Multiply the Benefits of Outage Management by Integrating with Other Systems
Intermediate outages
A second category that some utilities use is intermediate outages. These often include
outages of between 20,000 and 100,000 customers. In these situations the local district
usually cannot handle the outage restoration without help from outside their district.
Many times the management of the restoration is elevated to a regional or sometimes to
the corporate level. The decision process of when to switch from local control to a higher
level is impacted by the need to move resources from one location to another to help with
the restoration. The impact of moving resources from one district to another is an
important decision that is usually made at a level above the district.
Large system outages
Large storm outages are caused by events like hurricanes, ice storms and large
thunderstorm fronts moving through an area. Outages of this type may be in the range of
over 100,000 customers out and cover a wide geographic area. The resources required to
restore these outages include in-house crews, in-house contractors, outside contractors
and resources from other utilities. Restorations of this size are managed on a corporate
wide basis. The usual outage management systems, which analyze outages and help to
locate the probable outage cause, are not effective for these types of storms since there
are so many problems at the electrical circuit level.
While major storms may be the reason for companies to investigate tools that will help
with the decision processes, they only happen a few times per year. The average may be
1 to 3 major storms per year. Intermediate storms happen 10 to 15 times per year and
may provide a better justification for the development of advanced decision-making
tools. In both these cases decisions are made about the movement of internal crews or
importing crews from outside the utility. There is a large sum of money at stake each
time the decision is made to import crews from outside.
What we have described here is a generic division of the different outage levels
encountered by various utilities. It is important to note that not everyone is involved with
hurricanes or ice storms. Each company has to develop and use the process that fits their
particular situation. That is why it is so important to start by evaluating the processes
used and then develop systems that support the correct processes.
The Process of Managing Storm Restoration
The following process is an overview of a model that could be used to manage and
restore outages associated with major storms:
Model
The activities in the Modeling step of the process are focused on preparing for both the
assessment and restoration efforts that will be necessary to restore outages that occur as a
result of a storm. Models of what to do and how to do it are often in the heads of
experienced personnel. Past storms are often used as references for how to handle future
storms; however, historical data is often not readily available.
Assess
The activities of the Assessment step are focused on assessing the scope of the outage. In
the case of large outages a ‘macro’ assessment requires that patrols go into the impacted
areas to determine the scope of the damage and report it back to the storm center. They
perform a drive-by to collect the information and report specifics such as the number of
poles down, which provides an outage-by-outage assessment of the damage. Systems
such as SCADA are also used as input to the assessment process.
Deploy
The activities of the Deployment step are focused on getting the resources, including
patrollers, repair crews and support personnel, ready for when the storm hits and ready
for performing the assessment and restoration work. Support personnel are deployed to
run the outage management system.
