On September 3, NTIA issued its BEAD Supplemental Deployment Policy Notice, opening a second round of bidding aimed at locations that remain unserved because of defaults in other federal or state programs, provider misreporting, and changes to the FCC broadband data maps. Based on tentative location counts, as much as 2.4 billion dollars could be available in this supplemental round. That figure is separate from the roughly 21 billion dollars in program savings NTIA declared after last year’s rebid, which remains subject to future guidance. This follows NTIA’s August 25 approval of all 56 state and territorial Final Proposals, and states must run the second round within 90 calendar days of NTIA approving their final eligible location lists.

NRECA was blunt about the first round. CEO Jim Matheson said BEAD’s initial investment is failing rural America and called for a course correction.

We are not going to relitigate BEAD policy here. The narrower point gets lost whenever broadband and electric operations sit in different buildings.

If your cooperative builds fiber, you are also building grid infrastructure

The business case for cooperative fiber is usually written as a broadband business case. Take rate, subscriber revenue, capital cost per passing. That is legitimate but it is not the whole picture.

The same fiber that serves a member’s home passes your poles, your reclosers, your capacitor banks, your regulators, and your substations. Once it is in the air, the marginal cost of tapping it for grid communications is small compared to building a dedicated utility communications network later.

That matters because nearly every distribution automation technology worth having depends on communications. Automatic Source Transfer needs two devices to talk to each other. FLISR needs multiple devices, a distribution management system, and enough bandwidth and latency margin to coordinate isolation and restoration across zones. SCADA visibility into substations and line devices depends on it.

As Finley’s Christopher Smart, P.E. wrote in our whitepaper on AST and FLISR, both technologies are significantly underused among cooperatives and municipal utilities, and the reasons given are usually cost and complexity. A large share of that cost is communications infrastructure. A cooperative already investing in fiber for broadband has quietly solved the expensive part of the problem and often does not realize it.

The electric engineering work a fiber build creates

This is the part that surprises cooperatives that treat broadband as a separate venture.

Pole loading and make ready. Adding a fiber cable to a distribution pole changes the loading on that pole. Structures adequate under NESC for the existing electric configuration may not be after the fiber addition, particularly in heavy loading districts and on long spans. Make ready engineering is electrical engineering, and doing it wrong creates both a safety exposure and a rework bill.

Joint use. If third parties are already attached to your poles, or you intend to attach to someone else’s, joint use agreements, attachment inventories and billing all need to be in order.

Clearances and construction standards. Communications attachments have to maintain clearance from the supply conductors above them. Field conditions rarely match records.

Designing the route for two purposes at once. A fiber route designed purely for subscriber density may not pass the substation and line devices you would most want to monitor. Designing with the electric grid needs in mind costs almost nothing at the planning stage and is expensive to retrofit.

The question to ask internally this quarter

If your cooperative is evaluating a bid in this BEAD round, get electric operations into the room before the route design is final. The question is simple, if this fiber goes where the current design puts it, what percentage of our substations, reclosers, voltage regulators, and switched capacitor banks does it reach, and what would it cost to reach the rest?

Answer that before the design is locked and the fiber build lays the groundwork for a grid modernization program you were going to have to pay for separately.

One clarification, because it matters and it gets confused. BEAD funds broadband deployment. It does not fund electric grid equipment. Pole make ready and pole replacement are generally recoverable as part of deployment cost, but reclosers, relays, a distribution management system, and the rest of an automation program are not BEAD eligible. The advantage here is not a funding advantage. It is that the fiber is going on the poles either way, and where it goes is a decision you get to make once.

Where Finley fits

Finley is one of the few engineering firms that does both sides of this. We design fiber and wireless networks, prepare grant and loan applications, and manage broadband construction. We also design substations, distribution, and transmission, perform pole inspection and joint use services, and run the sectionalizing and coordination analysis that makes AST and FLISR schemes work. When those functions sit with one firm, the route gets designed once, for both purposes.

If your cooperative is bidding in the new BEAD round, let us look at the route design through an electric operations lens before it is final. Call 800-225-9716.