How Salt River Project Is Evolving Its OT Strategy

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

As a professional involved in electricity delivery, the T&D World Podcast and tdworld.com is your definitive source for breaking news, industry updates, and more. We've got you covered from transmission to distribution and everything that affects the power grid. And now, on to today's episode.

Jeff Polstewaite (0:20)

Hello, and welcome back to the T&D World Live Podcast. Or if this is your first episode, let me welcome you for the first time. My name is Jeff Polstewaite, and I am Senior Editor and Lead Reporter at T&D World.

Today, I have an interview for you that I did at the Aspen Tech Conference, which among other things, covers the IT and OT side of utility operations. I got to talk with Chris Campbell, Senior Director of OT Services for Salt River Project. That's the Arizona-based electric and water utility. It's a nice, wide-ranging interview where I talk about everything from computing technology to nuclear power. And I really hope you'll enjoy it. So here's my chat with Mr. Chris Campbell.

So I guess just what have you been hearing at the conference so far? Because I've been attending and listening, but I think you've probably been understanding it a little bit more than me. What are people talking about that catches your ear?

Chris Campbell (1:13)

Yeah, well, I think the first thing was, you know, there was a surge of keynotes on Monday, and there was a very common theme that we're all facing a lot of the stream, you know, the same challenges. And I know what I talked about then, which I've been hearing over and over, is that we have a challenge around system growth, unprecedented growth with data centers, and in our case, advanced manufacturing, you know, like semiconductors and things like that. We are all trying to transition our energy portfolios to decarbonize. And so that's a big transition in how things work. We're seeing grid transformation happen, you know. So how we operate the grid is differently than it used to be, and it's changing pretty rapidly. Decentralizing? Yeah, there's a lot of elements of that, you know, kind of distributed energy.

You know, now that customers are generating and electrification is impacted, we have more variability on the demand side, as well as the supply side. So we're constantly balancing the grid in real time, is becoming more of a challenge.

Jeff Polstewaite (2:16)

I think a factor is electrification in Arizona. When I hear it, I think about California because they passed those policies, but I mean, there is a lot of electricity use in homes here.

Chris Campbell (2:27)

Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's a factor. I think it's one that's going to grow over the years, you know. So obviously, electric vehicles, you know, I think we're, I've lost track, but we're probably 75,000 electric vehicles in our service territory out of 3 million. So little ways to go there.

But we're also seeing more electrification on the industrial side. That's going to continue.

Jeff Polstewaite (2:49)

I've heard some people say electrification over time could be a bigger deal than AI or data centers. I mean, even with some of the big numbers that we're seeing predicted there.

I've been doing some work with SRP before based on their wildfire mitigation strategies. And so I was thinking OT probably does a lot to support wildfire mitigation. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Chris Campbell (3:12)

Yeah, obviously, there's a number of elements to a wildfire strategy. You got to detect, prevent, and respond.

And so on the OT side, part of what we do is when there is risk, there's a risk assessment that goes on. And when that risk is there, we will change how the system operates to mitigate some of that risk. And so an example is what we often do on our system is reclosing. So if you have a fault, you'll trip, it will wait a second and then close back in. And the intent there is that if it was a momentary fault or something, then you can restore your customers much faster. But the concern with wildfires is if you have a fault and then you close back in, you can still have a fault and now you're creating more potential for ignition. And so that's something.

Jeff Polstewaite (4:02)

Will that also be like public service safety shutoffs at all or managing them?

Chris Campbell (4:06)

Yeah, that's another level there. So when you get to a really high threat and risk, then there will be public safety shutoffs. We will actually shut off parts of our system to really mitigate the risk of anything being started.

Jeff Polstewaite (4:22)

That's the last resort.