State Rep. Daniel Troy addresses FirstEnergy, PUCO regarding Aug. 6 storm

Following correspondence issued to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, state Rep. Daniel Troy, D-Willowick, and other House Democrats called on the body to take “immediate action to address the reliability of Ohio’s power grid” in light of recent severe weather events that caused widespread outages.

The delegation — made up of Democrats on the Ohio House Public Utilities Committee representing Northeast Ohio — urged PUCO to convene meetings with utility leaders to discuss the issue and explore solutions to protect consumers in case of prolonged outages.

Earlier this month, Troy appeared at a PUCO briefing regarding the Aug. 6 storms and raised concerns about grid modernization.

“First of all, one of the things that I heard a lot from my constituents was that when the initial messaging went out, residents were hearing that they were probably not going to get people’s power back on until Aug.14th,” Troy stated. “As a result, people were very irate….that really put a lot of residents in a near panic mode.

“I know there has been some discussion about that from questioning (posed) to the commission members,” he added. “Whatever we can do to refine or modify that public information process would certainly be appreciated.”

As a participant in joint hearings with Pennsylvania legislators, Troy said there seemed to be “considerable concentration” on the distribution of energy generation.

“Very honestly, the problems I’ve witnessed and am hearing from my constituents over the years is not so much about the capacity of available generated power, but rather the ability to transmit and distribute that power ensuring that it flows with as few interruptions as possible to our homes and businesses,” he added.

“Going forward, we should do whatever we can to improve grid performance,” Troy continued. “We are subject to a lot of challenging weather conditions in Northeast Ohio, and we are seeing climate change causing more extreme weather incidents. I think we need to start concentrating on the transmission and distribution of our energy and the transmission of the power and maybe a little bit less on how we generate that power.”

He added that regional FirstEnergy restoration crews also had difficulty making contact with the corporation regarding additional areas requiring service, noting power had still not been established.

“I understand that power transmission to (storm-damaged) areas was shut off for purposes of life safety, but once repairs were made, the delay in resending it certainly caused a lot of downtime for repair crews rather than allowing them to move on to the next fix,” Troy said, addressing First Energy Ohio President Torrence Hinton.

“Is there an advanced technology that First Energy can utilize or is in the process of developing that can minimize those occurrences?”