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Clallam County PUD commissioner warns of risks to Bonneville, urges local-generation feasibility study
Summary
Phyllis Bernard, district commissioner at the Clallam County PUD, told a CQ Community Advisory Committee meeting that staffing cuts at the Bonneville Power Administration and private-sector pressure pose reliability and safety risks and said the PUD has budgeted a feasibility study on local generation, including geothermal.
Phyllis Bernard, District 3 West End commissioner for the Clallam County Public Utility District, told the CQ Community Advisory Committee that she is watching efforts she described as aiming to privatize the Bonneville Power Administration and urged residents to be alert to the implications for rural service and reliability.
"There is an effort underway that I think everybody needs to be alert to to privatize Bonneville," Bernard said, adding that recent staff reductions at BPA have removed experienced operators and reduced redundancy. She said that can lengthen outage-response times and create safety risks for line crews and customers.
Bernard described local consequences she said follow lengthy outages: school buses that need to know by early morning whether routes can run, food spoilage for households and the need for local emergency plans. She said the PUD is pursuing a feasibility study, funded in part in the utility's budget, to evaluate ways to provide some generation locally and reduce dependence on long transmission feeds from BPA.
On options for local generation, Bernard said she favors geothermal and noted potential partnerships with federal agencies and the military. "I'm really in favor of geothermal," she said, adding that the American Public Power Association and the current federal administration have signaled support for alternative generation that could increase local resilience.
County commissioner Mike French (committee organizer) and other attendees credited Bernard with pushing for attention to West End power reliability and for engaging BPA in local discussions; Bernard said those meetings led to operational changes such as deployment of fault indicators ("orange balls") that help crews pinpoint outages more quickly.
Bernard also said the PUD has added a communications and community-outreach staffer and will focus at an upcoming meeting on practical emergency-preparedness steps for residents and organizations. She urged residents to attend local emergency-management planning meetings and said the PUD plans to lean more heavily on scientific and engineering tools to improve operations.
The meeting produced no formal action on the topic; Bernard said the feasibility study is in the PUD budget and further analysis and community outreach will follow.
