Working remotely presents challenges, opportunities for power sector: panelists

摘要

Efforts to protect workers involved with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and its stakeholders from the novel coronavirus pandemic have created challenges and opportunities across the power sector, Gulf Coast Power Association webinar panelists said June 25. “The question was, who really needs to be onsite?” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness. “In the real-time control room, we even looked at the idea that we could do that remotely, and we couldn’t make it work.” About 95% of ERCOT staffers now work remotely, Magness said, and stricter protocols govern those who do operate in ERCOT’s control center. In the past, day and night shift people would mingle and take over the same space at shift change, partly to discuss what has been happening on the grid, but now those two shifts operate in different control rooms and never have contact, to minimize the chance that an infection in one shift might contaminate people in the other shift, Magness said. “I would really not like to quarantine [the center] — that’s like setting up a cruise ship in our offices,” Magness said.