ENMAX: Powering Up for the Future
This week our guest is Jana Mosley, President of ENMAX Power. Headquartered in Calgary with operations across Alberta and Maine, ENMAX Corporation is a leading provider of electricity services, products and solutions. Jana is responsible for ENMAX’s regulated transmission and distribution business in Calgary. She also directs ENMAX’s power infrastructure, engineering and maintenance services.
Here are some of the questions Jackie and Peter asked Jana: Why did ENMAX purchase the business in Maine? What is ENMAX doing to help customers with affordability and adoption of clean energy? Is net-zero electricity possible by 2035 for ENMAX? What are you doing to prepare for a growing number of electric vehicles (EVs), trucks and medium duty fleet vehicles? Besides EVs do you expect other electricity load growth? Will Calgarians be able to use their EVs in their homes for battery back-up and for sending electricity back to the grid? Do you expect that there will be a need to build new wires and equipment to people’s homes to support EVs and other load growth?
Content referenced in this podcast:
- Jackie’s tweet about the peak energy load in Alberta for natural gas and electricity using ATCO data: https://twitter.com/JackieForrest/status/1605331565151924224
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Episode 191 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest. Exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian. Welcome back. I guess the budget came out here a few days ago.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, that’s right. Making a lot of news, and it’s kind of similar to our outlook for revenues from the oil and gas industry, not surprisingly, because the budget in Alberta, such a big part of it’s coming from the resource revenue, and that’s the real variable part. But they’re saying that the money that’s coming from the natural resources sector’s going to be down quite a bit. Was 27 and a half billion they’re estimating for the fiscal year that’s just ending, and next year they’re thinking it’s going to be closer to 18.4, which seems like a big drop. It is a big drop, but still, a very big number, 18.4 billion, if that does come to be this year would be the second highest.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s a big drop for sure from 27 to 18. First of all, just so our audience knows, the fiscal year in the province of Alberta ends on March 31st. So we’re talking sort of a March-to-March cycle. And from March to March last year, of course, the price of the commodities as a consequence of the war in Ukraine was very elevated, both for oil and natural gas. Sort of come back since and expect it to be much more moderate. But still, I mean, let’s put this in context. If you look at the period, say between 2014, and 2015, all the way to and through the pandemic, the resource revenues were between three and five billion dollars in a fiscal year. And now we’re disappointed if it falls from 27 to 18. I mean, these are still huge numbers. And by our calculations, given that a lot of these oil sands projects have paid out the steady state level of royalty revenues, assuming even 60 to 65 barrels of oil is still well above 10 billion per year. So still, these numbers are very robust.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Well, and they do assume $80 oil, but like you’re saying, if prices go down, because now some of the projects are paying more in royalties than they used to. There’s going to be more money there. Now, because there’s less resource revenue, there’s a much smaller surplus this year. I think they’re estimating only 2.4 billion versus 10 billion in the year that’s just ending. So that natural resources money is all being spent pretty much.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right, right. Well, that’s sort of the … In economics, the consumption function, the more you make, the more you spend. So it’s a pretty linear relationship. But anyway, that’s talking about resource revenues, oil, and gas. And today, we are going to talk about electricity again because it’s so topical as we think about electrification going forward and a significant part of our utility bills. So, I can’t think of anyone better to ask to come on our podcast than the president of ENMAX Power, Jana Mosley. Welcome, Jana.
Jana Mosley:
Thanks for having me.
Jackie Forrest:
All right, Jana, well, maybe you could talk a little bit about ENMAX’s business and ownership as well as your role at ENMAX.
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, absolutely. So, ENMAX is a leading provider of electricity services products and solutions. We have operations in Alberta and the state of Maine, and we are focused on delivering safe, reliable electricity and also trying to advance innovative projects and making sure that we are operating safely and reliably for all of our customers. We pay our dividends to our shareholder, the City of Calgary, on an annual basis, and we have three different business areas. ENMAX, the T&D business that I run. We have ENMAX Energy, which is our generation business, and we retail electricity across the whole province. And then Versant Power is our transmission distribution utility in the state of Maine.
Peter Tertzakian:
Can you maybe just for our audience to give us a sense of how you came to be in the position that you’re in, the president of ENMAX Power?
Jana Mosley:
Oh, sure. I’ve been fortunate to have a blessed career in Alberta. I used to work for TransAlta and AltaLink after that as the independent system operator that plans the transmission systems across the province. And I’ve been at ENMAX now for eight years doing various roles from capital planning, asset management, leading field services, engineering projects, and now have the privilege of leading the entire team here at ENMAX Power in Calgary.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, we’re going to get to all the challenges that come with electrification and the potential for a lot more load, but before … I think a lot of our listeners probably didn’t know about this Maine business that you have. So I guess ENMAX purchased in 2020 for $1.4 billion this distribution utility in Maine. Why did you purchase that business and what has been the reaction from the City of Calgary and its shareholders?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Part of our shareholder value proposition is to grow the dividend for the citizens of Calgary and our shareholders. So this is reflective of our long-term growth strategy, this acquisition. There’s only so much growth that we can make happen within our current territory. A lot of it is organic growth for our shareholders. And so if we want to grow in a more major way, we needed to diversify geographically and look at places where we could generate a higher rate of return.
Peter Tertzakian:
So is there some regulation … I want to talk about the jurisdiction in which you are allowed to operate within Alberta. Is there some provincial regulation that says ENMAX cannot grow beyond some geographic boundaries, say Southern Alberta? Is that how it works?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, so for the transmission and distribution business ENMAX Power, we have a specific territory that is our jurisdiction to operate in just as AltaLink or Fortis Alberta, or ATCO. And so that is our limits are the city of Calgary, 14D. Yeah.
Peter Tertzakian:
And so organic growth, the term that you used means population growth, GDP growth, and the electricity that supplies that. So to grow the dividend beyond organic growth, we have to go outside of Canada.
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, we have to look at other areas. Within Canada, we have a lot of Crown Corp organizations where you can’t go in and purchase and grow that way. So you have to look at areas where you can get into more of a competitive market. And Alberta has one of the lowest return on equity formulas here in North America, so looking beyond Alberta is important from that perspective.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s switch a little bit to Calgary now. Our new mayor has got some pretty aggressive goals in terms of clean energy and wanting Calgary to become a cleaner place in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. And what is ENMAX doing to help with that? Are you encouraging people to put in solar? Are you putting more EV charging points in? I think there are not enough points in the city for fast charging at least. So just tell us a little bit about what you’re doing to help reduce emissions and electrify more in the city.
Jana Mosley:
Yeah. I mean, it’s very important to us to support our customers and help them meet their sustainability goals, and to partner with the city on their vision for Calgary. So in addition to operating wind facilities, which we own, we also have led customer solar installations across the province and we offer energy efficiency tools to customers as well. So we have a residential solar program in our energy business, and we are enabling charging stations across the city as well as home charging. And we’ve been doing several pilot projects in that area to figure out how can we maximize the use of the existing grid as we enable electrification.
Jackie Forrest:
Do you have any plans to put more fast charging in the city?
Jana Mosley:
You know, we’re watching this pretty closely. We’ve done … I think you guys … You had a podcast on it recently actually, about some of the smart charging pilots that are going on in the province. And we certainly have been leading the way in that space. And so we’re really working with the city around their plans and we have been enabling DC fast charging in various areas according to their plans and then working with customers just in their homes because that is still where the majority of charging happens and looking at how we can perhaps influence that to minimize the investment that’s needed on the grid to enable this.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, let’s ask the question. Are we ahead or behind the state of Maine in electric charging stations?
Jana Mosley:
That’s a really good question. I would say from a charging perspective, we’re actually doing fairly well, even though Alberta is generally a bit slower than some of the other provinces that we see here in Canada. But we’ve got about 3000 electric vehicles on the roads here in Calgary, and we expect that to climb to 200,000 by 2035. I’d say where Maine we’re seeing them evolve quicker is more around the micro generation. And so when you look at distributed gen, they’ve got some neat programs in that space and things are taking off there.
Peter Tertzakian:
You mean like, just for our audience, like micro gen, distributed gen, that’s more generation close to the community or the district in which the consumers are located.
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, and connected at a lower voltage level than something on a larger transmission system.
Peter Tertzakian:
Mm-hmm.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s get to that because that’s a little bit like having your home solar and having your batteries in your home as well. But before we get to that topic, let’s talk about the affordability of electricity. Electricity prices have really gone higher. In December, they were 22 cents per kilowatt hour, about three times higher than the first part of 2021. But the province came out with some news that they were going to fix the price at 13.50 cents per kilowatt hour. And you can see that now on the prices that are put forward. Now, my understanding is that this cap is not like the government is paying the difference, but instead, the difference is there’s a debit being created and that at some point, consumers are going to have to pay that, I guess, loan off. Is that right?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah. So first of all, I would say we certainly support any measure that’s going to help Albertans with their energy costs. This is a provincial initiative that you’re speaking about and it is intended to be a short-term measure for those who aren’t on a fixed-rate plan. So people talk about the RRO, the regulated rate option. That’s what this is about. And so our understanding is this ceiling will be in place until the end of March, and then at that time, the difference between whatever the rate ceiling is and the actual cost of electricity is going to be collected from the customers that are on this regulated rate option over the rest of the year. So we’re still waiting on details from the government of Alberta because this is a government program.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, so in financial parlance, it’s a little bit like a fixed-price swap, right? You get it capped or set at 13 and a half and if it falls below 13 and a half in the future, the customer’s still going to have to pay 13 and a half to pay back what they effectively borrowed when it was higher than 13 and a half.
Jana Mosley:
You know, it could be that. We’re waiting to see what the government comes out with. I mean, this is such an important priority for our government’s affordability and for us as a service provider. So we continue to partner with them on what the best options are so that everybody can afford safe and reliable electricity because we certainly need it here in Alberta.
Jackie Forrest:
When prices were kind of ramping up at the end of the year, do you see that some of your customers do have issues with affordability and is there anything that you can do to help them?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, this is important for us as an organization. So, our ENMAX energy business started reaching out proactively to customers when we saw market rates were going to start to go up in 2021, making them aware of what different options are. And since then we’ve sent, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of letters and emails to customers about shifting them to our website to help them reach out to our customer care team to see what we can do to help them with their plans. Following this, we had about 75% of our customers who were on this regulated rate option in our service territory in Calgary, but they are now on a retail contract. So that’s a much better option for them in terms of controlling their costs. And then we also have done a pilot recently where we took residential customers and we did not disconnect them for non-payment. Instead, we did this with customers who were in arrears, as we placed them on a load limiter so that we were able to keep power flowing while they worked out a payment plan. So this is important to us and we’ve been partnering with the regulator around that as well.
Jackie Forrest:
So, the government is going to come out with this clean electricity standard. I think it’s overdue. I don’t know exactly when we’re going to see it, but soon this year for sure. Do you think it’s doable that ENMAX achieves net zero electricity by 2035, which is what the government’s asking at the federal level?
Jana Mosley:
You know, I think that we’re seeing technology evolve very quickly. We’re partnering and learning from other organizations and what they’re doing, and I think it’s our commitment certainly to try to reach those goals, enabling the technologies that are out there, leveraging supply chain, and also being attuned to that and the impacts that might come in there, and watching cost and working with governments around are these the right targets. But yeah, it is certainly our goal to help the government reach its goal. So, something that we’re excited about.
Jackie Forrest:
All right, Jana. Well, as you said, Blake Shaffer joined our podcast at the end of January and told us more about ENMAX’s pilot to understand how these financial incentives could drive people to charge at different times. And that three cents per kilowatt hour incentive did get people to change their behavior and charge at night whereas no incentive didn’t affect people at all. So I guess my first question is, you talked about, I think 3000 cars in Calgary with so few cars. Why did you decide to do this pilot now and did the results surprise you?
Jana Mosley:
Well, first of all, it’s our job to be ready. We need to be ahead of the game here, and when you look at vehicle electric vehicle adoption across North America, we certainly see things moving in this direction. In every projection that we’ve seen, we tend to have exceeded whatever that forecast was when you look at actual. So we’re taking this very seriously and we want to make sure that our customers are able to adopt the technologies that they want to adopt when they want to adopt them. So that’s why now because we need to stay ahead of it. In terms of surprises, I think that we were encouraged that we were able to influence charging behavior because we’re all about figuring out how we maximize the existing grid. And we’ve all invested in that grid, so how do we make the most use of it as possible and limit other types of investment we might need to do? So I’d say we were quite encouraged, and we’re just following up with those participants now.
And the other thing I think that surprised us is just how little people needed to charge. So they’re coming home, they’re plugging in. We expected that, but a lot of customers, they’re only actually drawing a charge for those first two hours because they’re just topping up. So it’s not like people need to draw electricity all night. It’s not even like people need these DC fast chargers in their homes because a level two charger seems to be adequate for the majority of EV users.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s interesting. The suburban user like me wired up the charge port in a garage plugin just like I plug in my phone and just let it charge. And it’s done … Honestly, probably in the entire time I’ve driven an electric vehicle within Calgary, I’ve probably charged once at a charging station. But it’s a bigger issue for inner-city users living in condos and places like that. I mean, I can’t see entire inner city high-density complexes being retrofitted. Now, some would argue, well, they don’t need to be retrofitted because people have vehicles right now and they go to a gas station to fill up. And I guess that’s my follow-on question are you sort of teaming up with existing gas stations or parking lots closer to the inner city so somebody who lives in an apartment or a condo can always get a charge?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, so certainly the city of Calgary has some neat plans around this with their electrification goals. And so we are looking at those congregating spaces downtown. A parking garage is a perfect example. Malls, shopping centers, grocery stores, those things where we go and spend some time. So how could you enable that? It’s going to be interesting to watch what the typical gas station does do we get to that place where they’ve changed out and you’re just pulling in and you’re doing a DC fast charge instead? Certainly, we’re in conversations with organizations about that. A lot’s happening with technology yet. I mean, so now some people are saying it’s really hard on the battery to do DC fast charging and really changes the lifespan of your battery. So I think we’re just going to continue to watch this because you don’t want to go build out something that then if the technology doesn’t keep up and people aren’t actually willing to fast charge like that at say a charging station, we don’t want to invest where we shouldn’t have invested either. So we’ve got to just continue to collaborate with what the technologies are telling us.
Jackie Forrest:
You know, one interesting thing, you talked about the fact that each day people don’t need that much. And Blake talked about the fact that some people can make it just with the existing … 110-volt plugin that might already exist in their parkade, they can top up a lot of what they lose each day. So that’s interesting. To me, if you had fast charge points, which don’t exist in the inner city right now in Calgary, you could go there once every two weeks or something, but maybe for a lot of your commuting, you could just use the existing plugin that exists in a lot of parking lots today to kind of top up at the 110 or level one charging.
Peter Tertzakian:
I’m just going to have to be adaptable to these studies because I just want to sort of get back to this notion of top-up and the topping-up of vehicles for the first 3000 that we have here in Calgary and most of these vehicles are passenger sedans, mid-size like the model 3, the model Y, those kinds of vehicles. For the next 3000, the trend is for substantially bigger vehicles like the F-150s to the extreme like the Hummers and so on. I mean, it’s just sort of a natural progression and expansion and we know people have a tendency to buy bigger and bigger vehicles, so the load for charging bigger vehicles is proportional to the weight of the vehicles and everything else. So I see that … I mean, the load is actually not going to double with the next 3000 vehicles. It’s going to be even bigger and bigger, isn’t it?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, you’ve got it. I mean, we’re doing a medium-duty fleet pilot right now and we’re excited about the forecasted savings. I think we’re estimating something like 4,300 liters of diesel per vehicle every year. Right? That’s what we spend. And so-
Peter Tertzakian:
This is an ENMAX fleet.
Jana Mosley:
Absolutely. So if you think that happening in all sorts of different operations as well across the city, what is that going to do? And it will drastically reduce the carbon footprint, but also everybody’s operating costs. So we’re quite excited about that. We still have to battle the weather here. And so even with these F-150s, I know a few people who’ve got the Lightnings on order and we’ve been talking to a few folks, and we’ve got a couple of them in our fleet too, just checking them out. And the temperature outside is still a bit of a challenge in the winter. So …
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. But talk about the substantially more amount of energy that’s required to move an F-150 or even a delivery truck and so on, because the fleets are probably going to electrify much faster going forward. And do you, ENMAX, have the ability to charge a whole bunch of fleets plugging in all at the same time during the day?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, so we’re piloting this at our own shop right now and we have converted a bunch of our bays to be able to charge multiple medium-duty vehicles. One of the things that I’d add is that, and we’ve been encouraged with different manufacturers, is being able to partner on even changing what those vehicles look like. What do you really need inside? How do you make them lighter so that you can still actually get out there and do the job? So it’s going to take innovation on both sides, but hey, it’s our job to make sure that people are able to plug in and charge, and if you want to convert a whole neighborhood, we need to be ready for that. So that’s why we’re doing the pilots we do and we’re going to stay ahead of it.
Jackie Forrest:
You mentioned something. It’s a challenge when it’s cold. What did you mean by that?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, so just the battery charge in these vehicles, as you guys would be very familiar when in cold temperatures it just sucks the battery life out at such an astronomically faster pace. And so your range is very, very limited. And so that’s something that we’re noticing with even our field crews. There’s some hesitancy on the cold days to take the electric fleet out because they don’t want to get stuck somewhere. But we keep encouraging them, we got to test the range, we got to be practicing with this and understanding it.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. So my experience has been like we just had that period of minus 30 or something, that the range is cut in half on those types of days because so much of the energy is not going to the wheels; it’s going to heat the cab. Well, you talked about the F-150s. I do have a question about that. One thing that’s unique about the F-150 is that it allows bidirectional charging so that we can store power may be off my solar panels during the day and maybe at one point we’ll have pricing that would motivate me to want to send that back to the grid or maybe even just use that within my home if there is a power outage. I was told that we are not allowed to do that. We can’t have these batteries in our house that would enable us to have energy security at our home if there’s a power outage. Is that the case?
Jana Mosley:
I wouldn’t say that, no. I mean, technically speaking, any home in Calgary that registers as a microgenerator is capable of exporting to the grid just in the same way that a home with solar panels can export to the grid. So as long as you have a bidirectional charger, say like the new Lightnings, then that’s capable of exporting power from your vehicle back into your panel, then you’re able to make use of this technology. We have an exceptionally reliable system here in Calgary, so it’s unlikely that customers in our service territories are going to need to rely on their vehicle for reliability, but at the same time, this is certainly … vehicle to the grid is something that’s very exciting and we’re piloting that and we’re looking at what are the benefits to the grid and how can we share those benefits perhaps collectively in a community or across all customers. Again, this is all about maximizing the energy that’s out there and the grid that’s out there today. So this is exciting stuff and we’re looking forward to watching how this technology emerges and looking for opportunities for our customers.
Peter Tertzakian:
Okay, well, that’s vehicles. Let’s talk about the electrification of appliances for heating all the way from cooktop stoves to heating.
Jackie Forrest:
Like heat pumps.
Peter Tertzakian:
Heat pumps or radiative heating. I mean, that’s another substantial shift in electrical load demand, going away from thermal combustion heating to thermal electric heating, whether it’s for cooking or heating my house. So how do you see that playing out?
Jana Mosley:
Yeah. I mean, we really see first and foremost it’s going to be vehicles if you’re looking at the trends. So as we look out to the next 15 years or so, we’re focused on making sure we can enable the electric vehicle adoption. But you’re right. As you look further out, what is going to happen around how we heat our homes and what does that mean in terms of the services that we need to provide? And we do see heat pumps being part of that future, even here in Calgary. It’s challenging in cold weather, so watching what happens with that, but I do see that that’s going to be something that is viable here.
Peter Tertzakian:
Let’s talk about those challenges because they’re important. At the extremes, heat pumps don’t really work all that efficiently. Extremes mean high heat or extreme colds. And so how are we to think about the challenges? Well, let’s just talk about heating when it’s minus 25 or minus 30 out there. And we’re going to have to presumably either do that in a traditional way or just suck up a lot more power during these periods. And the question then is, well, do we have that kind of instantaneous power available to the homes and factories that are in your jurisdiction?
Jana Mosley:
This is something that across the province of Alberta, the Alberta electric system operator certainly is planning for, always doing a long-term outlook, working with the different resource suppliers and the wires providers. So this is iterative, I would say. It’s our job to stay ahead of it, as I mentioned before collectively for customers, but there are challenges. You can see that we’ve got some new generation that’s going to be coming on in the next couple of years in our province and we think that’s going to really help with power prices in terms of the wires itself and delivery to some of these new technologies. It’s really important that we learn from others. So BC Hydro for example is doing quite a large pilot with heat pumps and I was chatting with one of their leaders recently and just leveraging some of that information. And then relating that to our weather system, which is different than Vancouver, and which is why I think we do have some time in this space to figure out what home heating might look like as we shift here. Alberta’s unique just because of our reliance on natural gas as our natural resource that’s available to us compared to say water in another province like Quebec or Manitoba, for example.
Jackie Forrest:
I’m going to put a link to the show notes to a tweet I did during our cold spell in December, and it was data that ATCO had put together with the peak use of electricity in the province compared to the peak energy that comes from natural gas and it’s something like five or six times higher because of course on those very cold days, we use so much energy for heating. And it’s only for maybe a handful of days a year, but that’s the real challenge of electrifying heating if the peak is so high.
Peter Tertzakian:
You know, if we think about electrification going forward, one of the things is not necessarily the emission type of pollution, but the visual pollution of wires all over the place. I’ve actually noticed around Calgary, a lot of neighborhoods, don’t have those overhead wires. Is that something conscious scenario design? Because you go to other cities and there are just wires all over the place.
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, I mean, we’re fortunate to be a bit of a newer city compared to others across the country. Almost 70% of our system is underground, and so with that comes a much higher level of reliability because you don’t have the weather impacts causing outages and things like that or animal contacts, which is where you see the majority of outages from overhead. So that is one of the reasons why Calgarians enjoy such a high level of reliability here.
Jackie Forrest:
I do want to ask one more question before we wrap up. We talked about the fact that we’re going to see more electric cars, and fleet vehicles, which is something maybe people aren’t considering the demand that will come from those and that may happen in short order, as well as the potential for maybe not all heating, but more heating is definitely going to come. Do you foresee that we’re going to have to start adding more wires to people’s homes to support all this and how difficult is that to do? My perception is that would be very difficult. Are there other solutions to that? Because I think there are probably some limits we learned on Blake’s podcast. There may be limits if five or six people on the same block want to charge their electric car at the same time. The existing infrastructure wouldn’t support that.
Peter Tertzakian:
In minus 30.
Jana Mosley:
Yes. Yeah, no, it’s an important question and it’s part of why we’re doing all the different pilots that we are doing. I mean, it is going to take all the tools and the toolkit to adopt these different technologies to hit clean energy goals. We’re going to need to continue to innovate, and that’s why you see us doing the projects that we’re doing today. We also really need to look at non-wires solutions or alternatives. And what I mean by that are some of the things that you guys talked about today around the vehicle to grid, a home battery system, looking a little bit more at that micro situation instead of macro from a grid perspective and how do we actually communicate in some ways how we’re transferring electricity. This is exciting stuff and I do think non-wire solutions are going to be a big part of what this looks like. That said, there will be some traditional wires investments that are required. We do have an aging system and we’re going to need to continue to make sure that at the core, the hubs, we’re making sure that we can continue to provide the service that we do today.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Well, maybe [inaudible 00:28:14] sort of wrap up, but the challenges are pretty big going forward, and I think the customers want to be assured that as we electrify more and more going forward, and as Jackie said, more and more people buy electric vehicles and what, the circuit breakers aren’t going to blow when you get home because we’re in a society where there’s not a lot of tolerance for power outages. When I grew up as a kid, I don’t want to say how many years ago, but power outages were kind of routine when I grew up, but now when the lights go out, you go, “What the heck’s going on?” We’re not in a very tolerant society for circuit breakers blowing and being out. What is ENMAX doing in terms of thinking about or modeling out potential problems?
Jana Mosley:
Oh, we consistently do forecasts and models looking out at all of these different scenarios, like I mentioned, partnering with the Alberta electric system operator on that as well. Then we have to apply some judgment to what we think is reasonable because you also can’t go out and just overinvest and then have it sit there for 10, 15 years, and the customers of today are paying for something that we aren’t even using. So, it is a balancing act, but it’s the business that we’re in. We’ve been doing this for years and what’s happening now is technology’s changing. And so, the capabilities of our team need to change with that and is, and our partnership with customers and with the city and other technology providers is really important and a different place that we’re investing our time so that we can do this together. I think we all know that advancing in this energy transition, advancing electrification, and meeting some of these targets is going to take all of us working together and learning from each other and perhaps even adjusting some behaviors as we talked about so that we can do this in as an affordable way as possible.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, Jana, thank you so much for explaining. There’s an opportunity here, but there’s also a challenge and it’s great to see that you’re doing all this work early on to understand the challenge. So, with that, we really thank you for joining our podcast.
Jana Mosley:
Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me.
Jackie Forrest:
And thank you to our listeners. If you like this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
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