Tuesday, July 22, 2025, 9 a.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee
The Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee approved minutes from its May 20, 2025 meeting and heard an interim General Manager's report on the May 28, 2025 microburst storm, the third-worst outage event in Austin Energy's history, which peaked at 72,500 customers out and cost an estimated $6.5 million. The committee received a semi-annual briefing on implementation of the Resource Generation and Climate Protection Plan to 2035, including progress on energy efficiency, demand response, local solar, and a pending 100-megawatt battery storage contract with Jupiter Power. The committee also heard results of the overhead distribution resiliency study conducted with 1898 & Co., which identified over 600 mainline and over 1,000 lateral recloser placements and 24 resiliency initiatives, with a comprehensive distribution resiliency plan expected around November. The weatherization program briefing was postponed to the next meeting. No public speakers signed up.
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.