Climate Week highlights the importance of resilient energy infrastructure

By Kim Hanemann , PSE&G President and COO

PSE&G marks 2023 Climate Week with a heightened sense of urgency and renewed commitment to prepare for extreme weather before it’s too late.?

Recent events have made the stakes clear. Devastating hurricanes in Florida and California and catastrophic wildfires in Hawaii foreshadow a future of increasingly severe weather and related disasters intensified by a changing climate.?

According to NASA, July 2023 was the hottest month on record globally — 2.1 degrees F (1.18 degrees C) warmer than the average July between 1951 and 1980. NASA predicts that “if global temperatures keep rising and reach 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, people worldwide could face multiple impacts of climate change simultaneously.”?

We can also expect worse floods, droughts, damage to infrastructure—and the resulting harm to humanity and wildlife.?

That’s why we are taking sustained action to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather. With the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ approval last year of our Infrastructure Advancement Program (IAP), we plan to invest $511 million over four years to modernize our distribution systems. This work will provide customers with improved reliability and resiliency, including during extreme weather. ?As an added benefit, we expect that the IAP will create hundreds of well-paying jobs and help stimulate the New Jersey economy.??

We also intend to make "Last Mile" investments to begin preparing the grid for the transition to EVs and enable a greater blend of renewable energy resources by increasing the reliability of the state's electric grid down to the street and neighborhood level.

In addition, we also are preparing for the future by investing in our system to make it more resilient when extreme weather does hit and by continually improving our storm restoration process to get power back on for our customers as efficiently as possible. In 2023 alone, we are investing $3.5 billion to improve our infrastructure and make it more reliable regardless of the weather.

Our efforts in this area include installing smart meters across our service territory that gives us visibility into which customers are without power so we can respond quickly. We are proud to say that in July we announced that we hit the milestone of installing 1 million smart meters across our territory, and that the effort is ongoing. Through our Energy Strong II program and other resiliency investments we are creating an advanced distribution management system to make the system smarter, improve outage response and upgrade and secure vital communications networks. We have installed system automation devices (e.g. reclosers and fuse savers) to reduce customers impacted during blue sky and extreme weather events.? Lastly, we are in the process of upgrading overhead electric wires to a more storm resistant construction.

?A History of Resiliency Leadership

Our emphasis on resiliency is not new. In the years following Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy, we launched an historic infrastructure modernization program to fortify New Jersey's electric and natural gas systems against future storms — with even more investment planned in future phases.

The $4.8 billion effort included raising, rebuilding, eliminating and upgrading equipment at 26 substations, many of which were damaged by flooding during the storm.?

We also installed smart grid technologies, replaced close to 2,000 miles of aging gas lines and added digital and other technologies to make the network more intelligent and agile.??

This work benefited our customers when it counted — in the teeth of severe weather. For example, only 215,000 PSE&G customers lost power during Hurricane Ida in 2021, compared to more than two million who suffered lengthy outages during Sandy.?

We were proud to be recognized last year by the Edison Electric Institute, which awarded us the 2022 Edison Award, the electric utility industry's highest honor, for our industry-leading efforts to protect New Jersey communities and customers from extreme weather conditions.?

Like that award, Climate Week reminds us that our dedication to creating a more resilient service while addressing the greatest challenge of our age — climate change — is critical to our ability to continue to serve our customers.