Last week was fairly uneventful at the Commission. The yearly “Summer Preparedness” meeting was held on Tuesday. Many of the utilities presented on how they plan to deal with the upcoming Arizona heat. Much of the content was repeated from the prior week’s meetings, but it was great to hear a consistent message and have an opportunity for the Commissioners to once more get any answers to questions they may have had.

I also had my first Critical Infrastructure meeting last week. This was a presentation from the Office of Energy Infrastructure Security at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). This presentation was regarding a recent notice of proposed rulemaking that was issued by FERC that would allow utilities to request incentives for certain types of “above and beyond” measures they may have taken with regards to cybersecurity. Of course, utilities are able to make as many improvements as they deem necessary, but if this rule were to be enacted, any money they spend on automated and continuous monitoring of cybersecurity related to federally regulated equipment, would be eligible to recoup the costs with a little bit of incentive (2%) for those ongoing costs. I know…a lot of you are going to ask “why don’t they do this already?” Well, it all comes down to money and equipment. Much of the grid in the utility infrastructure is outdated and difficult to protect because of the age. The companies must spend a lot of money and time to do the updates, hence the reason we are now discussing an additional incentive. If you have any feedback I would love to hear it.

This is all I have for this week. As always, please make sure you sign my petition and donate a bit of seed money at www.nickmyers.us.

Thank you and God bless!

Nick