InFocus featuring Westfield Gas & Electric General Manager Tom Flaherty

from the 22 News plus studio. [Music] This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Barry. Hello everyone and welcome to today's edition of In Focus. I am your host Patrick Barry and today we're going to have a fascinating conversation about powering your home. We're here in the 22 News Plus studio with Thomas Flity. He is the general manager of the Westfield Gas and Electric Light Department and Whip City Fiber. And we're going to talk today about how the electricity goes from point A to the outlets in your home. Tom, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Oh, no problem, Patrick. Happy to be here. This sounds like a very boring conversation. But you But you and I are here to make it exciting. And and it is one of those things nobody thinks about. You know, I plug my phone into the wall to charge my cell phone, but I don't understand how that happens. You know, other than, you know, as a kid sticking a fork in there, getting zapped, and my mother telling me, "That's why we told you not to do that." Yeah. It's a cool process, but, you know, when you when you don't think about it until you don't have it, right? Until you have an outage and or uh or you're impacted in some way. So, how does how does power get generated? Maybe it's not just in Westfield, but just generally how is how is power generated? So there's a variety of power sources, right? You have, you know, the popular ones, nuclear, natural gas fired, oil fired. Um you then also have the new ones like when you look at the solar panels that you see, you know, the easiest ones are down, you know, as you're driving down the highway. And then you also see uh wind, you know, if you go up to uh what used to be Brody Mountain or Jimny Peak, you have quite a few uh wind turbines up there. Um and now you have the you know somewhat whatever controversial however however you want to go about it you know with the offshore wind offshore wind was really going to be a lifesaver for Massachusetts to reach their environmental you know non energy or non-emitting energy uh goals and now through the current presidential administration some you know some or a lot of that has been put on hold and might be put on hold and set you know have setbacks that are 7 to 10 years and it's a mass Massachusetts and I guess I would say all coastal states probably would benefit from offshore just because of the natural wind flow across water, right? You do have that and if you look at Cape Cod for example, there were um you know if you go to like Woods Hole uh Falmouth area uh there was a couple turbons there that you know got put up but there was uh there was side effects to it, right? There was a a whooing noise. So as the as the blades turned you know for lack of white noise helps you sleep. Yeah, I would I would think so too. But um you know the the people in those areas uh stopped it and they actually shut it down after it was it was built and running. You know and if you look at you know people in you know Nucket or Martha's Vineyard that you know their their vista is going to get ruined. You know they want green energy. They want nanomic generation but they don't want to see the little the little Yeah. Uh bananas build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. Exactly. Right. So you you have, you know, everybody wants electricity when you want it. Uh when you don't have it, you want it more and you you're angry about it or your inconvenience. But when when you look at um you know where I come from, I try to come from a common sense standpoint and my friends might think, you know, Tom Flity and Common Sense don't relate together. Um, but you need a diverse fuel mix to have reality here in in and especially in New England. So I So we have these options. So you've got um wind, you've got coal, you've got all these coal is very minimal. So we're down in in New England down to one coal plant that's in in New Hampshire and they're actually in the process of winding down. So coal is going away. Natural gas. Natural gas is the primary. So natural gas today, you know, as I was, you know, chitchatting with you earlier is that 70% uh of the generation mix right now in New England is natural gas. So how do these forms and let's take gas for example, how do you turn a gas into charging my cell phone? Yeah. So um a a lot of it it's it's simple in simple theory, right? So he says he does it every day. I don't do it. I just I just try to talk about it, you know. uh my my you've got people my strength yeah I've got people my my strength is actually procuring uh procuring power in natural gas uh commodities for for the Westfield gas and electric right so that was one of the huge value or the larger values that I brought to the to the department but with you know with natural gas typically you're you're creating steam that's going to um then you know power a turbine that's going to spin and you know you have magnets involved and you take that you know that generates the electricity then that's then put brought out to uh an on-site substation. So then that um uh within that substation there's transformers that uh transfer it to 115 KVA or 345 KVA. That means nothing to you. But when you go out the door and you see the transmission lines, you know, there's fresh 345 KV transmission lines which are which are a lot of power, right? Don't touch it. Um, but that's what's uh bringing the power out to the investor owned utilities or the municipal utilities like Westfield and then it comes down to a substation where then it's put to a distribution level. So in Westfield we have 23 KV uh primary transmission or distribution lines that go through Westfield and then those go through a transformer which you know to describe those those are the cans on the pole right and um and that's all like bringing it from major power all the way down to your household which is you know the grid um yeah so you have 220 which is two lines two two uh 2110 or two 120 lines that are in your house. So the 220 will, you know, will power your your electric dryer or your electric hot water heater or your electric stove. Um, but most of your power in your house is going to be 110 120 um voltage. That's that's your uh standard outlet. So there's a lot of technical aspects of getting it from from the wind turbine or the the hydro machine. Yeah. Anywhere down to down to your own particular home, right? So and and you kind of went through it. you you start with like the bigger picture of you know the power comes into you know the big Westfield Genie plant or wherever it might be and then it's kind of paired down paired down paired down till it till it reaches your home. Yeah. So the simple thing here for for Westfield is we have two substations. We have the Elm sub which is at the corner of Elm Street and and Meadow Street right by the uh the Great River Bridges and then we also up on the north side we have our Buck Pond substation. So, uh, both of those are fed by 115 KV lines that are coming in from that are owned by Eversource. Eversource is transmission, uh, company. And so, we take that power off if something so they're fed by different circuits. So, if a transmission line goes down, which is, you know, would be a catastrophic fault, we're able to serve uh from the other substation because power will still uh continue to flow. And then we'll repower back up. If it's an extremely hot day in the summertime, we're going to have to make some some choices at that point whether or not we're going to go into brown brownouts or or how we're going to run those circuits. Well, folks, we hope you're on the edge of your seat talking about electricity. This is fascinating to me, but we need to take a commercial break. We'll be right back after this. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Barry. [Music] This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Barry. [Music] Welcome back to today's edition of In Focus. We're here in the 22 News Plus studio. I've got Tom Flity, general manager of uh Westfield Gas and Electric Light Department and Whip City Fiber sitting across the desk from me. We're having the riveting conversation about how power gets from the various sources uh into your home. Uh in the first uh portion, Tom, you talked about New England and that you know the sources that that generate power, you know, the Cape Cod or wherever it might be. Westfield is a municipal utility. So Westfield doesn't have its own wind farms or hydro plants or nuclear plants or so. Westfield gets it from all these other places. We get it from all these other places. So we actually own a small percentage of Milstone 3 and we own a small percentage of Seabbrook. So right now there's three uh nuclear generating plants in New England. So there's Milstone 2, unit 2 and Milstone unit 3 and then there's also Seabbrook. So those are the three nuclear generators right now. Over the past 10 years or more now, Pilgrim, which was down in Plymouth, that uh that was shut down. And that was um you know there was people beating the drums to get it closed down and everybody was celebrating up in Vermont um Vermont Yankee which is in Vernon up on the Connecticut River uh that was owned by Energy. They won a fight with with um Vermont to stay open. And then they said, "Okay, we won. Now we're going to shut it down." So um so that that was huge for for New England. losing those two major power plants and what was coming online was um overwhelmingly natural gas. Over the last 30 years, natural gas has come online. It's replaced like Mount Tom Station as you go up 91. That would used to be a uh about maybe 170 megawatt uh coal fire generation plant. So, that one got shut down. It was part of the Sudi7 and the Filthy Five, you know, back in the in the '90s. And you said earlier coal is virtually non-existent. Coal is is close to non-existent. You'll see on on uh on today's piece, yeah, there was no no coal, but it was also less than less than 1% of today's energy mix was was oil as well. So, Oh, interesting. But you you need oil. You know, when we look at this past January and February, we had a number of days where um natural gas prices escalated and also the the demand, the big suck in the in the gas pipeline um was uh was going towards heat. So heating residential or heating, you know, commercial facilities and and in the summertime air conditioning, right? But it's not as not as necessary, you know, when you look at the heating and the cold is necessary. So um we got up to 25 to 30% oil fire generation making up that New England mix. The other thing that we've run into, you know, especially right now this summer and and last summer was we're in drought conditions, right? So there's, you know, typically a huge amount of power coming down from Canada and Hydro Quebec. Um so most of this year the phase 2 line, so there's two phases that come into um the northern New England uh from Hydro Quebec, uh the phase 2 line has has really not been transporting power into into New England. So it's that's been something and we've actually been exporting up to Canada because the drought is when you get up to Maine and Canada much more severe than it is here in Western Mass. There's a lot of talk about green produced energy. You know, we talked a little bit about windmills. Is solar an element of how local communities get power? Yeah. So solar is um but you know for when you look at solar or wind uh solar for New England, you know, when when you look at that desert southwest, it's great. Yeah, New England probably not so much. So, it's 13 to 15% efficient. And and what does what does efficient mean? It means it only runs 13 to 15% of the time in New England. So, if you want to do simple math, 50% of the time would be only operating during the daytime, right? So, day daytime, nighttime. And then when you break down days like today where um cloudy you know for now it's cloudy and rainy and so now that brings solar down to um you know 1% or less than 1% of the of the energy mix. Interesting. And you know on a on a good day it might get up to seven or 8% of the energy mix. You know if it's a bright sunny day like we've gone through for the past month. So, so you have to have that mix of different sources because but then if you're getting an abundance of solar, which we are in New England because there's there are federal tax credits and there's incentives, there's solar wrecks, you know, renewable energy credits that you can sell or you can retire. Most people sell them because there's a value to them. Um, but you can you can go out and do that. But now what we're seeing is is when you see peak power, what's peak power? is what time of day is the actual peak happening of demand? And that's going to be your, you know, you're going through a heat uh a heat wave. So, it's going to be the fourth, fifth day of a heat wave. But it used to be at between 2 and 5 in the afternoon. And now that's been, you know, pushed up to 7 or 8:00 at night because of solar. But the other thing that we're seeing with solar is now there could be an overabundance of it if it's not a hot day. So when you go this past month from August now into uh late September, we haven't it's been pretty mild, right? So we haven't had a huge call for um air conditioning. Now you have an overabundance of solar and you're ISO New England, uh independent system operator New England up that's located up here in Ohio. They're now trying to balance all of this solar behind the meter load, you know, whether it's houses or or solar fields and stuff like that. and you're trying to manage the grid for system reliability. Okay, how do how do we do that? Um, but the other factor is how does Massachusetts meet their goals and and they're really putting a push on battery storage and you know from being in Westfield there was a a 200 megawatt battery storage facility um planned for the north side of Westfield which touched onto the aquifer. So right um there was a lot of push back on that and the developer you know pulled pulled the plug for lack of a better term. they they pulled out and um but they really need the battery storage, but it's also a new technology and is it gonna survive? And they've had fires at, you know, battery storage facilities that burn for days because there's really no way to put it out. And if you're throwing more water on it, is that then um you know, have contaminants go out into the But but those battery uh facilities, they're sort of dictated from Beacon Hill, right? state local communities now. So you have the um state energy facility sighting board, right? So they have the say. So the local planning boards and conservation commissions and stuff like that, you don't have a say anymore. So it's only only the state does. So you can rattle your sabers and and uh and yell and scream all you want, but you got to get somebody to hear you. So in Westfield, they were able to do that. They were able to get people to hear. they were able to get uh Jupiter Power, which was the u um the the facility owner, to to listen and they said, "Okay, you know what? We're we're going to we're going to concentrate our our investments elsewhere." We are up on our second commercial break. We're with Tom Flity. He's the general manager of Westfield Gas and Electric Light Company and Whip City Fiber. We'll be right back after this. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Barry. [Music] This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Barry. [Music] Welcome back everyone to today's edition of In Focus. I am your host Patrick Barry. I've got here with me in the studio Tom Flity. He is the uh general manager of Whfield Gas and Electric Light Department, Whip City Fiber. Tom, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Um very quickly uh what is Whip City Fiber? So Whip City Fiber is a a division that's now 10 years old. Um so we provide highspeed internet uh symmetrical to the home. So we provide one gig of uh fiber internet. So it's fiber directly right into your home. Uh and it's internet. It's not cable TV. It's not television. You can buy your streaming service and um it's just higher. Yeah. higher, more reliable level than what your potential current uh carrier is. I'm not going to go into crashing. I mean, right when it came out in Westfield, I got it. Um primarily because back then my wife worked out of the house, needed the higher speed internet connection. It's more than just Westfield though, right? Yeah. So, we're serving about 23 communities right now. 23 communities. Oh, wow. So, some are like uh New Asheford, which is up in the north northwest corner of where is Okay, I'm gonna have to Google map that one. Yeah. Um, but you know, then there's 96 customers there, right? So, that's one town. That's and that's 90 some odd percent of the town. So, there might be one or two customers there that uh that didn't want it. But, you know, we did a lot of the hilltowns. They had nothing before. Even Montgomery right next to Westfield had nothing before five, six years ago. Now was that all part of the the the initiative from uh our state legislators about um highspeed internet to rural areas? Yeah. So mass mass broadband uh institute which is part of the mass u technology collaborative. Um so it started with Governor Patrick and then uh Governor Baker and Lieutenant Governor Pledo really drove it forward. Okay. and uh and we completed the last town under under Governor Baker's administration and they provided some uh financial incentives to these towns, but a lot of these towns, you know, when I first came on, you know, almost 5 years ago, there was a couple towns left and they were scared to death taking out a million dollar bond. It's like million dollars, that's nothing. But for these towns, yeah, that was a lot. And they were really taking on a lot of risk. And um we partnered with them and really our partnership just started as us trying to help them, right? And um then a business came out of it because they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the capabilities. We have the billing system, we have the people, uh we have the customer service, and um and we're, you know, moving forward with that. We're working with East Long Meadow right now. They're on the on the verge of construction there. And uh Southwick had a vote earlier this year not to do the full town uh and take out like a $16 million bond for that. Um now they're doing a smaller like $4 million project. That's what they're looking to go forward with. And you know that the upside for that is there's various meat meat what we call meat meat points going into Southwick where Westfield touches that Southwick really doesn't have to have that robust infrastructure because you know it's almost coming off of off a Westfield system. Fascinating. What fiber is a an nice element a business unit element to Westfield GNA? Yeah, we're at the point where um probably the first quarter of next year with with adding on West Springfield where we'll have more fiber customers than we do uh electric customers. Interesting. Be our biggest uh biggest customer. Let's go back to the electric conversation. Uh I just wanted to touch on Whip City Fiber for a second. So, uh when it comes to my electric bill, you know, there's a bunch of things on there. So how how and we talked earlier about you're getting stuff from the Cape, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, wherever it might be. So how do you calculate everything that's on my bill? So very careful. We have to cover our cost, right? So we have to make a certain amount of money every year to be to be solvent. But uh when we're looking at you have components that are energy supply uh and then what makes up energy supply. So you have the actual generation portion but then you have coming from all those the hydro the that's coming from all these all these varied so we have contracts we have a variety of contracts with solar and wind and uh and also ownership uh but then but we're buying through power purchase agreements um you know we buy the power but then there's also other aspects of cost and and there's like spinning reserves so you have to pay plants that aren't necessarily generating but they're ready to generate so they have they have to respond to an emergency in 10 minutes. So if a major plant goes down, ISO New England is responsible for having all these other plants on standby. Okay? So there's a cost to the standby. So you have 10 minutes spinning reserves, you have 30 minutes spinning reserves, and then there's um a capacity scarcity event or pay for performance where hey, it's this really hot day, you're going to be ready to run just in case there is this emergency. We've had a couple of those in the past uh past couple years that that there's a huge cost to that. If you're not ready to run or you're not running when that happens, even if ISO doesn't tell you to run, when that event happens, you're you're gonna, you know, wow, get costed out at a because there's nothing worse and we all know it, folks. There's nothing worse than not having electricity. You forget how right it's there, you don't think about it. You head into the kitchen, flick the light on, bathroom, bedroom, whatever it might be, but when you flick that switch and nothing happens, right? So then you're also paying for the distribution system. So, you know, when you look at Westfield, we have um I think the second most miles of roads in in Massachusetts. We're the third largest uh landwise community in Massachusetts when you're looking at the acreage. So, you have to pay for that. You have to pay for you know, we have an inventory of transformers. So, we we're you know, all of our infrastructure, all of our trucks and equipment. Uh a utility truck now costs over $350,000. for the larger trucks and even the smaller square trucks, those are over $250,000 outfitted. So, when you look at that, the number of people um then you come up with the sections of your bill. So, you have energy supply, you have uh transmission, distribution, um and those are those are the main components. You have energy efficiency for us that's that's just added in. So, our bill in Westfield is is is pretty simple. So there's there's you know a customer charge which is low and then you know our all-in rate now for uh a residential customer is just over 17 cents where and for investor owned utilities I'm not going to bash them or any way but they might be closer to 32 to 38 cents a kilowatt hour. So that's you know more than double what we are but there's a lot of social costs that are acted in there where they're u mass save or energy efficiency portion portion. So there might be 32 line items on their bill um because of whatever state ruling or the DPU rules. Um they have to identify what each cost is because before they used to push everything into one component, right? And all the requirements that came from the DPU or from the state governments in various in various states um needed to be outlined. And then you you touched on it briefly, but out of all of that just comes down to the individual homeowners using. Yeah. What you're using. Yeah. Yeah. So, I started my life in in energy efficiency and the cheapest kilowatt hour is the one you don't use, right? So, when you're looking at energy efficiency and trying to manage, you know, lighting or, you know, cooling during the summertime, um, you know, how how warm can you handle it in the summertime and how cold can you handle it in the time, right? So, and trying to, you know, turn off lights and and uh um, you know, find better ways and and how to use electricity that's going to control your bill. So change out your light bulbs, get the more energy efficient light bulbs, energy efficient air conditioners, HVAC systems, close your windows, lock them, do whatever you can. Close your windows, open your window, you know, depending on what it is. Saving energy is going to save you money, right? Fantastic. Tom Flity from West Gas and Electric. Thank you so very much for joining me today. Fascinate. See, folks, I told you it was going to be fascinating. Thanks, Tom. All right. Thanks, Patrick. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Barry. [Music]