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Engineering personnel and others who would benefit from an understanding of current electric utility engineering principles and practices.

The CFO & Senior Accountant Webinar Series is comprised of 11 webinars from February through December 2023. Webinars can be taken individually or as an entire series; by registering for the full series, you will receive all 11 webinars at a discounted price. Descriptions for each webinar are listed below.

During this session, you will: gain an understanding of the unique FERC accounting system of public utilities and the impact of the requirements to an electric utility; learn key concepts of FERC accounting in classifying assets and expenses; and understand and correlate financial concepts to the ratemaking process.

We will discuss basic layout of substations, purpose of major components, use of transfer buses, and bypass switching. Other issues to be addressed are SPCC options, lightning protection, grounding, and access.

A 4-day online, hands-on security course that teaches students how to harden, monitor and protect Microsoft Windows-based networks. Based on more than 15 years of security assessment and penetration testing experience, this course goes beyond theory and best practices and delivers proven, field-tested solutions for mitigating, monitoring and protecting Microsoft Windows-based networks.

During this session, you will: establish an understanding of components of a recession readiness plan; consider policy responses for a recession situation; understand the short- and long-term impacts of supply chain disruptions

The trend in the industry is to design more resilient systems that go beyond basic reliability. We will review techniques for hardening distribution systems, including increasing weather loading, increasing load factors, upgrading key poles on the system, and undergrounding.

Every interaction is an opportunity to build commitment and capability. Your daily interactions are the heartbeat of your working relationships. Are your interactions boosting the commitment and capability of those you lead? This course will introduce proven principles and skills for interacting effectively in a variety of leadership situations and enable you to apply them.

Leadership happens in the context of relationships. This course will help you identify and proactively manage the relationships that matter most to you in your role as a leader. Building relationships of trust and respect is central to your success as a leader. Know your key relationships and care for those key relationships on an ongoing basis.

Discussion and decision-making are the heart of the board’s work, yet often they are challenging. Robert’s Rules of Order has surprising answers on these topics. This workshop provides the tools, tips and guidelines to ensure effective discussion and better decisions. Essential information for chairs and board members.

We will review the requirements of the NESC as it relates to pole inspections, and address inspection cycles and methods. Estimating reduced strength of wood poles will also be covered.

Coaching is the craft of today’s workplace leader. Your role as a leader is to help others succeed in their role. This is done by continually building your team’s capacity (commitment and competence) to succeed. This course will provide a proven roadmap and set of tools to effectively coach others to higher levels of commitment and competence.

During this session, you will consider high-level and detailed metrics to evaluate and report evidence of capital investment spending; evaluate the impact of labor in planning and executing capital projects; identify areas where an evaluation of project costs would benefit the utility and establish buy in from others regarding the importance.

Change requires leadership. Leadership requires change. Workplace leaders are the tread on the tire when it comes to change. This workshop will provide the roadmap and set of tools to lead your team through challenging change.

During this session, you will establish standard operating procedures to manage O&M expenses of the utility; analyze the impact of payroll charges in O&M expenses; evaluate actual outcomes compared to budget and forecast over time to right-size the expenditures for your utility.

This two-hour webinar will give you confidence in taking minutes and serving your board when parliamentary issues arise. You will learn the key guidelines from Robert's Rules of Order for processing meeting minutes, but we will not discuss the actual act of listening and recording what is said. This course includes 20 key points staff should know and Guidelines for Meeting Minutes in Local Governm

While many of the techniques used for single circuits can be applied to double circuits, this session will review unique issues and design considerations applicable to double circuit design, including spacing between crossarms, guying challenges, and framing options.

Avian protection is a key component to many aspects of operating a utility. From wildfire mitigation to regulatory compliance, understanding avian protection is critical. This four-part webinar will use case studies coupled with the instructor’s years of experience to help you support your utility's long- and short-term avian-related projects and planning. The sessions will focus on accepted metho

During this session, you will correlate historical financial results to the current rate structure; plan for future needs of the utility and understand the impact to rates; establish a plan and reporting mechanism to align stakeholders with a plan and needs assessment to the appropriate rate support needed.

Reliability is becoming more important in today’s electronic dependent environment, and animal-caused outages is one area where the utility can improve distribution reliability. We will discuss mitigation for outages caused by animals, such as squirrels and birds, and also talk about substation protection.

To mitigate the risks of wildfires caused by the electric distribution system, many utilities are fire hardening their systems. We will discuss the electric distribution system components and line equipment and their potential risk for wildfires. We will also review changes in standards for the construction and maintenance of the distribution grid to reduce the risks of wildfires.

During this session, you will understand variable expenses and their trends; correlate performance measures to financial outcomes; scale the budget to support strategic and financial goals of the utility; analyze past performance; plan and adjust for future performance.

Three-phase, pad-mounted transformers can be expensive items for an electric utility so it is important to understand the industry standards that apply to them, as well as many of the different options available in the marketplace. We will also review the specification and application of these units.

Learn how to be financially prepared for a FEMA event from big-picture considerations to specific details. During this session, you will learn how to be financially prepared for a FEMA event from big-picture considerations to specific details; discuss key financial considerations in the navigation of a FEMA event; establish best practices to support emergency operations plans from a financial pers

Many power quality issues stem from harmonics often introduced on the power system from inverters, VFD, and other devices. Attend this session to learn about harmonics, IEEE 519, and how to use a k factor in specifying transformers subject to high harmonic connections.

During this session, you will learn about and consider the volume and importance of the various components of financial information at the utility; build credibility through organizing, validating, navigating, and reconciling data; and learn what to report to whom and when; gain perspective about interactive reporting

The purpose of distribution lines is to move energy from one place to another through conductors; the key to reliable, safe, and efficient design is having a good working knowledge of overhead conductors. Therefore, we will address electrical and mechanical properties of primary overhead conductors.

During this session, you will: understand the impact of seasonality, the weather, the economy, energy efficiency, and other influences on your utility’s sales patterns; learn ways to adjust to a changing industry environment; respond to future planning through an interactive perspective of the changing industry environment.

During this session, you will learn about basic tools of the budgeting process and steps to manage the process; discuss best practices in electric utility budgeting; discover lessons learned from past budgets and the best ways to prepare for future planning needs.

Designing underground distribution differs from designing overhead distribution in terms of resiliency of the system. We will review common underground design criteria such as methods for design in underground subdivisions and commercial developments; routing of cable systems; and use of conduit, burial depth, and common errors in design. We will also address single contingency outage and overcurr

As distributed generation becomes ubiquitous, electric utilities must become more adept at interconnecting these sources to the distribution system. In this session, we will focus on the screening methods for smaller DG units, the impact of smart inverters, and detailed system impact studies if screening fails.

During this session, you will: learn about basic tools of the budgeting process and steps to manage the process; discuss best practices in electric utility budgeting; discover lessons learned from past budgets and how to best ways to prepare for future planning needs.