SAN ANTONIO – CPS Energy’s executive team shared a single message Friday on all company fronts: the utility company is ready for the summer. The message was affirmed by Rudy Garza, the utility’s president and CEO.
“Right now, we have roughly 9,400 megawatts of generation capacity to power through the summer season,” Garza said. “That’s going to take care of both CPS Energy customers, and it’s going to help ERCOT ensure reliability across the season.”
During Friday’s media briefing about summer preparedness, Richard Urrutia, the vice president of generation operations, detailed some of the steps taken to prepare CPS Energy for summer electricity demand. He said crews at all energy plants have been focused on three objectives: people, processes, and equipment.
“We just spent three months in outages [maintenance] basically preparing our equipment, systems, subsystems for the summer heat to make sure the units are ready through the summer,” Urrutia said.
He also addressed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) projected hurricane and tropical storm forecast for this year, which was released earlier this week, as June 1 is the start of hurricane season.
Urrutia said both of CPS Energy’s plant operations in Corpus Christi have taken those possible weather events in their preparation processes into account.
“Those plants there have prepared separately for those types of events if they occur,” he said.
CPS Energy leadership also wanted to elicit the support and participation of all of its customers in the utility’s calls to conserve energy.
DeAnna Hardwick, the chief customer strategy officer, touched on the company’s color-coded energy level conservation campaign.
This year marks the fourth year of the campaign that was launched to inform customers how they could help conserve energy and reduce the strain on the state’s electrical grid.
Hardwick pointed out that the calls for conservation are color-coded to reflect the different types of customer action needed.
The conservation levels enacted change according to demand. Cam the chameleon, the utility’s face of the campaign, changes its color.
Green calls for customers to minimize usage where they can, such as turning off lights or unplugging electronics not being used.
Yellow is a request for customers to continue to minimize usage and avoid using large appliances like the oven or washing machine during specified hours when the energy demand is peaking.
When the conservation energy level is orange, ERCOT or the electrical power grid may not be able to supply enough energy to meet the greater-than-usual demand for energy.
Of all four conservation levels, red is the most severe. If the conservation level is at red alert, it indicates ERCOT is conducting rolling blackouts or brownouts, whichever is necessary, until the energy usage situation has reached an acceptable condition to restore normal usage across the board.
Hardwick encouraged all customers who want more information on the campaign can click here.
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