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

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Former Governor of Louisiana John Bel Edwards and Neil Chatterjee, Former Commissioner and Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), at AiDASH Evolve 2024
Former Governor of Louisiana John Bel Edwards and Neil Chatterjee, Former Commissioner and Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), at AiDASH Evolve 2024

This is a recap of a session from AiDASH Evolve 2024

Summary:

  • Technology is critical to the upcoming energy transition.
  • Making the case for action includes talking about economic development, investment, and job creation.
  • Where there are challenges, there are opportunities.

John Bel Edwards, former Governor of Louisiana and current Special Counsel, Fishman Haygood, opened AiDASH Evolve 2024 with a keynote speech about securing critical infrastructure in a changing climate. Immediately upon conclusion of his keynote, Governor Edwards invited Neil Chatterjee, Former Commissioner and Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to join him on stage for a fireside chat.

The pair dug in further on the subjects Governor Edwards spoke about, including the importance of technology to the energy transition and why economic development, investment, and job creation are critical components of multilateral efforts going forward.

To begin, Chatterjee explained what FERC does: It’s the government agency with the primary responsibility of overseeing the reliability of the grid. A lot goes into the process of maintaining reliability, including having close contact with state leaders, who are seeing things at the ground level.

Throughout the discussion, he posed several questions to Governor Edwards:

Where did you see some of the vulnerabilities in the utility infrastructure?

“Well, there was no place where we didn’t see vulnerabilities,” said Governor Edwards. “It happened on the transmission side and the distribution side.”

He acknowledged the debate over how much of the infrastructure should be put underground, but pointed to parts that simply can’t be. He recalled the huge transmission towers that crumpled because of Hurricane Laura and how incredibly difficult it was to replace or repair them, as well as when lines reaching across the Mississippi River collapsed and halted all river commerce.

“There is not a piece of our grid infrastructure that we haven’t seen challenged,” he said.

Where do you see opportunities with AI in terms of being smarter, being better in facing these challenges?

“One of the benefits that comes from facing these kinds of events is that you learn from them, and you get better,” said Chatterjee. “It’s been just remarkable to see the evolution with AI over the past couple of years.”

“If you can combine AI and … satellite imagery to pinpoint your allocation of resources on a routine basis, with respect to managing vegetation, and knowing where you need to put your limited resources and your … vegetation crews to minimize the likelihood of an outage in the next storm … that’s so smart,” said Governor Edwards.

Former Governor of Louisiana John Bel Edwards speaking at AiDASH Evolve 2024
Former Governor of Louisiana John Bel Edwards speaking at AiDASH Evolve 2024

He shared some particular insight into how disaster recovery intersects with state and federal politics: When you’re trying to get funds for disaster recovery, it’s a negotiation. For example, from a state leader perspective, you need to get funding both to meet emergency housing needs and also get the power back on.

“The language that gets written into that appropriation in Congress is specific to that disaster,” he explained. “The language changes all the time. But in the vast majority of cases, utilities are not eligible for that funding.”

“So, minimizing that damage to your system on the front end is really, really important, and it minimizes the increase to your rate payers on the back end, because the reality of the situation is you’re very unlikely to get help from Congress,” he added.

How do you suggest utilities should educate policymakers about new technology?

Chatterjee came up with the question because “I do think it took me some time at the federal level to learn about these kinds of things,” he said.

“We just have to do it,” said Governor Edwards, because disaster preparedness is getting harder, not easier. “The lessons that we’ve learned in the past aren’t always going to be enough to prepare us and to allow us to quickly respond to and recover from these disasters.”

He advised taking advantage of every available resource, especially when you know how powerful a tech solution like AI can be. “That’s part of restoring the trust with rate payers, with customers out there. They need to know that you’re doing everything that you can do, and that you’re going to more often meet their expectations going forward.”

In your time as a Democratic governor in a red state (and since), have you seen people’s views around climate change and extreme weather events shift?

Chatterjee acknowledged the political divisions that exist around climate change issues while emphasizing that when it came to dealing with disasters, the FERC and Governor Edwards were effectively apolitical. “When it came to things like disaster response, neither one of us checked to see what the political affiliation of our counterpart was. We did what was right for Louisiana, [and] we did what was right for America,” he said.

He added, “Maintaining reliability and affordability in the face of an increased surge in demand for electricity, while simultaneously decarbonizing — that’s a huge challenge that’s going to take everyone working together, and we can’t afford partisan infighting.”

Governor Edwards said he’s hopeful bipartisan cooperation can still happen. But regardless of one’s stance on climate change, he said it’s incontrovertible that things are happening that weren’t happening before. Even so, he said, “For those people who may not think [climate change] is real, they understand economic development, investment, and job creation.”

“[In Louisiana], we were successful because we promoted this half about the environment and climate change and half about economic development, investment, and job creation. And so there’s some part of that that everybody can embrace,” he said.

How important is technology to making us more efficient as demand for electricity increases?

Demand for electricity is changing, said Chatterjee, “with data centers, with cloud computing, with streaming services, vehicle electrification, building electrification, increased demand for air conditioning, [and] semiconductor manufacturing.”

“That means we’re going to need to add new sources of energy, but we’re also going to have to make our existing sources more effective and more efficient,” he added.

Neil Chatterjee, Former Commissioner and Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), at AiDASH Evolve 2024
Neil Chatterjee, Former Commissioner and Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), at AiDASH Evolve 2024

Governor Edwards said they have a climate action plan with dozens of strategies and action steps. “The No. 1 thing that’s required in order to come close to meeting our goals is to electrify industry in Louisiana to the maximum degree possible, and for the source of as much of that electricity as possible to be renewable.”

That was true even before they were facing the increased demand. For anyone to want to invest in an area, he said, they need confidence. “So, if we can’t promise them enhanced resilience, it makes it harder to get the investments,” he said. A key to economic growth, alongside things like transportation, infrastructure, and workforce, is the reliability of the electrical grid and the ability to add more capacity.

“But for every challenge, there’s a real opportunity out there, too. And there’s a lot of excitement,” he added.

When we’re thinking about vegetation management, can you speak to the geography and topography of Louisiana outside of New Orleans and Baton Rouge?

Governor Edwards described the vegetation of Louisiana. There are the bayous, of course, but further north there are pine forests. “We actually grow trees here faster than they do in the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

Much of Louisiana is extremely rural, he continued. There’s a lot of forest land, including national forests. Louisiana has no mountains, but otherwise the state presents “just about all the challenges that you could face in managing vegetation,” he said.

After a drought in 2023, they faced widespread tree death. “We had a record number of trees that just didn’t leaf out this spring. They just died,” he said. “And they’re all over the state of Louisiana. Those root systems are dying, and it’s not going to take much of a wind [to knock them down].”

“Before, we were just—for the most part—trimming limbs. Now, we’ve got to go all over the state of Louisiana, along our highways, but also along our transmission lines and distribution lines, and actually remove dead trees.”

That’s specific to Louisiana, but you can extrapolate to other regions. “That’s another area where … the work that AiDASH is doing is going to be able to help as well,” he said.

Check out more sessions and information from Evolve 2024, and reach out to see the AiDASH Platform in action!