JANUARY 2019 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 23
CORNER OFFICE
PSEG LONG ISLAND PRESIDENT DANIEL EICHHORN
POWERING THE ISLAND
BY JEFF BERMAN
Few companies directly impact
Long Islanders on a daily basis as
much as the Public Service Enterprise
Group (PSEG). As the head of
its PSEG Long Island subsidiary,
Daniel Eichhorn is the executive in
charge of making sure more than
1 million homes and businesses
have the energy they need to keep
running.
Since 2017, Eichhorn has been
president and chief operating officer
of PSEG-LI, which operates the Long
Island Power Authority's transmission
and distribution system under
a 12-year contract. He recently spoke
with the Press about some of PSEGLI’s
many initiatives and how it’s
striving to keep our lights on and bills
as low as possible. Here are excerpts
from our conversation:
What is the mission of PSEG-LI?
We have six goals. Safety, customer
satisfaction, reliability — keeping
customers’ lights on — storm response,
helping customers save
money on their bill (mainly through
energy efficiency), and giving back to
the community.
You started upgrading more than
3,000 miles of wire. How far have
you gotten? Since 2014, 2,684 miles
of wire have been inspected and upgraded.
We also received a grant of
about $730 million from FEMA, which
is great for Long Island customers
because it’s not coming out of their
bill. It’s coming out of federal funding.
We’ve raised substations, we’ve
replaced poles with bigger, more
sturdy, hurricane-proof poles, we’ve
upgraded wire and the hardware
associated with that. And since doing
the FEMA work, we’ve done an additional
708 miles of storm hardening
and installed 756 automated switches.
That program will wrap up in about a
year to 18 months from now.
What are your clean energy
goals? PSEG-LI's a big supporter
of New York State’s Clean Energy
Standard, which calls for 50 percent
renewables by the year 2030 and a
40 percent reduction in greenhouse
gases by that same time. And it’s
something we take to heart. We do
have a plan in place to get to 50 percent
renewable energy by 2030.
What are the main challenges
that PSEG-LI has faced? The biggest
challenge we had, I think, was the
"If we’re all working together and we all
understand the direction we want to go in,
then we can move mountains."
perception that, “Hey, are they going
to be any different?” And I think with
all the technology we implemented
in our customer area, pretty much
every channel of how a customer
interacts with us has been upgraded
with state-of-the-art technology.
What do Long Islanders need to
know to protect themselves from
utility scams? Most of the scams —
and the most successful scam — is
when the scammers call a customer,
threatening to turn off their electricity.
A lot of times it’s a Friday
night, when people may be looking
to entertain. They try the scam with
businesses around their critical periods.
And a lot of times it involves
telling the customer that if they don’t
make an immediate payment through
a prepaid credit card that their power
is going to be shut off. And we don’t do
business in that way. So, we always
try to get that information out to
customers. If something sounds a
little bit fishy, just give us a call and
confirm.
How did PSEG-LI fare through
our first winter storm that happened
a week before Thanksgiving?
We have a very well-defined storm
plan and we go through a very similar
preparation every time there’s
a storm coming. For this storm, in
general, we were prepared. It was
supposed to — and it did — happen
in the evening, when most of our
people are nearing the end of their
shift. We brought in about 200 what
we call mutual aid workers — most
from out of state — to assist with our
restoration. About 36,000 of our
customers lost power. We have 1.1
million customers. So, in general, it
was a small percentage of customers.
But, if you’re one of those customers,
it’s a big deal to you. And the majority
of our customers — 99.9 percent of
them — had power restored within
the same day or within a 24-hour
period of when they lost power.
Do you have any sayings? If we’re
all working together and we all understand
the direction we want to go
in, then we can move mountains. The
other saying that I like to say is, and
I really believe this one, too: What
really makes a company great is not
only to be able to come up with ideas,
but to take those ideas and make them
into reality — bring them to fruition.
Daniel Eichhorn, the head of PSEG Long Island, keeps the lights on for more than one million customers.
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