Tuesday, July 22, 2025, 9 a.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee
0:00 Thank you very much.
0:01 Uh, Mayor, I will call the meeting of the Austin energy utility oversight committee to, uh, order at
0:08 9 0 5. Uh, all members of the committee are present, and let's go ahead and start with, uh, public
0:16 communications. Do we have any, uh, folks that have signed up?
0:19 No speakers. Uh, thank you very much.
0:21 Well with, uh, no speakers, we'll go ahead and move on to the uh, items.
0:25 Item one is, uh, approval of the minutes from the May 20th, 2025 meeting.
0:30 Uh, can I get a motion to approve motion from council, from committee member uchin second from, uh,
0:36 committee member, uh, Ryan Alter.
0:39 Um, and, uh, all those in, uh, favor, please indicate by raising your hands unanimous approval of the
0:47 minutes. Uh, item two is the general manager's report by interim general manager stewart riley, uh, general manager,
0:55 the floor is yours.
0:57 Alright, thank you chair.
0:58 Um, and looks like while, while they're pulling that presentation up, uh, I'll just get started.
1:03 Um, again, I'm stuart riley, Austin energy, interim general manager.
1:07 Um, I'll be speaking today about the microburst storm that Austin energy and our customers experienced at the
1:12 end of May, but I do, before I get into that, want to acknowledge that more recently, uh,
1:19 the, the central texas area and hill country have experienced severe and tragic flooding, um, that flooding makes
1:26 our May microburst storm seem minor by comparison.
1:28 But it's important for us at Austin energy to identify measures that we need to do an even
1:33 better job than what we did in this storm.
1:35 But I couldn't move on to this May microburst storm and kind of go back farther than what,
1:41 uh, we've experienced. Uh, without stopping for a moment just to acknowledge that, I do want to say
1:46 that all of these storms are another reminder of the severe and important impacts of climate change.
1:56 And, you know, for decades, Austin energy has been an industry leader in fighting climate change.
2:01 We're now also responding to its many impacts, responding with our customers.
2:06 And, uh, the other presentations besides this one that you'll see today on resource plan implementation, overhead system
2:13 hardening, um, customer weatherization programs, that's all demonstrative of our commitment to, uh, fighting climate change, responding to
2:21 climate change, and also helping our customers be more resilient.
2:24 Um, next slide please.
2:27 So, you know, we've had several unprecedented weather events here in recent years.
2:33 This storm on May 28th, was the third worst storm in Austin energy's history.
2:39 Um, from a outage perspective, that is from a system damage perspective to, from the perspective of damage
2:46 to Austin energy infrastructure, this was actually the second worst storm that we've ever had.
2:51 Uh, second only to winter storm mara in February of 2023.
2:55 Winter storm uri in 2021 had more outages, but that was an ercot load shed emergency with less
3:01 damage to the system.
3:03 And this, this storm, of course, came with very extreme rainfall in a, in a very short period
3:08 of time, intense hail, high winds, um, a lot of lightning.
3:13 And this was all concentrated in a band across Austin from west to east.
3:18 And that came through in the evening, early evening of, uh, May 28th.
3:22 Next slide, please. So this graph just shows the number of customers that we had affected starting the
3:29 evening of May 28th. As you can see here, when the storm came through, its intensity caused a very,
3:34 im, you know, immediate peak, peak, uh, this spike in outages that came through within minutes where we
3:40 got up to 72,500 customers out.
3:44 Additional storms created other outages over the course of the restoration event.
3:48 That's why you can see that it's not a smooth, uh, downward slope to that line.
3:52 As we had other storms that popped up and came through our area.
3:55 Um, Austin energy crews, along with mutual aid providers restored all power to customers by late evening.
4:03 Uh, January 1st, next slide.
4:07 As with any big storm, our crews encountered many unique and unexpected challenges along the way.
4:12 And at times that delayed our progress in restoring power crews reported seeing homes with roofs ripped off,
4:21 um, trees uprooted and stuck back in the ground, upside down things that our crew members reported they
4:27 had never seen before.
4:28 Uh, a lot of damage to our distribution lines and communications in infrastructure of com telecom providers.
4:36 Most of the damage was at that distribution level to our infrastructure.
4:40 But there was a, a transmission line that was damaged going across lady bird lake over near longhorn
4:46 dam when a construction barge crane was pushed into our line from the high winds and that caused
4:53 damage that could only be repaired by helicopter.
4:56 So we saw all kinds of impacts from this event.
4:59 We set up multiple community outreach events to answer customer questions, and it also helped with resources.
5:05 And we did our best to keep our community informed along the way, whether that was through targeted
5:09 text messages, emails, news, media alerts, or on social media.
5:14 Next slide, please. So this slide has a lot of numbers of what we experienced during this event.
5:21 I've mentioned that we had a peak of 72,500 customers affected, but the total number of customers affected
5:28 was 124,000 unique customers who were without power at any given point.
5:33 During this event, we had 91 power poles that we replaced, just to give you a sense of
5:38 of impact there. The typical pole replacement on a, on a normal day, just your run of the
5:43 mill pole replacement takes a larger line crew more than half a day to replace a single pole.
5:49 And so we had 91 of those.
5:51 We replaced 52 transformers, 32,000 feet of overhead cable.
5:55 Our call centers fielded over 25,000 outage related inquiries.
5:59 And between our crews, our contract crews and mutual aid providers, we had nearly a thousand people out
6:05 in the field restoring power, not including our damage assessors.
6:10 And our initial cost estimate from this response is $6.5 million in costs.
6:16 From this response, that number is likely to go up as we have additional mutual aid invoices coming
6:23 in as well. Next slide, please.
6:28 So Austin energy is a continuous learning organization, and each time mother nature throws a new learning opportunity
6:35 at us, we find ways to get, um, uh, findings from those events and learn from that and
6:41 improve what we do going forward.
6:44 And so we've done thorough after action reviews previously, and we're doing the same thing this time.
6:48 Our prior after action reports and implementation updates are on our website.
6:52 And there we, we show how we have documented each and every follow up action from all of
6:58 those storms and how we have followed up on every one of those identified action items.
7:04 And during this four day storm response, we employed several lessons learned from previous, uh, after action reviews,
7:09 particularly from the winter storm mara after action review.
7:12 And so in this outage response, we, um, we implemented our new departmental incident management team, uh, that
7:19 provides enhanced communications and collaboration, a new damage assessment process to more quickly understand the magnitude and complexity
7:27 of our restoration needs, our phased restoration 1, 2, 3 process that focuses resources where those resources need to go,
7:35 and also helps our customers understand the process, our enhanced outage map capacity with all that traffic going
7:42 to the outage map.
7:43 Uh, in previous storms when we had those, those periods, the, the, the website couldn't handle that amount
7:49 of traffic. We've fixed that as well.
7:51 And, but better mutual aid coordination and pre-draft contracts so that we can bring in mutual aid crews
7:57 more rapidly. Um, this is the first time we've implemented any of these new changes and, um, it's
8:04 our estimation that we'll only get better at this going forward.
8:07 And now we are in the middle of our May microburst storm after action review.
8:12 And so this involves a discovery process, analyzing feedback, and coming up with improvements that will be in
8:18 a report that we expect to be complete in October.
8:22 Next slide. So lastly, I'd just like to thank all the Austin energy team members, um, for all
8:28 their hard work, whether that was on the incident management team in the call center, out in the
8:32 field, working many, many long hours away from families, uh, to provide 24 hour coverage.
8:37 Also, our partners at hess, Austin police department, Austin fire department, and several of the support services departments,
8:44 uh, for, for the collaboration on this response, I'd also like to thank all of you Mayor and
8:49 council members for amplifying our messages that we put out to the community and helping us get word
8:55 out to our customers.
8:56 But most importantly, I'd like to thank those customers for their, for their patients.
9:00 Every outage event is a very frustrating experience, but we heard a lot of, of support for our
9:06 line workers, for the mutual aid providers, and I'm just very grateful for our customers, um, and, and,
9:13 uh, their patients with us as we worked as quickly and safely to get the lights back on.
9:17 But, um, and before I, before I finish, I just wanna say that, um, you know, it's, it's
9:21 important to do well at restoration in, in outage scenarios, but that's not all that we wanna be
9:27 good at. We wanna make sure that we don't have the outage in the first place.
9:31 That's why our resiliency plan is very important.
9:33 That's why all the work that we're doing to harden our system and studying that, and you'll hear
9:37 about that in a little bit.
9:39 So, um, chair, that's all I've got and I'm happy to answer any questions, mr.
9:43 Chairman. Excellent, uh, segue there to, uh, uh, one of the other items on the agenda, but, uh,
9:49 mother nature has been sending us far too many learning opportunities, uh, recently.
9:54 Hopefully that'll, uh, slow down a bit.
9:56 I did want to just ask about that, the restoration process of the phase one, phase two, phase
10:02 three approach. Uh, my sense from the feedback that I got in the communications, uh, was that there
10:09 was more clarity in the communications and that people are willing to be patient when they have a
10:15 better understanding of the timeframe that they're looking at for power restoration.
10:19 I was just wondering if you could just, uh, explain that, that phase one, phase two, phase three
10:23 process a bit. Absolutely, yes.
10:25 So what, what we're calling restoration 1, 2, 3 of the phase one, phase two, phase three, um, during phase
10:32 one, that is the time when we need to focus our restoration activities on getting critical load customers
10:39 back online, like hospitals, critical communications equipment, first responder locations, um, along with the mainline circuit.
10:47 So getting the backbone of the system back up and running during that phase one.
10:51 So critical customers, hospitals and things, uh, backbone of the system, uh, phase once we're through with that.
10:58 Phase two is when we move into getting off of that system backbone and into some of the
11:03 lateral lines off of that backbone.
11:05 So going into a lot of the neighborhoods, some of some of those distribution, um, laterals that affect
11:11 a large number of customers.
11:12 And in that, we work always from, from largest to smallest and from oldest to newest outage.
11:18 Um, and then phase three is when we have the smallest, you know, uh, you know, single or
11:25 double outages when you just have a very isolated, it's just at the transformer, it's a or it's
11:29 a customer service drop into their property where maybe they need an electrician and so forth.
11:34 And we, um, have improved our processes a lot in terms of getting word to our customers of
11:39 what they need to do in terms of getting an electrician.
11:42 Dsd has been great about expediting those, uh, the permit processes and doing, uh, the inspection after the
11:48 fact. And, and so that's the restoration.
11:51 1, 2, 3. And then just a final question, uh, from me, uh, the outage map.
11:57 How did you feel about the performance of the, uh, outage map?
12:00 I know that there's been some upgrades and some improvements made to the outage map over the last
12:03 few years. How are you feeling about it?
12:06 Um, you know, I will say that each, each time there's, there's a very large scale event.
12:12 There's, there's something that materializes on the outage map this time.