Ramping Up Reliability When the Weather Turns Wild

This blog was originally published on LinkedIn. 

Wild weather can be destructive and economically damaging. At the same time, it wreaks havoc on our electric grid, leaving utilities searching for solutions.

We are growing less surprised every day by the craziness that Mother Nature throws at us. What remains constant though, is the unfortunate physical and economic damage and losses that result. In 2017 alone, weather and climate cost the U.S. more than $300 billion—a truly astonishing sum. Year after year, hurricanes, ice storms, wide-scale flooding, and other severe conditions continue to wreak havoc on our electric grid.

When the American east coast is hit with four high-impact winter storms in one month or southern cities get a foot of snow and historically cold cities experience record snowfalls, we see snarled highway traffic, airport delays, and bewildered residents bundled up on the news. At the same time, snarls, delays, and bewilderment can be seen and felt at utilities dealing with damaged networks and substation assets.

Often crews find themselves on standby, waiting for instructions, and even waiting for the all-clear from first responders before they can get onto the field to find, assess, and restore every fault. Operators and dispatchers must navigate through piles of disconnected data, from disparate sources, to attempt to piece together a complete picture of an emerging situation. 

All the while, communities can be left without power for extended periods of time. An efficient and effective response requires utilities to have interoperable systems and tools capable of sharing data between back-office systems, operators, and field crews teams—getting the right information to the right person in the right location at the right time.

GE’s comprehensive Outage Response solutions provide utilities with the interoperable tools they need to react to and even anticipate outages, minimizing disruption of service. With geospatial visualization tools and seamlessly integrated mobile workforce applications, utilities can ensure a faster and more efficient recovery.

Advantages include:

• Storm-proven performance for outage management with real customer evidence of scalability and performance, even during the worst of storms (such as 2017’s Hurricane Irma)

• Network understanding to drive planning work, mobilize resources, and optimally restore parts of the network after an outage

• Predictive analytics to better anticipate the scope of outage and number of customers affected

Under storm conditions, the clock is ticking as utility customers wait patiently—or impatiently—for the return of the energy powering their lives. Some of GE’s clients have taken the step to roll out advanced applications such as the Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR) application to gain an overarching view of the network and restore power automatically via a closed loop, self-healing process.

GE’s standard Outage Response solution continues to empower the utility’s staff. Operators can quickly mobilize crews to complete orders, providing direct mobile links to schematics and GPS navigation. In addition, with the simplification offered by mobile switching, field crews can instantly confirm authorized switching steps through secure communications without the need to talk directly to the operator. This automation enables Operators to coordinate a larger number of crews and a higher volume of work while reducing crew/operator interaction (up to 80%) and providing greater productivity.

Ultimately, whether it’s a blue-sky day or an extreme weather event, GE’s unique Outage Response solutions empower utilities to maximize grid reliability and minimize network downtime delivering storm-proven performance when you need it most.