Multiply the Benefits of Outage Management by Integrating with Other Systems
Restore
The activities of the Restore step are focused on the planning and execution of the day-today
work and related restoration activities. Planning is performed for 1 day at a time.
Patrolling (micro assessment) is performed on a selected area to determine the work that
should be planned for tomorrow. Work packages are scripted for an entire day. Repair
crews are assigned to work packages along with the needed materials and other resources
Communicate
Communication is required during each step of the process to both internal and external
organizations. With some of the technology available today crews can communicate by
using terminals in the vehicles. This frees up the voice channels for safety related
communication.
Critique
A critique of the Storm Restoration process and results includes a post storm review
where lessons learned are identified and documented. Lessons learned include those
efforts and results that were good and those that weren’t so good. The review considers
the efficiency of the efforts including preparedness, assignment of resources, logistics
and problems. As part of this phase, there is often a report to the Public Service
Commission.
The goal of an improved process should be to get more customers restored faster. This
means an outage curve like the one shown in the following figure will change to show an
increased rate of repair during the initial efforts of the restoration process. Without doing
something to storm proof the electrical system, the front of the curve would remain the
same as it is now. The area where the opportunities are is in the restoration period.
FIGURE 1 – STORM OUTAGE CURVE
Additional considerations for the process of outage restoration for a storm include:
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Logistics of deploying crews. Can’t scale up what is typically done. Don’t know
how many people are needed, etc.
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Too much information to manually deal with
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Need to make transition from day-to-day to a big event
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Need to make it easy to implement good decisions
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Regional considerations.
