Improving service reliability in the deregulated environment
Take the total business approach to reliability improvements
In response to the pressures and challenges in today's business environment, energy delivery
utilities must take a proactive and total business approach to improving service reliability. Such
an approach involves more than the conventional distribution system planning, engineering, and
network operations and control. It requires engineering the business process and network
improvement strategies together. It requires utilizing the utility's information, people, and
network assets in a synergistic manner. It means in addition to planning and engineering the
electric network more effectively, the utility will have to better communicate with the customers
and public, as well as execute business processes in all areas together.
Communication with Customers and the Public
Perception is everything. A recent survey of overall customer satisfaction among utilities by J.D.
Power and Associates indicates that 40 percent of the satisfaction comes from the utility's image
and only 17 percent of the satisfaction is a result of reliability and power quality. Much of the
image is built on how the utility communicates with customers. For example, customers
associate how much the utility is on top of its operations with how well it keeps them up to date
on outage statuses and restoration efforts during storm or other major outages and on reliability
improvement measures afterwards.
Most utilities have recognized this need to improve public perception and have stepped up efforts
to enhance communications with customers and the public. However, too many of these efforts
are ineffective due to a lack of timely and accurate information available to the utility
organizations responsible for public communication. While utilities attempt to improve customer
facing with blended media technologies like Intranet Web pages and interactive voice response,
they still suffer from difficulties in assimilating data from various sources within the company to
provide meaningful information. They need to provide information in a timely manner and in a
form the public can appreciate. For example, customers care about problems and improvement
projects in geographic areas like towns and neighborhoods, not by circuits and substations.
Utilities need to adapt suitable analytical engines behind their customer relationship management
(CRM) initiatives. These engines and their underlying data model ought to be geospatially
oriented (Tram, Engleken, and Gay, 1999).
Coordinated Planning and Management of Business Processes and Resources
Adding capital dollars for upgrading network facilities and equipment may be a solution to
solving system reliability problems, but it must not be the only option. There are a number of
possible ways to reduce the duration of outages. For example:
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Add network automation, monitoring, and control capabilities so the utility knows about
network problems or potential network problems sooner and resolves them automatically.
This involves conventional network protection engineering, Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA), Distribution Automation, Substation Automation, etc.
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Provide better intelligence and decision support tools to system operators and dispatchers so
they can diagnose and take corrective actions quicker and faster. This involves, for instance,
trouble-call entry and analysis, outage prediction, emergency switching formulation, etc.
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Improve the efficiency of field resources by directing the right crew with the right
replacement parts to the right place the first time, so travel and repair times are reduced. This
involves, for instance, mobile dispatch and combining field resources from different
functional groups such as service, substation, and construction, for emergency response.
There are also alternatives for reducing the frequency of outages. For example:
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Reinforce the distribution network and upgrade network facilities to increase the capacity and
flexibility of the network, reduces outages due to system overloads. This involves both
conventional and modern methods for distribution system planning and reliability
engineering.
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Improve inspection and maintenance of network equipment, implementing transformer load
management, online equipment performance monitors, etc., to reduce failure rates of network
equipment.
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Increase the vegetation management effort to reduce the number of outages caused by trees.
This involves keeping track of where problem areas are, as well as when and where trees
have or have not been trimmed.
While every utility probably has programs in place to do each of the measures listed above
already, most utilities need an information system and process in place to coordinate the
planning and execution of these programs (Tram, 1999.) For example, to reduce the average
customer interruption duration to a targeted level, would it be more cost effective to add network
automation or mobile workforce management? Or would the utility really need a combination of
the two measures, one in certain parts of the service territory and the other in the rest?
