Lesson of the Winter Power Collapse

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks Barbara
Sugg who is the President and CEO of the Southwest Power Pool
(SPP). The discussion focuses on February’s extreme cold weather
event that knocked out power in parts of Texas and impacted some
of SPP’s operations. 


“The issues that Southwest Power Pool had were similar to that in
ERCOT in the case that we had more load than we could supply
energy for, but it wasn’t nearly as significant as what happened
in ERCOT,” said Sugg.


Ms. Sugg will explain the key difference that allowed SPP to
minimize the impact compared to Texas utilities and what should
be done to prepare for similar weather situations in the future.


“We would be naive to think that won’t happen again, and so we
have to focus on that, and we’ve got to really shift our mindset
to looking at what the projections are for the future.”


Finally, she addresses cyber security threats to the power
system.


“It is definitely very much still our number one corporate
threat.”   


Barbara Sugg became President and CEO of SPP in April of 2020.
Ms. Sugg has 30 years of IT experience in the electric utility
industry. She joined SPP in 1997 as a senior IT specialist,
focused on application development and maintenance for computer
systems in support of tariff administration, reliability
coordination and regional energy scheduling. She has been a
member of the SPP management team since 1999 and became vice
president of information technology in 2010 and chief security
officer in 2016.


Ms. Sugg earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from
the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1986 and completed
the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in
2013.