The following is a transcript of the Oct. 28, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s News Director. Our guest on this episode is Rob Shelley, the general manager of Michigan public power utility Grand Haven Board of Light and Power. The utility in September 2024 unanimously voted to name Shelley as its new general manager. Prior to this action, Rob served as the utility’s interim general manager. He's worked for the utility for nine years. Rob, thanks for joining us.
Rob Shelley
Thanks for having me, Paul. I appreciate the opportunity.
Paul Ciampoli
Rob, just to get our conversation started -- and I've done this with other officials that I've interviewed who've had a long career at the public power in question for the interview. So in that context, I wanted to give you a chance to provide an overview of your career at the utility.
Rob Shelley
I started at the Grand Haven Board of Light and Power in October of 2015 as the distribution engineering manager. So that would be other utilities may call that like your operations, distribution operations manager overseeing the tree crew, the line crew, the meter shop, et cetera. From there I worked in that role for the nine years I was here -- always been in an executive position, but prior to coming to Grand Haven full time, I actually worked for Grand Haven as a consultant. I was a consulting engineer for 15 years before jumping ship to public power. And I did a lot of work with Grand Haven on a daily, weekly basis before coming here, so it was a very familiar utility before just even becoming a full time employee here.
Paul Ciampoli
I guess it goes without saying that having that insider knowledge of operations gives you an advantage in terms of taking on your current role.
Rob Shelley
Absolutely. It's another step up the chain here, but understanding what the people do in the back day-to-day and, of course, you have to interface with everybody as the operations manager – so I deal with accounting, HR -- so change the role a little bit but have a lot of familiarity and understood what the role was going to look like before moving on to it.
Paul Ciampoli
Switching gears here, I want to talk about renewable energy and in terms of preparing for this interview, one of the things that jumped out at me is the fact that the utility has a goal of having renewable energy represent 28% of its overall generation portfolio by 2025. Can you detail how the utility plans to achieve this goal?
Rob Shelley
Currently we are at 24% and over the last handful of years, I would say the last 20 years or so, we've been growing that portfolio. We're very lucky here in Michigan. We have a great joint action agency – MPPA....and with them, we've been working for years on evaluating projects and the ability to buy into things and really have been able to grow that. The biggest jump on that happened in in 2020. We had a coal-fired power plant that we shut down and had decommissioned and tore down. So we went from being able to generate all of our electricity to actually having to go out and purchase our electricity which gave us a lot of opportunity to go out and look at things that are available in the marketplace -- can we replace some of this coal energy with wind, solar, et cetera?
So we have everything from landfill gas to wind and solar in our portfolio. And like I said, we started that in like 2010. The state of Michigan has a 15% goal for all utilities. And like I said, we're currently at 24%. And the state of Michigan is now going to 50% in 2030. So we'll be continuing to build that relationship with other partners and maybe some internal work to get to that level. But most of that will be gone through with our Joint Action Agency.
Paul Ciampoli
Public Power Week was celebrated nationwide the week of October 6th through October 12th. So I wanted to take advantage of this interview to give you the chance to tell our listeners more about how Grand Haven Board of Light and Power celebrated Public Power Week.
Rob Shelley
We look at Public Power Week as an opportunity to tell our story and be a commercial to our customers, our community. So as you know public power is all about being community facing and it was a very, very busy week for us because we had not only our stuff for just public power, which we did some stuff online and our social media platforms. We had some free giveaways -- anybody that wanted to come in the office -- the little freebies we gave away and we had a raffle for a smart thermostat gift basket as well. So that was the kind of stuff we were planning -- as well as we had to deal with the hurricane in Florida, we had crews go down there. So that kind of came a big news story here locally. So during that week we had, like I said, our normal public power stuff.
It's also fire prevention week, so we had people at the local fire barns giving electrical safety demos. We had a career fair at the local high school once again [to] meet up with the local high school students talking about careers and opportunities in public power. Of course we do our press releases...[talking] about public power, the things that we do, the value we bring back to the community, the services we offer the community.
I mentioned the hurricane. Our mutual aid response actually led us to get two interviews on the local radio stations to talk about that. So we use that opportunity to bring up Public Power Week and once again inform our customers about all the things that you get with having a local owned municipal utility. You’ve got good paying jobs locally. You've got better rates, better reliability. I mean, we all know the story. If you're listening to the Public Power Now Podcast, you know the story I'm talking about, but it gives us a chance to get out there and really give that to our customers.
Paul Ciampoli
Earlier this year, the utility received two national awards from APPA. The utility received the Gold Standard for Safety award and a Diamond level Reliable Public Power Provider designation from APPA. What are the steps that Grand Haven Board of Light & Power has taken to achieve these high levels of safety and reliability?
Rob Shelley
It all begins with accountability. So we look at these things... safety is of course paramount. I think every utility feels that way, but we try to live that model and we tell the guys what's your number one rule when you're reporting to an outage. So we kind of tie this into reliability. It's not about getting the lights on, it's about making sure the public and our guys stay safe, our people stay safe, and then we're trying to protect the system as well so that we don't do more damage if we burn something up. How are we going to turn the lights back on for everyone else?
So when you when you start getting these mindsets and the training and the foresight that goes into that....it's a model. It's foresight. It's thinking about all this stuff, so you get the proper training so everybody knows what's expected of them. They understand how to make good decisions. And then of course it goes back into the engineering, everything else. When you talk about the RP3, it's not just looking at your reliability statistics -- are you putting the proper training in place? Are you putting funds aside to reinvest in the system? Are you doing proper tree trimming? All these types of things all roll into that and that's where it's very important to live that and and you'll see the results.
So I would encourage anybody that doesn't participate in a lot of these APPA awards, whether it's the safety awards or RP3 or customer service or customer satisfaction, it really does put you through a process to see is there things that I could be doing better. What is the standard? What are others doing and maybe it's something you're not doing. But you learn from...filling out the applications that maybe there's something we can be doing better, or maybe there's something we can we haven't even thought about. So that's really where we rely on those APPA designations.
We're very proud of them because you know it means that we're performing well in our sphere. We're not trying to compare ourselves against the big IOU. We’re comparing ourselves against others and our same class, but it also gives us the opportunity to benchmark ourselves and say, is there something else that we can be doing better?
Paul Ciampoli
Great, Rob. Well, thanks again to so much for taking the time to speak with us. It's been a really interesting conversation and I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of it. So thanks again for taking the time to speak with us and also I wanted to just give you the opportunity to come back as a guest at some point perhaps this time next year where we could talk about some of these topics. I'm sure there's other things going on at the utility we could also talk about.
Rob Shelley
Perfect. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the opportunity to be on today.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, graphic and digital designer at APPA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
