Staying Connected: Adapting Mutual Assistance to New Challenges

Staying Connected:

Adapting Mutual Assistance to New Challenges

- By Joelle Lancaster -

Advisor, Regulatory Affairs & Grid Infrastructure, Canadian Electricity Association

The electricity grid is an essential part of our everyday lives, powering the alarm clocks that wake us up in the morning to the hallway nightlight that flickers on when we go to bed. Powering the grid – underneath the generation, transmission and distribution equipment – is a vast network of lineworkers, arborists, grid operators working to repair lines, trim hazard trees, all while keeping a close eye on the grid to ensure that interruptions to power flow, such as storm damage, can be dealt with as safely and as efficiently as possible.

Adaptation is a constant in the electricity industry, with forestry and lineworkers prepared to address issues that arise both within and outside the bounds of their service territory, and to assist in circumstances that have threatened the reliable distribution of electricity to their neighbours. Mutual assistance agreements underpin these activities and reinforce the engagements between various utilities, where their respective lineworkers aid each other to restore power to energy customers across North America in times of severe weather.

Such forays can vary from a quick stop in the neighbouring town to help untangle broken power lines following a windstorm, to long journeys with extensive repair work. The network of electricity neighbours can stretch across North America and beyond. Always willing and available to travel great distances to rebuild critical infrastructure, Canadian electricity utilities have provided assistance from Québec to Georgia, Ontario to California, all the way from Prince Edward Island and Alberta to Turks & Caicos, and many more as increasingly severe weather has, due to climate change, stretched the needs of affected utilities.

New environments entail new challenges, as electricity workers may have to learn how to safely climb an electrical pole in the absence of bucket trucks or how to adhere to new safety standards for a high voltage system that isn’t quite the mirror image of the one at home. The beginning of spring 2020 saw an intense and swift new reality for the industry to adapt to, as electricity utilities sought to keep their employees safe while continuing to ensure the reliable supply of electricity – a service essential to Canadians. At the same time, utilities kept mutual systems of assistance in mind, ensuring that electricity employees are able to answer the call for mutual assistance and lend a hand when extreme weather raged, confident that their safety was considered in each step of the process. Best practices and potential challenges were shared and resolved through crossborder forums of utilities dealing with one common, global pandemic. From ensuring that employees could physically distance when traveling to different jurisdictions, to ensuring that essential electricity workers could cross the Canada-US border to respond to extreme weather events, electricity utilities have come together to ensure continued, safe mutual assistance would be available if and when needed.

The need for adaptation in the electricity sector is a continuing one, as electricity will remain essential to our day-to-day lives, as modern society will continue to evolve, and as the inevitable challenges will keep us on our toes. Electricity utilities supporting the industry – not only through a pandemic, but through the ongoing effects of climate change and the increasing intensity of extreme weather events – will continue to require collaboration, a key factor in supporting adaptation across the country. The electricity industry remains primed to lend a hand, whether that entails repairing a neighbour’s power lines or endeavouring to find a new industry standard for safety.