AT&T Responding to Power Shutoff Problems in California, CPUC Told

carriers adopting longer-life backup power at cellsites, said witnesses. AT&T has “taken a very high note of what happened in October” and will brief commissioners soon on its actions responding to the outages caused by power shutoffs, said Fenikile: “There is a lot of work underway.” The carrier is using portable, diesel-based generators with a focus on high-fire-risk areas, he said. All AT&T towers have battery backup system of up to eight hours, enough time to bring portable generators to sites without fixed generators, he said. There are “some scalability challenges” to deploying renewable backup systems, and space can be a limitation, he said. Without requirements or incentives, telecom operators make decisions about buying fuel cells based on what has the least immediate capital cost, said Darin Painter, Plug Power director-sales. Customers don’t consider long-term costs, he said. “The operators are looking for the initial investment, and they don't want to go beyond that,” agreed Ray Schnell, NantEnergy vice president-global business development. “Realistically, if you want 72 hours of storage like California's starting to think about, you really need a low-cost energy storage.” Adding value to backup power would help the business case, said SolarVision Consulting CEO Andrew Skumanich. "If you're going to be asking the telecom companies to be putting in assets that are essentially insurance for when the power drops, you're asking them to put out a capital outlay for assets that may be used 1% of the time, if that." The challenge is getting enough data and machine learning so a system knows when to switch energy sources, said Skumanich. There is such optimization software, said Schneider Electric Microgrid Competency Center Program Director John Ahrens. Earlier Wednesday, CPUC members heard about broadband adoption (see 2003040048).