Power Grid Disruptions – How the Right Grid Software Helps Utilities

There’s an inescapable reality all utility leaders must face when they’re setting their grid strategies: planning for frequent and extensive power grid outages. 

Over the course of the past few months, extreme weather events have placed unprecedented new strains on the grid.  

And over the next ten years, weather-related power grid outages are expected to be more widespread and damaging – further worsening the situation.  

For utility leaders, a primary focus should be examining and reconsidering how their organization handles disruptive events. In fact, it should be given the same level of attention as traditional goals, such as increasing efficiencies, boosting productivity, and controlling costs.  

In this blog, we’ll discuss: 

• The power grid outages and disruptions caused by extreme weather events 
• How the right grid solutions can help utilities manage these disruptions

Across Europe and North America, brutal heat and devasting wildfires have been a recurring theme for 2023. Meanwhile, unprecedented rainfall soaked Vermont, causing floods on a biblical scale. Florida suffered billions of dollars in damage from Hurricane Idalia. And the North American Electric Reliability Corporation stated that two-thirds of North America was at risk of energy shortfalls this past summer during periods of high demand.  

Every single one of these events and many others placed immense strain on the grid, causing power disruptions. 

As adverse weather events become more common, placing heightened energy demands on the grid, utilities need to act fast. They need new utility solutions and approaches to avoid potential supply shortages and the risk of blackouts, while also improving how they cope with and recover from these events.  

The challenges mentioned above pose an obvious question: how can utilities strategically prepare for an energy future shaped by disruption?   

One thing is clear: software technology is the right way forward.  

Specifically, utilities need software application solutions that help them with the before, during and after a disruptive event. 

At GE Vernova, we offer a collection of application solutions designed for just that. These solutions are tailored to help you better prepare for, cope with, and recover from disruptions quickly and safely. Let’s take a look at them. 

Preparing for disruption starts long before the first drop of rain falls, or the Doppler image shows those dreaded red and orange patches. Currently, utilities spend millions of dollars per year on proactive vegetation management, with the goal of eliminating any growth that poses a threat to infrastructure.  

This approach often results in mixed success, mostly because protecting grid infrastructure from vegetation is a two-pronged affair. You need to know both where the overgrown vegetation is, as well as whether it is close enough to your infrastructure to pose a threat of damage. For utilities leveraging traditional point solutions, the answers to those two questions come from two completely different sets of data, provided by two completely different solutions.  

With Visual Intelligence, part of GE Vernova’s GridOS portfolio, a single solution provides all the answers.  

Two critical tasks take place within Visual Intelligence to identify areas in need of vegetation management: 

1. The solution takes in satellite imagery and LIDAR scans, mapping out overgrown vegetation 

2. Geomapping capabilities (borrowed from another GridOS solution, Smallworld Geo Network Management - GNM) map out all your network assets – including both transmission and distribution  

Then, Visual Intelligence seamlessly overlays both sets of data within its interface, making it easy for you to pinpoint the precise location of any vegetation threatening your assets. This unlocks easier proactive planning via targeted vegetation management throughout the year. There’s no need to jump between different systems, trying to determine if and where vegetation threatens infrastructure. Visual Intelligence provides it all in one view. 

As every utility knows, you can prepare all year long to minimize the impact of disruptions – but you can’t always keep them from happening. When a potential disruptive event looks likely – be it a hurricane, a wildfire, a flood, or a severe thunderstorm – GE Vernova’s “Disruption Collection” kicks into high gear. Disruption Collection has three applications that empowers utilities with insights to help minimize outages, damages, costs, and confusion. Here’s a look at each: 

Disruption Readiness 

Designed for planning and forecasting purposes, Disruption Readiness can be leveraged up to 72 hours (about three days) ahead of an approaching event. Drawing heavily on GNM, it analyzes weather and outage data alongside your network map to predict the potential impact of the event. This visibility gives you a clear understanding of what areas will likely be impacted, with enough advance notice to safely and strategically prepare your recovery crews and other resources. 

Outage Assist 

Forget “riding out the storm.” As the event unfolds, you need to stay informed of the situation and know where you stand. Outage Assist kicks in for this purpose during the event. It draws heavily on GNM and Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) to show you what assets are damaged, their impact on power flow, and what resources you have available to deploy. This makes it easier to prioritize and coordinate restoration efforts.   

In addition, it should be remembered that during disruptive events, different areas use different amounts of power based on impact. Outage Assist can be used to shut off or reroute the flow of power to and from high impact zones. This ensures maximum grid resiliency, even during times when usage is at its peak. 

Storm Manager 

The post-event portion of the Disruption Collection, Storm Manager helps you coordinate your outage response workforce during the recovery phase.   

This application provides an interface from which internal and external crews can be activated and managed. This includes all aspects of logistics management, including time and expense tracking, workforce communications, invoicing, contract management, and more. Rather than working across multiple applications, Storm Manager consolidates everything into a single interface, which field-based users can also access via a secure mobile app. 

The solutions of our GridOS portfolio can help you mitigate the effects of disruptive events. Four of them in particular – Visual Intelligence, Disruption Readiness, Outage Assist, and Storm Manager – empower utilities to gain grid-wide insights that help minimize damages, restore power faster, coordinate recovery efforts, and streamline communication between the control room and field crews.