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Tag: electric grid

  • PSEG Long Island names Scott Jennings president, COO | Long Island Business News

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    THE BLUEPRINT:

    • named president and COO of effective Jan. 5, 2026

    • New five-year PSEG Long Island contract extension approved by NY comptroller

    • PSEG Long Island will continue operating ‘s through 2030

    • John Latka appointed senior vice president of electric operations

    PSEG Long Island has named a new leader, as the utility’s five-year contract extension with the was also approved by the . 

    Scott Jennings, who has a 27-year history with PSEG, was tapped as president and chief operating officer of PSEG Long Island beginning on Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, according to a company statement. Jennings succeeds David Lyons, who has served as interim president and COO of PSEG Long Island since May 2022. 

    The five-year contract extension for PSEG Long Island to operate the electric grid for Long Island and the Rockaways just approved by the state comptroller was awarded by the LIPA Board of Trustees in September. PSEG Long Island has operated the electric grid on behalf of LIPA since 2014, and the contract extension runs through Dec. 31, 2030. 

    Jennings has served in various PSEG leadership roles, most recently as senior vice president of Finance, Planning and Strategy, where he was responsible for the company’s business plans and investments, according to the statement. 

    “We conducted an extensive national search to find a leader who had the ideal skills and vision, while demonstrating a strong commitment to the role and the future success of PSEG Long Island. Scott has decades of experience and a strong strategic and financial background that will be instrumental to maintaining energy affordability for customers on Long Island and in the Rockaways.” Ralph LaRossa, PSEG chair, president and CEO, said in the statement. “We are confident that Scott will seamlessly lead PSEG Long Island in this new chapter and work in partnership with LIPA to enhance our safe, affordable, reliable energy future.” 

    Jennings headed the development and negotiation of PSEG’s arrangement to operate the Long Island electric grid on behalf of LIPA leading up to the establishment of PSEG Long Island in 2014. 

    “I am thrilled to be joining PSEG Long Island as it enters this new chapter. I will work diligently with our partners at LIPA and to continue the improvements we have made for customers over the past 12 years,” Jennings said in the statement. “I look forward to making strategic investments across the organization to deliver a reliable, resilient electric grid while enhancing the customer experience and maintaining affordability.” 

    Pat Guidice, business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1049, thanked Lyons for his leadership and service and his work with the workforce during his tenure. 

    “We appreciate the opportunity to have worked with him and wish him well in his next steps,” Guidice said in the statement. “We also congratulate Scott Jennings on his appointment as president and COO and look forward to working with him in his new role.” 

    In addition to Jennings promotion, PSEG announced that John Latka has been named senior vice president of electric operations at the utility to support both PSE&G and PSEG Long Island. 


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    David Winzelberg

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  • Biden announces new funding to shore up electric grid in areas impacted by Milton, Helene

    Biden announces new funding to shore up electric grid in areas impacted by Milton, Helene

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    President Joe Biden announced $612 million on Sunday for six projects to improve electric grid reliability in areas hard-hit by hurricanes Helene and Milton.Biden is expected to detail those resiliency efforts during a visit to St. Petersburg, Florida, which is recovering from back-to-back disasters.Taken together, the storms knocked out power for more than 8 million people in less than two weeks, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Ahead of Biden’s trip Sunday, the tracking website PowerOutage.us said more than one million people across the Southeast were still without electricity. The White House says a massive restoration effort is ongoing. “Fifty thousand power line workers from 43 states and the country of Canada have stepped up,” President Biden said on Friday. The Biden administration’s push to shore up the electric grid comes as disruptions are on the rise. The research group Climate Central says weather-related power outages have almost doubled in the last decade compared to the ten years prior. The $612 million investment Biden announced Sunday is part of the $10.5 billion dedicated to electric grid resiliency in the bipartisan infrastructure law, which passed in 2021. “We’ve already gotten the majority of that money out the door, 65 different projects all across the country to build more resiliently,” Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk said in an interview. Turk said those projects include replacing wooden electrical poles with concrete ones and burying overhead transmission lines underground. “We need to do a lot more of that and the storms are, unfortunately, only getting more intense,” Turk added.Without further action to improve the grid and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate change could increase the risk of hurricane-induced power outages in some places, according to projections from EPRI, an independent, non-profit energy R&D institute.”Some areas might see a doubling of the number of power outages experienced in a given decade in a future climate,” said Andrea Staid, principal technical leader for EPRI’s Energy Systems and Climate Analysis Group. In some metro areas, like Miami, Houston and Boston, EPRI’s models found the risk is even higher. “Most utilities understand they have growing risks from hurricanes. We hope this is just material that can be used to try to more systematically approach those risk,” Staid said.

    President Joe Biden announced $612 million on Sunday for six projects to improve electric grid reliability in areas hard-hit by hurricanes Helene and Milton.

    Biden is expected to detail those resiliency efforts during a visit to St. Petersburg, Florida, which is recovering from back-to-back disasters.

    Taken together, the storms knocked out power for more than 8 million people in less than two weeks, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Ahead of Biden’s trip Sunday, the tracking website PowerOutage.us said more than one million people across the Southeast were still without electricity.

    The White House says a massive restoration effort is ongoing.

    “Fifty thousand power line workers from 43 states and the country of Canada have stepped up,” President Biden said on Friday.

    The Biden administration’s push to shore up the electric grid comes as disruptions are on the rise. The research group Climate Central says weather-related power outages have almost doubled in the last decade compared to the ten years prior.

    The $612 million investment Biden announced Sunday is part of the $10.5 billion dedicated to electric grid resiliency in the bipartisan infrastructure law, which passed in 2021.

    “We’ve already gotten the majority of that money out the door, 65 different projects all across the country to build more resiliently,” Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk said in an interview.

    Turk said those projects include replacing wooden electrical poles with concrete ones and burying overhead transmission lines underground.

    “We need to do a lot more of that and the storms are, unfortunately, only getting more intense,” Turk added.

    Without further action to improve the grid and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate change could increase the risk of hurricane-induced power outages in some places, according to projections from EPRI, an independent, non-profit energy R&D institute.

    “Some areas might see a doubling of the number of power outages experienced in a given decade in a future climate,” said Andrea Staid, principal technical leader for EPRI’s Energy Systems and Climate Analysis Group.

    In some metro areas, like Miami, Houston and Boston, EPRI’s models found the risk is even higher.

    “Most utilities understand they have growing risks from hurricanes. We hope this is just material that can be used to try to more systematically approach those risk,” Staid said.

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  • What The Mid-Term Elections Mean For U.S. Energy

    What The Mid-Term Elections Mean For U.S. Energy

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    I’ve been waiting for election officials in the remaining outstanding congressional districts to determine winners before putting this piece together, in order to avoid needless speculation. However, given that officials in California and other states with close races still outstanding seem in no particular hurry to give up the media spotlight, time has run out on that goal.

    The first thing that is quite clear from the outcome which saw Democrats retain a narrow majority in the U.S. senate and flip at least two governor’s offices (possibly three, depending on the final outcome in Arizona) is that voters seem fine with the energy status quo in America. The conventional wisdom held that the high gasoline prices at the pump that have done so much damage to President Joe Biden’s public approval ratings would translate into Republican gains in congress, governorships and state legislatures. None of that materialized.

    Biden’s decision to pump hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to mitigate gas prices may have harmed America’s energy security, but the visual of his “doing something” to help gas consumers obviously helped Democrats at the ballot box. Similarly, while many energy and political observers chuckle at the Orwellian nature of the title chosen for Biden’s and Senator Joe Manchin’s green energy and social spending bill – the “Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – it is quite apparent that few voters had any similar reaction to that piece of legislation.

    Thus, regardless of which party ultimately ends up with a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, it would be unwise to expect any real change in the direction of domestic energy policy in the coming two years. When asked by reporters what he plans to change in the wake of the elections, Mr. Biden answered “nothing,” and he should be taken at his word.

    Given the inextricable interrelationship between energy and government policy, what this will mean for U.S. consumers is more of the same. Wind and solar power generation will continue to expand, and the pace of their expansion will accelerate thanks to the array of new incentives and subsidies contained in the IRA and last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).

    This expansion will happen regardless of rising instabilities on the nation’s power grids, as grid managers are forced to integrate and try to manage a rising percentage of intermittent energy into their daily mix. Warnings of increasing instability from grid managers like the one issued last week by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) will simply fall on deaf ears, as public officials continue to prioritize signaling their virtues about meeting climate change goals over the provision of affordable and reliable electricity to their constituents.

    “If nothing is done to mitigate the long-term risks within the Western Interconnection, by 2025 we anticipate severe risks to the reliability and security of the interconnection,” WECC said in its annual assessment. But policymakers concerned about their next re-election campaign look at the outcomes in these mid-term elections and simply advise the grid managers to deal with it as best they can.

    For the domestic oil and gas industry, these mid-terms almost certainly mean the President will feel more emboldened to act on his most aggressive impulses where their business sector is concerned. Expect a more concerted effort to implement a new Windfall Profit Tax, for example, especially should Democrats manage to retain a majority in the House.

    The White House said last week that the President would like to see some form of Senator Manchin’s vaunted permitting bill be included in the upcoming Defense Authorization Act. But oil and gas lobbyists should expect any such language to be significantly modified from the version seen in September to include strict sidebars that limit any benefit to oil and natural gas projects, especially any new pipelines. Biden has repeatedly made it crystal clear that he wants “no more drilling” – as he stated to a New York audience just last Saturday – and he has consistently shown that he should be taken at his word where such promises to restrict oil and gas are concerned.

    Should the GOP manage to somehow get to 218 seats in the House, then Biden would likely have to put his legislative agenda on hold through 2024. But that would provide scant comfort to producers of fossil fuels in the United States. The Biden regulatory agenda is already in full bloom, and the hundreds of billions in incentives and subsidies contained in the IRA and the BIL will work to ensure the great preponderance of energy-related capital continues to flow away from fossil fuels and into new green energy projects.

    Leaders and senior executives in coal, oil and natural gas have had to take on the thankless role of managing their industries’ decline for some years now, since at least 2009. The verdict of the voters in this year’s mid-term elections is that they can expect that decline to accelerate from here.

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    David Blackmon, Senior Contributor

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  • Utilities Beware: The Whole IoT Is At Risk From Itself

    Utilities Beware: The Whole IoT Is At Risk From Itself

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    Has the internet of things — the vast, interconnected, computer-centered ecosystem of today — reached a point where it is so complex, so multilayered, has so many architects, and has so many national interests embedded in it that it has become a threat to itself?

    Will the electric grid, the financial system or the air traffic control apparatus implode not by the hand of a malicious hacker but because the system — which is now systems of systems — has become the most subtle threat it faces?

    Worse, as the speed of telephony increases with 5G, will that speed up the system implosion with devastating consequences?

    Will this technological meltdown be triggered from within by a long-forgotten piece of code, a failed sensor or inferior products in vital, load-bearing points in this system?

    This kind of disaster from complexity is known as “emergent behavior.” Remember that concept. Likely, you will hear a lot about it going forward.

    Emergent behavior is what happens when various objects or substances come together and trigger a reaction which can’t be predicted, nor can the trigger be predetermined.

    Robert Gardner, founder and principal at New World Technology Systems and a National Security Agency consultant, tells me that the computer ecosystem is highly subject to emergent behavior in the so-called complex, adaptive system of systems which is today’s cyberworld. It is a world which has been built over time with new layers of complexity added willy-nilly as computing, and what has been asked of it, has become a huge, impregnable structure, beyond the reach of its present-day architects and minders, including cybersecurity aficionados.

    In At The Creation

    Gardner, to my mind, is worth listening to because he was, if you will, in at the beginning. At least, he was on hand and worked on the computer evolution, starting in the 1970s when he helped build the first supercomputers and has consulted with various national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. He has also played a key role in the development of today’s super-sophisticated financial computing infrastructure, known as “fintech.”

    Gardner says of emergent behaviors in complex systems, “They can’t be predicted by examining individual components of a system as they are produced by the system as a whole — facilitating a perfect storm that conspires to produce catastrophe.”

    Complexity is the new adversary, he says of these huge, virtual systems of systems.

    Gardner adds, “The complexity adversary does not require outside assistance; it can be summoned by minor user, environmental or equipment failures, or timing instabilities in the ordinary operation of a system.

    “Current threat detection software does not seek or detect these system conditions, leaving them highly vulnerable.”

    Gardner cites two examples where the system failed itself. The first example is when a tree branch which fell on a power line in Ohio set in motion a blackout across the Michigan, New York, and Canada. The system became the problem: It went berserk, and 50 million people lost power.

    The second example is how something called “counterparty risk” sped the demise of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street colossus. That was when a single default embedded in the system initiated the implosion of the whole structure.

    No Nefarious Actors

    Of these, Gardner says, “There were no nefarious actors to defend against; the complex, heterogeneous nature of the systems themselves led to emergent behaviors.”

    Going forward, the best practices in cyber hygiene won’t defend against catastrophe. The entwined systems are their own enemy. Utilities take note.

    And the danger may get worse, according to Gardner.

    The villain is 5G: the super-fast phone and data system now being deployed across the country. It will come in what are called “slices,” but for that you can read stages.

    · Slice one is what is being built out now: It is faster than today’s 4G, which is what phones and data use currently. It features mobile broadband.

    · Slice two, called “machine to machine,” is faster yet.

    · Slice three will move vast quantities of data at astounding speeds which, if the data is damaging to the system and has occurred at an unidentifiable location, represents a threat to a whole tranche of human activity.

    Self-destroying machines will be unstoppable when they have 5G slice three to speed bad information throughout their system and connected systems. Tech Armageddon.

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    Llewellyn King, Contributor

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