🔒Reliability, safety key for new utility leader Reynolds

Frank Reynolds took over this fall as the new president of four gas and electric companies — United Illuminating, Southern Connecticut Gas and Connecticut Natural Gas in Connecticut, and Berkshire Gas in Massachusetts.

The companies, subsidiaries of Orange-based Avangrid, provide electricity and natural gas services to nearly 765,000 customers.

Reynolds, a retired Connecticut Army National Guard major, has worked at Avangrid and its predecessor companies for more than two decades.

Reynolds recently spoke to New Haven Biz about his plans for the companies’ future. That includes helping ratepayers and making the power system more reliable — so customers hopefully won’t have to endure lengthy post-storm outages.

What do you hope to accomplish in your new role?

There is a lot to accomplish, and the first being safe, reliable and efficient delivery of our energy to our customers. During this COVID period, we are making sure our customers and employees are safe.

Through continued innovation and investment, we want to help the state to achieve its clean energy goals, while continuing to deliver safe and exceptionally reliable energy services at reasonable cost for our customers and communities.

How are the companies working toward sustainability?

We pride ourselves in being a leader in sustainability. Avangrid is one of the top providers of renewable energy in the country. So that is within our DNA.

When I think about our electric business, we are doing a lot with our distribution system. Our grid-modernization efforts enable more distributed energy resources and more renewable energies to come on to the system.

We are continuing to evolve our natural gas system at the same time. Natural gas has done a lot in terms of reducing carbon emissions. We are doing a lot with our natural gas systems in terms of replacing old pipe with state-of-the-art technology.

We are also looking to investigate new technologies in terms of renewable natural gas, hydrogen and certified natural gas, which could also continue to help reduce carbon emissions and increase sustainability.

How are you helping businesses improve their energy efficiency?

We are excited about our energy efficiency programs, particularly how they have evolved during COVID. Typically we send people out with our partners to do energy efficiency assessments. From there we come up with intervention and strategies that are introduced to help customers — commercial, industrial and residential — reduce their consumption.

With COVID, we have had to distance ourselves socially just to make sure we are being safe. That team has been innovative in doing things remotely with customers and continuing to support energy efficiencies. Our goals are pretty much on par with the targets we had set at the beginning of the year prior to COVID.

How has the pandemic impacted the companies, such as customers being able to pay?

The pandemic has had a significant impact on our customers in terms of all the economic issues that you read about in the newspapers. As a company, we have tried to make it as easy as possible for our customers to be able to stay current on their bills.

We have offered low-income programs, COVID repayment programs, arrearage forgiveness programs and flexibility in terms of payment programs. We did enter into a disconnect moratorium. We have really tried to make sure our customers are aware of the various programs they can utilize.

Gov. Ned Lamont in October signed legislation that increases accountability among Connecticut’s utility companies by implementing a performance-based incentive system that ensures utility earnings and profits are tied to good performance, and certain penalties can be enacted amid extensive service disruptions. What can customers expect to happen with their utility rates in the next few years as a result of this legislation?

We are working with the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) to formulate what performance-based rates will look like. The bill passed last October, so customers can expect to see performance-based rates sometime in the 2021 or 2022 timeframe. Exactly what that looks like I can’t say because it is still evolving.

The region has been impacted by powerful storms in recent years — such as Tropical Storm Isaias. What do you plan to do to help ensure any resulting power outages are resolved quickly?

We invest in our system every day to maintain power quality and reliability. We are a part of a much broader family of companies, being a part of Avangrid. We can use resources from those companies when we have those hundred-year or high-intensity storms. Grid modernization is taking place right now.

We are designing our system to make it more flexible in terms of rerouting power and having it be a self-healing network. If we have an outage at a particular location, we have components on the system that can open and close to reroute that power to that same endpoint more quickly, even though we need to fix whatever may have caused the temporary interruption.

What preventative measures are you pursuing so storms result in fewer outages?

It could be vegetation changes that we make, meaning tree trimming. It could be installing a sturdier type of conductor on the transmission lines, so if you have tree contact, you are less likely to have an outage.