Critical Assets

We are primed to spend a whole lot of your ratepayer money because forty five years ago electric substations were built with different criteria in mind. Read: FERC and NERC didn't yet exist, and all their new reliability standards are going to cost you a fortune, dear reader. You just don't know it yet.

Indeed, you'll never even know why your rates will rise faster than inflation over the next twenty years, but hey! you'll have reliable power, and you'll have your smarte grid. You have no idea how much non-productive effort my utility is currently undergoing this week for our NERC audit, non-productive...as it is as much a display of correct paperwork as it is actually having built electrical infrastructure to keep the power reliable.

The problem I have is that my industry has developed an irrational fear of fines for non-compliance while we'll have spent thrice that to avoid them. I would accept this if it really led to more reliable power, but I don't believe it. Always the skeptic I am.

You'll never even know how much it'll cost. Today, I couldn't log into my SCADA system to print out a station diagram -- a routine endeavor at any other time, but for these CIP standards and our readiness audit I fuckered away a half hour trying to 1) log in, 2) figure out what part of this wasn't working, 3) engaging the time of a SCADA specialist, 4) engaging the time of a co-worker to print the diagram out and 5) wasting a half hour. All this goes totally unreported, not counted in any audit-cost metric, simply lost to time and space. And it didn't get fixed. Tomorrow I'll have to piss away more time, too, to see this problem through.

And two years from now, when I have a fault at a substation deemed a critical asset, I won't be able to access my relay to find out what happened because we yanked out the cable to the front IP port connection due to these standards. Send out a relay technician on double time in a big diesel truck to pull the event record manually, while my engineering time goes idle waiting for him when I just could have retrieved it remotely in under four minutes. All this goes totally unreported, not counted in any audit-cost metric, simply lost to time and space.

And you know what? Critical assets are such a "guarded secret" that I'm not even allowed to know what assets are included! What a crock of shit! The list is confidential even to those like me who work designing them!

You have no idea how much time it took for our one utility to process just this critical asset list. Indeed, it's probably confidential. If we spent 100 man hours or 180,000 man hours, all this cost is that much less to be allocated to transformer iron, to overhead wires, to things that really make a difference in providing reliable power.

In my little view, and it is indeed little, smart grid and NERC are two major factors into why you're going to see 3-5% rate inflation every year for decades, while electric providers expand the role the they have in providing that service. That again -- smart grid is about expanding the role the electric provider has in providing that service. And it will be expensive...technology always is. This is why I'm so terse about this, why I don't think the means will justify the ends.