The following is a transcript of the May 27, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s News Director. Our guest in this episode is Joseph Bunch, General Manager and CEO for Florida public power utility New Smyrna Beach Utilities.
Joe, thanks for joining us.
Joseph Bunch
Thanks for inviting me, Paul. It's great to be here. Looking forward to chatting with you this afternoon.
Paul Ciampoli
Joe, I’m sure most of our listeners are familiar with your utility, but for those who may not be, I wanted to start our conversation to just give you an opportunity to provide an overview of New Smyrna Beach Utilities.
Joseph Bunch
Sure. Thanks Paul. New Smyrna Beach Utilities is located as the name would imply in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. We’re an East Coast beach town.
We have on the electric side of our business a little over 30,000 customers, 30,500 and about 29,000 water customers. We’re a combined utility, so we have both.
Another thing that's unique I think for us is although there are 30 public power utilities in Florida, we're one of five or six that have a separate Commissioner authority.
So we have a governing Commission of five Commissioners that are appointed by the city Commission, but we do have separate budgets, separate governance and separate Commission meetings by which we run and govern our utility.
We were formed in 1967 through a referendum vote, and so we've been in place now for about 57 or so years...and we're dedicated to serving our community.
Like many public power utilities, most of our employees live in the city or around the city, and if not there, a couple of the adjacent communities with a short drive away, so a lot of pride in serving our customers.
We've done a lot to improve engagement with the community, volunteerism, charitable giving and all those sorts of things.
So it's a really enthusiastic group of employees that for the last 5 1/2 years I've been very proud to have the opportunity to lead.
Paul Ciampoli
What popped up into my mind when I thought about inviting you onto the podcast is a story that I recently wrote for our newsletter related to the dramatic reliability improvements that the utility has experienced.
So I wanted to give you the opportunity to provide additional details on metrics that illustrate how the utility has strengthened reliability and also what specific steps has the utility taken in recent years to improve reliability and what plans does it have to further bolster reliability going forward?
Joseph Bunch
Great questions, Paul.
So let me start back in early 2019, it had been many years since our utility had updated vision and things like that, and this was just a couple months, six months or so after I had joined, I believe, and because of that we pulled our Commission in, we had workshops, we had consultants work with us and we basically redefined how we wanted to serve our customers in the community of New Smyrna Beach going forward.
And while part of it was we knew and we recognized we needed to modernize our infrastructure and make improvements to our infrastructure assets on both the electric and water side of the house we also knew that we wanted to improve reliability, so we actually pulled electric reliability out of the modernization plan and said this is something we don't want to be embedded in a plan. It needs to be a program by itself.
So in 2020, we started some of the first year implementation -- again we had a consultant work with us to do a system wide assessment and we developed reliability improvement plans, which included improving the reliability of every single feeder circuit on our system.
And over the next three years, we set about installing equipment like reclosers and trip savers that while it helped reduce the number of outages, when outages did occur or would occur, it also reduced the number of customers affected by any outage and help speed up the restoration.
And there were some other basic blocking and tackling aspects that Florida Municipal Power [Agency] helped us with, like firming up our maintenance plans for vegetation management, tree trimming, our periodic overhead inspections and things of that nature.
So it was an Electric Reliability Improvement plan, which we called ERIP -- we set three-year goals in place.
So as I mentioned, we started the planning in ‘20 and then 21/22/23 and then after three years of of improvement efforts we reduced the frequency of outages by somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% -- I don't remember the exact number -- I believe it was 41% and on the duration side, which is SAIDI, we reduced that by 32%.
But I will say if we went back for a further look back to as far as say around 2015, and looked at a five-year average, those numbers were actually improved by a good deal more than I just stated.
So the things like tree trimming and inspection programs that we did in year one started having an immediate impact.
That's the quick version of something I could talk to you a lot about.
Between modernization planning and the electric reliability improvement program, we have done a lot to improve reliability.
Paul Ciampoli
That's a great overview.
Just one quick follow up question that comes to mind.
Obviously, you want to get the word out to your customers as far as these dramatic reliability improvements.
What are the ways in which you're doing that?
Joseph Bunch
There were some things that we did on the periphery that were also related to reliability, so sometime during that period we also implemented a new outage management system that automated the processing of their calls when they were out, when they had outages.
It also made real time updates available on the Internet as well as Facebook for estimated times of restoration.
We communicated through Ellen Fisher, our manager of customer communications, on Facebook and other social media about things we were doing.
Also, if we were in the middle of things like hurricanes, which we get frequently here in Florida, in fact, we had two within a six-week period in the late 22-23 time frame -- We use those same platforms to keep customers up to date [about] area restorations through [an] OMS System, as well as social media.
We made investments in those technologies that also allowed us to text specific customers in specific areas about the progress of work.
So it was a combination of technology as well as using social media to do some basic customer communication.
I will say after the hurricanes, we got really rave feedback through social media from our customers in the community.
So everything I talked about – the reliability is for naught if our customers aren't seeing those benefits, and at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
It's about better serving the customers in our community.
Paul Ciampoli
I wanted to switch topics and look at renewable energy and as you know, in July of last year FMPA announced a major expansion of what's known as the Florida Municipal Solar Project.
New Smyrna Beach Utilities is one of 20 Florida municipal electric utilities that will purchase power from the project.
So against that backdrop, how does New Smyrna Beach Utilities benefit from being a member of FMPA, not only in terms of adding renewable energy supplies to its overall energy supply portfolio, but in other ways as well?
Joseph Bunch
I consider us like a medium sized municipal -- 30,000 electric customers -- we're not big, we don't have huge employee resource pools and we don't have tons of capital money.
But when partnering with 16 or 18 or 20 other utilities with our interagency partner FMPA, all the sudden you've got those pooled assets and when you go to bid, we're bidding hundreds of megawatts of solar capacity and we're planning on building multiple fields and actually FMPA is in the third phase now.
So you get the synergies and benefits of scale that we couldn't otherwise get by ourselves and for us to go out and try to find partners to team up with on something like this would be difficult -- not impossible, but difficult.
And we've also compared the cost of doing this with FMPA to doing it on our own and we've just decided that this asset light model where we partner with FMPA and our peer utilities in the state serves us much better.
And honestly, it allows us to to focus on improving our system and improving customer service and not procuring land, buying solar panels and installing and maintaining assets so the purchase power version of that was much more attractive to us.
You also asked about how does that fit into our portfolio.
While we have some generation, we largely don't utilize it because it's older diesel.
The majority of our power is actually through purchase power contracts and we also have a mix of solar and some nuclear through that as well and with FMPA while we were talking about solar, we have a fractional ownership in in a Florida nuclear plant as well through FMPA and again not impossible, but it would it be difficult for us to negotiate that type of thing and we've had fractional ownership of that plant since the 1980s, and it's very reliable.
And it's a nice mix in our generation [and] as things like the price of gas goes up and down...the solar and nuclear help provide stability in our power pricing.
Paul Ciampoli
In preparing for this interview, one of the things that jumped out of me is the fact that you were recently elected to serve as President of the Board of Directors for the Florida Municipal Electric Association of which your utility is also a member.
I wanted to know if you could tell our listeners more about the services and benefits that FMEA provides to your utility.
Joseph Bunch
FMEA is a lot like APPA for the Florida utilities.
It provides us the members with government relations, mutual aid coordination, communications across the state...[and] they coordinate large conferences.
So throughout the year, as I mentioned, we had two hurricanes in 22-23.
What we do is submit our request for a number of resources to FMEA.
Amy Zubaly [FMEA Executive Director] and her staff coordinate across the state and then if we need resources outside of the state, they also coordinate with APPA and for Hurricane Ian, we had municipal support from as far away as Wisconsin.
We did nothing but make the request for them...and then magically FMEA somehow makes them appear here a couple of days later.
So again, it allows us to focus on planning the restoration and then executing the restoration and through the work that they do actually obtain those resources for us.
I mentioned conferences. They do great conferences through the year.
They do some industry customer connections conferences.
You get a lot of the vendors that are at the big conferences across the country elsewhere, but they come to Florida and our folks are able to participate within an hour and a half drive over to Orlando instead of flying halfway or all the way across the country to attend another industry type conference.
So a lot of good benefits and they're great partners with us along with FMPA.
Paul Ciampoli
Well, Joe, thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with us.
And as is customary in terms of speaking with executives such as yourself, I wanted to extend an open invitation for you to return as a guest at some point in the future where we could perhaps revisit some of these topics.
I'm sure there will be a lot of other things going on at the utility that we could also discuss.
Joseph Bunch
Thank you, Paul. It's been great talking with you and I appreciate the work that you and the APPA team do for all of us municipal utilities through the year.
Paul Ciampoli
Sure thing, we appreciate that, Joe.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA.
I’m Paul Ciampoli and we’ll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
