for our members to pick up the most points in the survey. If there was one particular question or area that, for example, had a total of seven points and we saw that our members might be averaging about two points, that's a big opportunity for improvement. So, we tried to drill into what the gaps were to get them a little closer to that seven.”
But because this was “again aligned with our strategic plan, we looked at the results and saw where the opportunities were to better align member performance with the objectives of our specific strategic plan,” Fusco went on to say.
It was “two-fold. It wasn't just for the purpose of getting the designation. It was really ‘how could we drive improvement in areas that were important to us?’ Then finally after all of that, we definitely wanted to celebrate the areas of excellence where we got a five out of five or what have you to show that this is an area where we really excel.”
Fusco then turned to program enhancements in the interview.
He noted that he does quarterly reviews with his staff “and I ask them ‘how are we doing with regard to RP3 and SEP?’ They went through this laundry list of, well, we've done all these things based on the results of the two evaluations.” In response, Fusco said “you’ve got to capture that in a white paper and send it to me. I want to circulate it.”
Fusco provided some examples in the interview. “Under storm response, one of the programs we offer is safety training to our members and lineworker training, so we’ve got a pretty deep course catalog on training. One thing we didn't have was disaster drill preparation, so we launched a disaster drill training class.” It's a class “on how to prepare for -- in our area, specifically, hurricanes. It could be anything. So we launched that class and started providing it to our members.
Another area of weakness “for us was research and development, so we did a number of things there. We developed a database of our DEED and grant activities so members could see what other members were doing in that area and give them some ideas,” he noted.
The American Public Power Association’s Demonstration of Energy & Efficiency Developments program, aka DEED, funds research, pilot projects, and education to improve the operations and services of public power utilities.
“We also developed a library of research studies and case studies that perhaps members could utilize and do further research on their own systems. With our key accounts program, which is another offering we provide on behalf of our members for their larger customers, for a long time, we've been publishing CO2 emissions for them, but in the RP3, I believe it specifically called out NOx and SOx sulfur dioxide emissions, so now we're incorporating that calculation into our emissions calculations.”
And ElectriCities provided low cost options “for our members to meet cybersecurity best practices which is really a referral to other consultants because that's not a service we provide.”
Customer service training “was a big area where we could not only pick up a lot of points but again meet some of the objectives in our strategic plan. We offer a customer service training certificate program to our members, so we bolstered our marketing efforts amongst our members to ensure they were aware of that program. We've gotten more participation in that as a result.”
Also, ElectriCities has “stepped up promotion of our energy audit program that we offer and the customer portals that we assist our members with when they install a new AMI or billing system. We also offer an energy efficiency rebate program for one of our power agencies,” Fusco said.
“We focused efforts on getting the word out about those programs. And then the other thing that we have been doing as part of the strategic plan is we have a strategic technology roadmap that we publish for our members to help guide them in their technology investments.”
And then for ElectriCities, “we have a services roadmap to help guide us in understanding what our members need in terms of services. So we've adjusted both of those roadmaps based on some of the findings of the results of the two assessments.”
As a membership organization, ElectriCities has an association management system. “We've only had it in place for about five or six years, but we are looking for ways to utilize that system to provide members with more information in areas that are relevant to the two assessments. It can also provide them better information on their participation in things like our training programs or our conferences or webinars to demonstrate as they apply for these two assessments that they've actually sent people to these programs and they can document that.”
He also provided specific examples of the improvements that members of ElectriCities have experienced as a result of these efforts.
APPA’s RP3 program is based on industry-recognized leading practices in four important disciplines:
• Reliability
• Safety
• Workforce Development
• System Improvement
An RP3 designation is a sign of a utility's dedication to operating an efficient, safe, and reliable distribution system. Being recognized by the RP3 program demonstrates to community leaders, governing board members, suppliers, and service providers a utility’s commitment to its employees, customers, and community. Currently, 251 of the nation's more than 2,000 public power utilities hold an RP3 designation.
The Smart Energy Provider program is a best practices designation for utilities that show commitment to and proficiency in efficiency, distributed energy resources, renewable energy, and environmental initiatives.
