A fireside chat with former Governor John Bel Edwards and Neil Chatterjee

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to the AiDASH Evolve 2024 podcast.
AiDASH makes critical infrastructure industries climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. Evolve 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana was our inaugural event. We gathered industry leaders, innovators and visionaries to explore how cutting edge technology and satellites and AI is safeguarding critical infrastructure and fostering biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future amidst climate change challenges. In this podcast series, we are recapping the entire event, every speaker and session. You can find it all on our content hub at ai-dot-com-slash-evolve2024 or check the show notes for all pertinent links. In this episode, we get the second part of former governor John Bel Edwards' session. After his keynote, which you can hear in the previous episode, Governor Edwards sat down with Neil Chatterjee, former Commissioner and Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or the FERC, for a fireside chat. They talked about how technology is critical to the upcoming energy transition, and they make the case that action includes talking about economic development, investment, and job creation. And they emphasize that where there are challenges, there are opportunities. Here's former Governor John Bel Edwards and Neil Chatterjee.

**John Bel Edwards** (1:38)
Make welcome to this day's Neil Chatterjee.

**Neil Chatterjee** (1:52)
Well, I tell you what, Governor, if that's your first speech since January, you've got no rust on you at all. You've still got your fastball, clearly. That was outstanding. And you really teed up a number of critical issues that I would love to unpack in this conversation. But I guess maybe to start, I should explain to some folks in the crowd who are probably wondering, what is this Neil guy doing up here with the governor?
You know, what is FERC? What the FERC? So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for those of you all...

**John Bel Edwards** (2:21)
I got that too, by the way.

**Neil Chatterjee** (2:26)
It is the government agency with the primary responsibility for overseeing the reliability of the grid. So that making sure that when Americans, when Louisianans hit the switch, that the lights come on. And there's a lot that goes into that process of maintaining reliability. And it included having close contact with state leaders, because you all are the ones who had to see everything at ground level. You really thoroughly covered in your remarks the challenges that you guys have here in Louisiana.
I found it remarkable. I think most people who do associate the state with flooding, with hurricanes, wouldn't have really thought that Louisiana is a wildfire state, but it is now something that state leaders here are going to have to contend. In your years of experience really dealing with these challenges, can you speak a little bit about utility infrastructure and where you kind of saw some of the vulnerabilities during your time?

**John Bel Edwards** (3:28)
Well, there was no place where we didn't see vulnerabilities, but it happened on the transmission side and the distribution side. And I know there's an ongoing debate, probably among people in this room, about whether much of this infrastructure needs to be put underground. I think, you know, there's pros and cons to that. But some of it you're not going to put underground. But I'll never forget seeing these huge transmission towers crumpled in southwest Louisiana because of Hurricane Laura in 2020 And people expect that within a day or so, all of that's going to be fixed. Well, these were hundreds of towers. Each one requires three semi-trucks. And you can't get the trucks to the location where they are because they're out in the swamp. And so, really, really challenging. And so, whatever you can do on the front end to make sure that they don't fail. And by the way, you know, they had been rated, I think, up to 150 mile an hour winds, but they still failed. And so, we've seen that challenge. On the distribution side, whether it was with President Trump in 2020 or President Biden in 2021, we went through neighborhoods where the utility poles looked like that slide that I showed you. And maybe that's where some work can be done to put that underground. We had electric lines going over the Mississippi River here that collapsed into the river, and all the commerce on the river stopped.
Now, that's when you start getting attention out of Washington. They want to know when that line is going to be removed. It happened on the Intercoastal Canal down in southwest Louisiana 2020 as well, and it stops everything. So there is not a piece of our grid infrastructure that we haven't seen challenged. And the wildfires, y'all have seen what happens in California. It was the exact thing in Louisiana.