PG&E Unveils New $40 Million Electricity Distribution Center In East Bay

PHOTOS: Congressman Mark DeSaulnier joins Geisha Williams, president, PG&E Electric Operations, and Concord Mayor Tim Grayson, in a ribbon cutting at the new operations center; Visitors tour center; The 38,000-square-foot operations center. (Photos by Matt Nauman, courtesy of PG&E Currents online.)

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PG&E unveiled a new high-tech electricity distribution control center, what officials are calling a “nerve center,” in Concord Thursday.

The $40 million facility will oversee management of the company’s more than 140,000 miles of electricity lines distributing power to nearly 16 million customers. Operators in PG&E’s former control centers, which were built in the 1980s, had to rely on a series of large paper wall maps to coordinate the response of field crews making or planning repairs, said PG&E Director of Business Applications Gary Cassilagio.

At the Concord facility, large flat-screened televisions line the walls and huge computer monitors surround each operator desk.

“This is really a one-stop shop to understanding what’s going on with the grid, either power flow or outage-wise,” Cassilagio said. “Those tools are not necessarily available in the legacy centers today.”

The Concord facility is one of three that the company has or plans to open in an effort to improve its response to both planned and unplanned power outages. The first of the three centers opened in Fresno late last year and construction on a center in Rocklin is expected to be completed in the fall, according to company officials.

Each center is designed to mimic the other so operators can rely on a standardized design across the facilities. The centers are also networked together, so information can easily be transferred from one facility to the next, Cassilagio said. The operations centers are organized into stations, or “pods,” that were designed with the input of the employees who will be using them to maximize workplace efficiency, said PG&E Senior Vice President Greg Kiraly.

Each pod oversees a different section of the grid and a “leadership pod” manages workload between the stations. If there’s a major event impacting any one area of the grid, Cassilagio said managing operators can shift the extra work to an operator with a lighter load. If everyone at the facility is overloaded, work can be shifted to any one of the other two centers, he said.

“It’s a very real-time, rapid workload management model,” Cassilagio said.

Cassilagio described the center as the company’s “most reliable.” It’s built to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters with up to 72 hours of generator capacity, two independent computer server rooms and redundancies built throughout the system to ensure resiliency, according to Cassilagio.

“This allows for complete, uninterrupted, seamless (service) that the users inside the facility benefit from,” Cassilagio said.

PG&E President of Electric Operations Geisha Williams said the Fresno facility demonstrated the center’s effectiveness when a particularly rough storm hit Bakersfield last winter.

Normally, four operators oversee the Bakersfield area, she said.

“That’s fine on a sunny day, but now imagine four operators having to deal with thousands of outages and hundreds of crews coming in from other parts of the service area to deal with these outages,” Williams said. “It could easily overwhelm them and it could be a huge constraint on their abilities to do their jobs.”

Instead, operators based in Fresno were able to remotely take control of some of the operations responsibilities so the Bakersfield-based employees could handle their jobs with less stress and improved efficiency, Williams said.

The goal is to see those efficiencies system-wide in order to increase the reliability and resiliency of the system, she said.

Concord Mayor Tim Grayson lauded the new facility as a boon for the city. The facility brought roughly 250 construction jobs, he said, and will house around 80 permanent positions, according to Cassilagio.

Employees will start working out of the facility on Monday, but the center won’t fully come on line until later in the year.

All three facilities will be fully operational by August next year, Cassilagio said.

--Bay City News