Gainesville Regional Utilities General Manager Bob Hunzinger has been elected to chair the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, Inc. (FRCC) and the Florida Electric Power Coordinating Group (FCG) for a two-year term.
The council and coordinating group are tasked with maintaining a bulk electricity supply that can be shared among Florida’s utilities, ensuring that the flow of electricity is adequate and secure throughout the region.
As the new chair, Hunzinger will help oversee planning, operating and compliance responsibilities presented by the Board of Directors. Chairs and vice chairs are elected by their respective committee members and endorsed by the Board.
Reliability councils were developed after the Northeast blackout of 1965, when more than 30 million people throughout an area of 80,000 square miles lost electricity for up to 12 hours. Now, electric utilities coordinate with each other and adhere to strict reliability standards so that one failure does not cascade into a widespread outage.
GRU is a member of the FRCC, along with investor-owned utilities, cooperative utilities and other municipal utilities as well as non-utility entities in peninsular Florida east of the Apalachicola River. The electric load in this region is more than 50,000 megawatts at peak production, more than 100 times GRU’s peak load.
