It is April and no matter what the weather says, it is spring! Spring usually leads to rebirth and change and NEPPA is not immune to change. NEPPA is about to launch our newest member service which will greatly aid all of us with some of today’s emerging issues.

This past year we read about the incident in Northern California where a substation was attacked. The perpetrators cut the cables from a substation that would have sent the alarm to the system monitor and began to shoot at the station. This attack caused FERC and the Federal Government to expand their current focus on cyber security to include physical security. While these discussions and reviews continue to evolve, they will undoubtedly lead to additional changes or requirements for our systems.

The second issue that has been emerging is distributed generation and other sources of power that customers are generating that could have an impact on our systems. Not so much the question of how to account for the system maintenance costs, but more about the safety of unregistered or licensed solar installations, emergency generators or other power sources. These sources can be real hazards to our crews responding to outages or performing general maintenance and metering duties.

Finally, this past year we automated our communications for Mutual Aid and it is has been incredibly helpful. But we can go a step further. There is the capability of getting live visual feeds of outage areas and response activities.

How can we resolve all three of these issues with one new NEPPA program? DRONES! NEPPA is going to invest in a fleet of drones and offer them to our members.

For mutual aid activities these drones can be used either by the program coordinators or the individual utility staff. They will provide a clear understanding of the response status and additional resources needed. They can identify where the outage begins and ends and even traffic issues related to getting to the outage.

These drones can also be used to patrol our systems and identify unauthorized or permitted solar installations and back-up generators. They can easily record the location and then we can proactively protect our field people and notify permitting.

Drones can also be used in our physical security efforts. They can inspect our lines and patrol our plants and substations. This will go above and beyond whatever FERC implements for cyber and physical security standards. If we arm these devices any attacks on our facilities can be immediately responded to by the person in our control room. Heck, with a Taser system we could even cut down on graffiti.

Need to deliver cancellation notices and don’t want to risk personnel harm? No problem! The drone will stick the notice to the door. Vermont munis trying to find the illegal tap-ins by pot greenhouses? No problem. Worried about too many coffee breaks? The drone can be your eyes and ears.

NEPPA felt this would be a popular service, so we have purchased one per member utility and will be scheduling one-day training seminars. The quadrocopter drone is equipped with a camera which is pictured below. The Taser or other devices are easily mounted to the underside of the drone.

Mike Cloutier from Groveland has already ordered five equipped with Tasers. We have had a request from John Tzimorangas for one that is small enough to fit in a golf bag. Sharon Staz (our Legislative Affairs Chair) will be implementing the use of the NEPPA drones to monitor and coordinate the annual DC office visits. We are also looking into making the drones available to vendors.

I personally plan to use one to monitor the ISO New England offices and figure out what all of those people actually do.

On a more serious note, I just want to congratulate Sue Kelly on her new position as President of APPA and wish Mark Crisson well on his retirement. Thank you for your service to public power.

Thank you to all of the General Managers and Commissioners that participated in our 2014 Hill visits. Your participation made a difference. Please make sure to read Sharon Staz’s column on the 2014 Rally in this issue of Newsline.