Power grid disruptions are on the rise. Here’s how utilities can weather the storm.

At the start of 2024, a huge winter storm knocked out power to approximately 811,000 homes and businesses covering 12 U.S. states. It’s the kind of scenario that truly tests power companies’ resilience, and they’re happening with increasing regularity. In fact, between 2000 and 2021, 83% of major power outages in the US were due to weather-related events.

How can utilities better predict and respond to these kinds of events? We explored this topic in a recent webinar, where we discussed:  

• The tools and processes utilities need to deal with disruption.
• How an Outage Management System can help.
• Key actions to mitigate disruption during a storm.
• The benefits of our Outage Response suite.

Listen to the webinar to hear the full discussion and keep reading for a summary of the key topics.

Weather-related disruptions are impossible to prevent, but you can mitigate their impact with the right data and a comprehensive plan.

For example:

• Forecast and prepare: By combining detailed weather data with predictive analytics, you can better predict when and where a storm will impact your infrastructure.  
• Assess outages: After an outage, being able to visualize network data and damage to physical assets can help you better estimate time to restore.
• Respond to outages: With an accurate damage assessment, you can mobilize and decentralize the right outage support crews to the right areas and minimize disruption recovery.
• Recover: Once an outage is taken care of, streamlined communication and assessments can help you quickly restore the network.

This is just an overview of an end-to-end disruption plan. But clearly, it hinges on complex data analysis, damage assessments, multi-team communication, and rapid deployment of field crews.

It’s hard to coordinate all the above without a clear, centralized view of everything and everyone involved.

That’s where an OMS (Outage Management System)  comes in.

It’s a solution that helps you efficiently and rapidly restore your network, even during severe weather. To demonstrate how it works, let’s imagine your utility is facing a major storm event.

There’s a storm coming. You’ve seen the weather reports and it’s time to prepare your OMS. Here are two essential places to start:

Run data volume tests

Storms create masses of data. Is your system ready to cope? One way to check is to see if your OMS can handle all the incoming outage-related calls from your customers. This kind of data volume test can help you quickly identify and deal with any initial system bottlenecks.

Create a Storm Room

In the middle of a disruptive event, you need a focal point for communication. This is where a Storm Room comes in. By assembling key personnel in a centralized space, a Storm Room gives you a way to coordinate the crisis. At least some members of this group should know how to operate your OMS to collect and share real-time data with your wider teams, deploy repair crews, and more. 

The storm has arrived. To maximize the effectiveness of your response, we suggest:

Creating a ‘storm event’

A storm event involves recording the precise details and characteristics of a given storm on your OMS. This can include its start time, location, and severity. Historic and real-time data can also be used to help you produce an ETR (Estimated Time of Restoration), allowing you to share important updates with customers.

Using your data efficiently

You’re receiving huge amounts of storm data. But you don’t need to analyze everything. You can get a more refined view of your network status by only analyzing data from, say, your Bellwether meters (rather than all your smart meters) to avoid being swamped by too much information.

You’ve dispatched your restoration crews to assess and repair the storm damage. Using live data in your OMS, your crews can gain an upfront understanding of the situation to inform their efforts, and also input real-time updates as they focus on:

Restoration priorities

After assessing immediate risks and hazards, the next priority should be to assess the impact of an outage on public health, such as hospital life support systems. Your crews can update your OMS as they conduct these assessments. Once this has been completed, restoration efforts on less-critical priorities can begin.

Restoration verification

The outage has been dealt with. Now, you need to ensure the power is back for all your affected customers. One way to do this is by using smart meter pings that ‘ask’ smart meters if they’re back on power and help uncover harder-to-detect ‘nested’ outages.

The storm has passed, restoration efforts are nearing completion, and it’s time to deal with the aftermath. Your OMS continues to play a critical role here, allowing you to track outstanding tasks, process final reports, and liaise with contractors.

Important areas to address in the storm recovery stage include:

Reconciliation of assistance crews

At what point are your assistance crews no longer needed? How are you evaluating their performance? Do you have a streamlined way to process payments and invoicing? These kinds of decisions and processes are fundamental to a successful post-storm recovery.

Accurate storm data

Your storm data is a crucial statistical record of the event — for your utility and the wider energy industry. So it’s essential you use your OMS to help accurately catalog and process all this data, from identifying the end time of the storm to any outage records that were reported incorrectly.

At GE Vernova, we have a suite of solutions that can help utilities predict, plan, and respond better to disruptive events. This includes:

• Disruption Prepare helps you plan for outages with predictive analytics and granular forecasts.
• Damage Assessment lets you view network data visualization to assess and report damage.
• Outage Assist enables you to dispatch crews and optimize your ETR.
• Disruption Restore simplifies the process of network restoration and settling contracts.

Having the right solutions is just a starting point. To learn more how they can be deployed during a major storm event, listen to our webinar.