Episode 139: Faces of the Industry 2026, Part 2, Gary Brunet and Maryna Korsei

[Music] Welcome to the Flux capacitor, a podcast about the future of electricity. Francis here, and this is part two of our 2026 faces of the industry. This National Electricity Month, electricity Canada is introducing you to the people who are the faces of the industry. Electricity Canada's faces of the industry award highlights the work of six industry professionals who have demonstrated leadership in every aspect of the electricity sector. We created the faces of the industry award two years ago and it came out of a simple but powerful premise. The electricity sector isn't just companies, it's also people. The great thing about faces is it's a real grassroots campaign. We had 39 nominations for the award, representing people from all parts of the electricity sector from every region. All we ask for is for the recipient to demonstrate innovation, leadership, and outstanding achievement in their field. This year's award winners have been selected from across Canada and come from every part of the industry, including executive leadership, operations, engineering and construction, line work, and supply chain. What they all have in common is leadership innovation and of course their work in the electricity sector. I had the privilege of talking to all of this year's faces of the industry recipients for the Flux capacitor and it was once again humbling to realize the breadth of experience and talent the electricity sector possesses. I hope you'll experience this yourself as you listen to my conversations with this year's faces of the industry. On the pod today are two of those faces of the industry. First up on the podcast is. Gary Brunette, Senior Project Engineer, Damn Safety, Transalda. Gary, let me start off by congratulating you on being one of the faces of the industry, 2026, congrats. Thank you. So for the listen, I thought this was really cool, not just because I'm old, but the whole idea of a facility that is an incredible heritage facility and going through all of the challenges of rehabilitating this project in the middle of a pristine environment. As you came into the room I was looking at photographs of the Cascade Hydro Facility and those pen stocks. That's on my notes. This is a 1941 riveted steel pen stock facility. Yeah, that's right. So like 80 plus years old. So maybe for the listener, describe what the project. Well first off the facility is and then let's talk a little bit about the project to do the rehabilitation. Sure, that's right. So Cascade was built in 1941 in commission. Then it was expanded in 1955. Okay. So and then there's two pen stocks that feed the turbines for both of those facilities. The one that this project was based on, that was the older of the two. And actually back in the day it was Woodstave pen stock feeding the riveted steel. And Transalda had replaced. So back that up it was Woodstave, that's right. So upstream of the area of the project that was Woodpen stock and that was replaced in about 1981 with steel. I was going to say it wasn't replaced with wood. That's right. No, no, don't do that anymore. So but the segment's riveted steel and not it's original from 1941. It's buried and it goes down quite a steep slope. Okay. And that slope is visible just after one enters the BAMF gates on the TransCanada Highway. Yep. So it's immediately above the TransCanada Highway. Because you're heading into the work is on the left. Well it's heading. If you're heading in the park from Calgary, you'd be on the right. On the right. Oh, oh, yes, okay. Yep. And so you're on the TransCanada Highway and then just downhill from that's the TransCanada rail line as well. Yeah. So that's a premise. It's a national park. It's pristine. There's a lot of public around and very strict environmental regulations being in the national park. Yeah. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about then what that project actually looked like. So it's. You say it's in the national park. It is very visible because you do see it as you're driving along a highway. What, you know, what was first off, what was it like working with because presumably this wasn't just a simple project of going in, doing the work and leaving. It's in the national park. It's in an area. So a lot of stakeholders that had to be worked with and coordinated with. Sure. Yeah, first of all it's probably from start to end. It's about five years from I was charged initially just of an inspection. We did a screening inspection of a penstock that led to more inspections. Yeah. That led to things like transient analysis all through the development of the project. Finally, to an options assessment and the execution of the work. So that was, you know, I consider all of that the project. But for especially going into construction, I do a lot of projects always divided into internal stakeholders. And external stakeholders that work with the DEMP safety group, Transalta, we're adjacent to the hydro group. So first stakeholders always the hydro group. Okay. And, you know, the operators, it involves an outage and there's a lot of coordination internally. And then externally, then that's usually the regulators. That's a big part of it. So we worked with Parks Canada. I always bring them in at the beginning, we tour the site with Parks Canada. Yeah, just describe the project to them. We need to do a lot of coordination with them. There's going into the Cascade Penstock, drive-right pass Johnson Lake. That's a big tourist attraction in Bamp National Park. The reservoir for Cascades like Minoamca, that's another large attraction in Bamp. So it's the right thing to do, but it's also just an best interest of the project to bring these stakeholders like Parks Canada, you know, into the planning stages early on. Sure. Sure. So I want to talk a little bit about the project before we get to that. One of the questions that I asked folks that come on the podcast is about their journey. And I always make the same joke. So I'll make it with you, Gary, when you were a little kid in the playground, that's what you always dreamed of doing. Were you a kid that was always building stuff in the playground and this was your dream? So how did you go from the playground to working a transulta and doing this kind of work? It's funny. That's probably. Almost the opposite, I mean, there is probably hints way back when, but really growing up, I did tend in school towards math and sciences. And then I think I've always been just career-minded just in terms of, I know I need a career to sustain myself. So always kind of, yeah, right up to high school, you know, into calculus and math and science. But then I need to figure out where to take that with the next step. So really it was through, you know, talking to different mentors I had at the time, one I'd suggested engineering. And I went for it, it's about as simple as that. And one into engineering, then the next is selecting civil. And then still, did I know if I wanted to work in dams or not at all, maybe learned a bit and I was in the co-op program at U of A. So I did work geotech and different geotech jobs. I worked for contractor while I was there. So learned different parts of the industry, but coming out of school, I actually applied for jobs that looked interesting. Simple as that. And one was up in a mine in the Northwest Territories, a diabetic diamond mine. And that's the first job that I had coming out of school. I worked up there for two years on a rotation. And it was construction of the tailings plans for the diamond mine. And those are dams. And then I pretty much never left dams. After that I worked in mining, I worked at the diavec I worked in design for tailings dams up in Northern Alberta, Goldmine in Northern Ontario actually. And then kind of moved into hydroelectric dams later. Yeah. A lot of similarities, a lot of differences as well. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk specifically about this project. So you've got this 85-year-old steel pan stock. I guess for reasons we've already discussed, you couldn't just simply tear it out and replace it because it's, you know, it's in the middle of, in the middle of a, a grand national park. So for the listener, can you describe what you did because the, I, the pan stock is still there. That's right. But it's been rehabilitated. That's right. So that's one of the options that we considered at the time. We always select a few options and that's the most. That's the first option you think of. It dig it up and replace it and for the reasons you described, it wasn't. We didn't really even consider it feasible for this project. Yeah. We could imagine a rip and replace approach wouldn't have been populated with tourists. Now, and yeah, for many other reasons, expensive as well. There's a lot of work preserving the pan stock. They run side by side. 1942 in 1955. So I think to make it at all feasible, maybe if we had done them both at the same time. But the other one still had quite a bit of life, about 10 years of life on it. So that didn't make sense for us either. So then we got to thinking about I had been in the pan stock before we've done, you know, internal inspections. So mind rate went right to something that could be done internally. So when you said you've been in you mean physically you've been inspecting it. So we thought about coding. But coding is good. As a proactive measure. When you're trying to extend the life when you're near the end of life, coding that, you know, not necessarily the best choice. There's also because it's buried. There's risks of corrosion from the external. We just we can't see the outside of the pipe. Where so the technique ultimately we used was fiber reinforced polymer. So car the CFRP is carbon fiber reinforced polymer. And it's ultimately we're building a pipe within a pipe. So that polymer it comes in sheets and gets saturated in epoxies and placed into the pan stock layer by layer. And there was up to about eight layers of that within the pan stock. Very experienced, very talented, very technical practitioners. Unbelievable amount of quality control that comes into a job like this for, you know, just how those epoxies are mixed and the saturation. Yeah, and it was, yeah, it was built layer by layer inside. Right. And how long was that process of the actual putting on all those all those layers? Yeah, so we it was scheduled for eight weeks a job and that includes. Well, we already had an outage scheduled at the facility for some other work that we were doing in the plant. So we didn't have as much work for the outage itself. The whole plant was being taken off. The plant was taken off and we had actually removed some elements inside the turbine prior to the prior to the FRP work. And then so eight weeks for the FRP work, that's what was scheduled. That includes, there's a search tank at the upstream end of the work area. Pensock and the existing hatches that we went in, it was a bit of a squeeze going for inspections. That just wasn't, wasn't safe nor practical for actually bringing materials in and bringing crews of people. So we cut a hole in the in the search tank. And then so that was one exit entry point and then down at the plant was another. So that was part of it. Then we had to weld that back into place and and it was all day shift work. And it was actually six days a week, 12 hour days place it. There wasn't a lot of room to accelerate it because the epoxy needs to cure overnight every time you place it. But we did finish the work in six weeks. So scheduled for eight finished work in six weeks. And then I'm looking at some of the details here. And this was what the people who thought you deserved this award pointed out demonstrated strong values driven leadership by delivering over 9000 labor hours zero safety incidents, which is certainly something that is that is to be commended protecting sensitive environmental and transportation quarters, uniting diverse stakeholders. I mean, taken all together, each of those is is something to be proud of having them all come together on a single project, I think is is is what your, you know, your, your colleagues are noting here. That's that's one heck of an accomplishment to bring all of those pieces together and then to do it in, for example, without any safety and so on. Were you concerned at all when you were kind of partway through this process, whether or not you'd be able to keep it on track? How tough was it to stay on track and deliver? I think, you know what, more been involved in a lot of construction and been involved, I've been stressed out about a lot of projects. This one, I actually probably grew comfortable as the process went on. I think I worked with very talented team, my colleagues at Transalta, the engineer we had hired, a contractor, every one did very good work. And in a way, I probably haven't seen before everyone worked together. Right. Very well. And there was a lot of respect. So I grew more comfortable as we went. I was, I had more concerns leading up to the work in the development stages. One was because there wasn't, there wasn't any documented example of using FRP for this purpose. That was close enough to give me comfort in the hydroelectric industry in a Penn stock, the steep. So I had to gain comfort with that. And also just with the safety aspect, this is, it's quite steep. So we've always done inspections off ropes, which couldn't do that for this, for this work itself. So in epoxy, it, you know, you can't use harnesses, it's too messy for, to use ropes and harnesses. And also just with that many people working in a confined space. So it's confined space work, you're bringing in an epoxy and it's steep. So that was probably my main concern, how are we going to do that safely. So the contractor really innovated in this work, they, they had welded a staircase into the Penn stock that they, that they removed following the work. Right. And quite in a clever way, it was two staircases with a gap in the middle where they had a motorized cart running up and down this 120 meter long slope. And, you know, materials, tools, different things, they could run it up and down the cart. And they really worked efficiently in there. So, yeah. So anyway, the, when they brought that solution forward. And, you know, we ran it through all of our normal safety assessments and we're convinced that this work could be done in a safe way. I think those were, that was one of the, you know, one of the humps that we got over that I started to become really comfortable with this. And now this has become a case study. And people are pointing to it and looking to replicate this, this process. Yeah. So prior to the work, I had gone, probably made one C.A.D. International and really reached out to other colleagues. And while there wasn't any really close examples or some other, yeah, some other companies were, people were really generous with information. And I told myself when I was there, well, you know, I think we're doing something unique here. All right, a paper if, you know, if this goes through. So, you wrote a paper for Canadian Dam Association, presented it for this project, presented at C.A.D. And also a partner with the contractor. We did no dig north. Okay. Zankover last year. So, yeah, three different. Yeah, three different. Yeah. Gary, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat about it. I think it's a pretty cool, interesting project. I've driven past it many times. And, you know, I want to once again congratulate you on being recognized by your peers across the country as one of the 2026. faces of the industry. Congrats. Thank you. The next guest on the podcast is Marina Corsé, a senior leader at Sipley Chin Central Services at BC Hydro. Marina, congratulations on being named one of the 2026 faces of the industry. Thank you so much. It's such an honor to get the recognition, but as I say that's even though there's my name on that, but it recognizes and celebrates all the brilliant people that I get to work on a newly basis and solve complex problems with them. So it's not just my word, it's my team's and my company's work. Okay, well maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk a little bit about the team and some of those people, but why don't we start off with maybe just a description of, you know, we hear a lot about supply chain. It's been in the news, I think since the beginning of COVID-19, supply chain has been a very topical issue, but maybe for the listener, if you could maybe give us kind of a description of what the challenge is from a supply chain perspective, and I know it's more than one. But yeah, if you could kind of describe how complex is this world today? You're totally right. I think COVID-19 put supply chain on the map for sure. And one of the long-lasting lessons that we took out of that is that you build the resilience of your supply chain before you need to use it. And those lessons continue to serve us right now because the disruptions didn't end with the pandemic. And if I would say what are there, you know, like two challenges or two trends that are shaping up supply chain right now, it is definitely resilience and risk management. Coupled with maybe emerging and evolving technologies as well AI and data digitalization. And going back to risk management, the past year has taught us all that overly, you know, dependence on certain jurisdictions for some critical pieces of equipment is a big risk, especially for electrical industry as essential services. So this is where we are predominantly focused on right now dealing with geopolitical tensions, trade issues, tariff, cost pressures to continue to provide affordable electricity. And to make sure that reliability is not compromised because our crews or our teams don't have the service of material that they need. So that's my response of those challenges. It is about continuity of supply because every part of the organization needs a material or service or a supplier. So in the context of where the electricity sector is developing right now, reliance on supplier market on supply chain is in big, it's just massive and it will continue to grow. Right, right. Well, you may have Mr. Calling as a diplomat. I think you were very very careful in your description of the geopolitical challenges that we face. But there, you know, as you point out, you know, it's been a year, certainly a year of geopolitical challenges a world of uncertainty around tariffs. That complexity was not something that existed really until about a year ago. So this is now an additional layer on top of everything else I would imagine. 100% and NBC Hyder for example, an actually quite a few utilities that we are working with through electricity Canada, by the way. Most of our procurement spend is actually flowing through or from Canadian suppliers. However, we do rely on the US. For something that is quite critical, some high voltage circuit break is for example, some other type of electrical equipment technology. This is where US is dominating typically. So this is where we realize even though the US represents a small portion of our procurement spend, it actually also represents something that is critical to reliably run our system and the aren't quick alternatives to switch. So one of the priorities for our supply chain group right now and for many utilities in this sector as well is to work on those diversification strategies and work on longer term solutions. And I'm saying one the term because to design to test and qualify new suppliers, new production facilities, it could be multiple years. So absolutely. That's situation with our neighbor absolutely. At the complexity, at the same time, I think about as like civil lining, which forced us to look into sole source issues even deeper. Right. I've heard other members talk as well about the vast majority of the procurement is coming from Canadian companies. And I've said that as well to stakeholders in government in Ottawa. And I understand how that's problematic. But people that are not close enough and don't understand the challenges of the sector have said to me, well, if it's only 10%. It's easy when I'm trying to make them understand that yet 100% of our procurement has to happen because we're talking about the reliability of the system. We can't simply say, well, we're good with 90% of it and the other 10% will be a challenge or a challenge. Because there is nothing in your procurement that is optional. Absolutely. And there was a good reason why those 10% comes from the US or from somewhere else. Yeah. But the most important is because we don't have either enough capacity, production capacity in Canada. We have shortage of certain skill or technology. And it was that easy to stop purchasing from the US. We'd probably do that, but because that stuff matters. It's really important to our reliability and continue duty as well. So you're totally right. Yeah. Yeah. Marina, one of the things I ask people to come on the podcast is about their journey. And so I make the same joke once again. When you were a little child on the playground, did you always dream of working in supply chain? What was your journey from the playground to the role that you have now? Well, I don't recall seeing supply chain as a specialty at university, for example, it's not the A in supply chain. I didn't grow up thinking that, oh, I want to work for utility, oh, I want to work for supply chain. In fact, when I got my first masters in Japanese linguistics, and then environmental economy, I absolutely didn't have a defined career plan. But what I knew that I was drawn to, you know, complex, intellectually challenging environment. So I got curious around this FMCG company just because house sophisticated of all the business was. And I applied for my first ever procurement role in there. And that's how it all started. I fell in love pretty much with supply chain because it's an intersection of strategy operations, risk management, sustainability, government relations, cost management, pretty much anything. And in my current role, you know, some days are very strategic and one from thinking. Some days are very operational and tackling problems or moving barriers for the teams. And what I find, and maybe I'm biased talking about supply chain, but I feel this is one of those spaces that gives you a such a well-rounded understanding of the business because you're working with each part of the business and provides pathway to different parts of the company. And speaking about utility in particular, this is this is the field where you feel so connected to the impact. And to the public interest and that purpose is I think the word that anyone working in this space will share with you when they talk about why, how they got there and why they stick around in the utility space. Right. Right. You mentioned working and collaborating with colleagues and other companies. What does that collaboration look like? We have a very collaborative group of different people from peer utilities, and the electricity Canada Supply Chain Committee. We talk on a monthly basis virtually and then meet twice a year in person. One of the biggest benefits I would say that I get from being involved in the committee is the relationship. To be able to pick up the phone, I should email and talk about a particular issue or best practice. This is what we do quite a lot. My favorite part of those meetings is the round table. When we go and talk what keeps us up at night and the opportunities, and I would say for the most part, we're pretty much aligned in our challenges and opportunities. We're also working on something that I mentioned earlier, just recognizing that it's so important to create Canadian capabilities for those categories of goods and equipment that we rely on. We're working on the initiative where several utilities are pulling together demands for critical piece of electrical equipment and working with domestic and international manufacturers to build the case, to expand or establish production capacity in Canada. When utilities come together in exercise like that, it sends pretty strong signal to the industry, to manufacturers, to the government as well, because I do believe that there's work for governments who do as well with investments with certain permits and decision-making. It's pretty exciting, very meaningful, and I do believe that we are making progress in several spaces. The one that I'm particularly excited recently about is this joint that's called by initiative. You mentioned the term artificial intelligence a couple of minutes ago. I'm wondering, to what degree do you think AI will or will it have an impact on procurement in the future? I truly believe in AI. I think that most companies or many companies, especially utility space, are still wrapping their hat around it, trying to really think about the use cases. Procurement and supply chain, even though it's called back office, or referred to as back office, but it's a pretty strategic function. UI can be an extremely helpful tool, with strategy development, with pandanoletics. When we're talking about the transactional procurement and cutting purchase orders and all that, I do believe that it can be significantly streamlined and automated with AI. One of the challenges is data. I believe this is one of the fundamental enablers that most companies or many companies are challenged with. At BCHIDO, we absolutely were working on identifying those use cases in supply chain. We're also looking at the tools that could have a larger enterprise-wide impact. For example, we have eight-tall-than-employees, and any of them could need a material or service. We're working with pretty sophisticated systems, ERP systems. We are governed by complex policies that are sometimes even hard to find. We're working on the idea of the digital procurement assistance, which would allow the casual and user to navigate this whole landscape of policies and rules and systems to finally place a requisition for something that they need. That would be one of the examples. Generally, I think that we're in a bigger picture for utility space. I think we're scratching the surface mostly in the productivity enhancements. But I do believe that this is one of the transformational capabilities that we need to remember how to run and start using. Well, Marina, once again, congratulations first on being nominated by your team and being selected by your peers across the country as one of the 2026 faces of the industry. Thanks for joining us on the award. Thank you so much, Frances. Appreciate it. For those that have been with the podcast since the beginning and those that have joined along the way, thanks for listening. Please take the time to rate the podcast on whatever platform you use to listen. And let me know what you think of the flux capacitor. You can find me on Instagram as the Brad Bradley on LinkedIn and through our website at electricity.ca. The website for this pod is the flux capacitor dot c a and it includes links for this episode on the show page. And let's continue the electricity conversation on our Facebook page on Instagram and at electricity dot c a. Thank you.