Power outages, whether large or small, can range from a mere inconvenience to a matter of life or death. Outages are almost always unplanned events, but electric utilities have a responsibility to their customers to provide reliable service, no matter the circumstance. During an outage, the customer is interested in getting the lights back on, and is not concerned with the “how” and “why” of the situation. The main question is how, even in the face of disaster, can the utility meet customer demands and safely, quickly and efficiently respond to outages?
A modern outage management system can help a utility overcome these challenges and operate more efficiently even in the worst of situations. For a utility to effectively operate in today’s evolving industry it is critical to employ a solution that helps streamline crew management, safeguard workers and the public, improve restoration time and efficiency, enhance customer service, enable better maintenance management, monitor network performance and reduce the costs, risks, and uncertainty involved in energy distribution; a tall order, to say the least.
As a not-for-profit electric distribution utility with about 50,000 members, Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative (MCEC), which is headquartered in Lexington, S.C., needed an efficient and effective way to accelerate outage response and restoration. MCEC also wanted to improve and enhance worker and public safety, improve network reliability, reduce outage durations and increase member satisfaction. In 2002, the utility’s outdated outage management system was unable to handle current demands due to a lack of updates and support by the vendor. It was also based upon AutoCad drawings rather than a true geographic information system (GIS), which MCEC upgraded in 2002. The utility’s technology was stuck in the past, and MCEC had to move on.
Turning It All Around
To operate efficiently and provide excellent customer service, utilities must ensure that customer service representatives, dispatchers and technicians are in sync with one another at all times. This was certainly one of the driving factors in MCEC’s decision to replace its legacy system with Oracle Utilities Network Management System. The utility needed a highly scalable and fresh solution to connect its disparate working parts.
MCEC realized many benefits from its original implementation of Oracle Utilities Network Management System, including using its newly implemented ArcFM GIS system as the source of the network data model. After about five years of using the application, the utility decided to take the next step in more effectively and efficiently responding to the needs of its customers by improving outage restoration.
In 2008, MCEC decided to upgrade to the latest version of Oracle Utilities Network Management System. MCEC hoped the upgrade would allow it to streamline its automatic advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) integration, better identify and resolve power outages and, most importantly help identify “priority groups” – small groups of members in need of life support – in the event of an outage. Further, MCEC wanted to reduce call times in its service centers to improve productivity and enhance customer satisfaction.
Flipping the Switch
The implementation phase lasted approximately five months and the team went through numerous migrations and testing phases. Through this, the utility learned that it could meet its goals of improving restoration and meeting the needs of its customers by upgrading to the latest version of its Oracle Utilities Network Management System.
The project team was comprised of Oracle Utilities resources including a project manager and technical resources with expertise in the network management system program code, building the geometric network model and Oracle’s Business Intelligence product. There were also three to four specific resources from Oracle that worked on an as-needed basis on the project.
MCEC provided project management, database management system (DBMS) expertise, integration assistance, testing resources and a comprehensive level of direction gained over the four-plus years of experience with the original network management system product.
MCEC’s primary goal was to enhance its customer service – specifically with regard to outage management – which would eventually result in fewer service calls and help the utility to save money. To meet this objective, MCEC decided to marry three of its most important systems – its interactive voice response (IVR) system, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and outage management system. This integration allows the utility’s IVR system (Milsoft PORCHE) to take the initial customer call and match the provided phone number with the customer on file. The IVR also helps scope the outage and determine the resources needed for restoration.
Next, the outage management system and integrated Aclara AMI system receive the customer information. The upgrade and integration have allowed MCEC to “ping” its meters to help utility managers identify outage boundaries and specific device failures, as well as predict fault locations. This capability helps dispatchers and repair crews manage and resolve issues quickly and efficiently. It also enables MCEC to identify “priority groups” experiencing outages and respond quickly to meet its members’ needs.
The system flags critical customers with specific statuses indicating their needs, allowing for proper prioritization per established MCEC policies. The integration of these three systems allowed MCEC to streamline information sharing, enhance data integrity and accelerate issue resolution for its customers.
Major Success – Restoring Power to Thousands
Most recently, a 65-mile-an-hour wind storm sustained over a four-hour period hit Lexington, SC and caused more than 12,000 MCEC customers to lose service in about 300 different events. MCEC workers scrambled to get everyone back up and running, and were able to restore most sites within 36 hours. The utility estimates that without its upgraded outage management system it would have taken twice as long to get its customers’ services restored.
With the outage management system, MCEC dispatchers can now more effectively manage schedules because they have the insight they need to prioritize emergency restorations and schedule repair work. In addition, by collecting and analyzing system data, MCEC can proactively prevent problems from developing. For example, the utility can tell if a specific meter has experienced multiple outages, allowing MCEC to locate faulty equipment and service it more quickly.
MCEC is also able to perform test runs on switching orders to assure that switching in the field does not inadvertently de-energize network elements. MCEC updates any meter connectivity issues into its ArcFM GIS from Telvent-Miner & Miner on a daily basis.
Furthermore, MCEC uses Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence and other customer information system (CIS) applications to compile its monthly outage reports and reliability figures. The business intelligence solution allows MCEC to better report its outage history to the Board of Directors or Trustees by allowing the utility to look at the number of outages, type and cause of outages, their duration and how many customers were affected by each outage.
Additional features of the system include:
• Improved asset performance tracking, which allows MCEC to accelerate asset management decisions to optimize expenditures on new and existing assets. This also enables the utility to improve service reliability by tracking all customers affected by an outage, determining electrical configurations of every device on every feeder and compiling details about each restoration process – giving both the utility and its customers an accurate perspective of their specific outage
• The ability to access information – including manually entered crew location data – in real time, which allows MCEC to quickly direct workers to an outage site in case of an emergency, increasing crew safety and efficiency. MCEC is able to access automatically updated information via graphical maps and tabular lists. In the future, MCEC will also be able to incorporate an Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system that will directly integrate with the utility’s network management system and provide real-time crew location data.
• Integrated existing data. MCEC is able to integrate data from its CIS, GIS, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, interactive voice response systems and mobile systems into a centralized, real-time database. This guarantees the integrity of the data from the disparate systems in use at MCEC. Some of the utility’s older systems employ the “silos of data” approach, but with its back-end system-wide integration MCEC is able to see near real-time concurrent data across the organization.
Future Plans
In the future, MCEC hopes to better verify customer information when customers call, enhancing outage prediction and identifying nested outages – that is, a smaller outage within a larger outage – and also have the ability to more quickly confirm restoration. For example, if a blown fuse causes an outage in a section of overhead line, MCEC can identify the problem and restore that outage, along with any other outages – such as a transformer outage on the same section of line – even if they have another cause.
The utility also plans to utilize the outage management system’s meter pinging functionality built into the AMI system along with the circuit and phase assignment for each member MCEC generates daily from its CIS and GIS systems. The end result will allow MCEC to further build on its existing capability to qualify customer information by matching a customer phone number automatically to an address from the IVR before that information moves into the outage management system and, on the restoration side, make sure the power is back on in all locations before the crews even leave the area.
Moreover, MCEC hopes to reduce call time in its service centers by allowing its customer service representatives to automatically receive outage status notification information at their desktops via the outage management system. With this ability, they will be better equipped to provide accurate and real-time perspectives on outages, including information regarding the cause of a specific outage, work crew status and estimated restoration time.
Since MCEC’s outage management system integrates with the IVR system, customer service representatives will be able to quickly assess the outage and determine the resources needed for restoration. Additionally, MCEC plans to publish near real-time outage data via its Web site for its customers, further reducing the amount of calls coming in to the service center.
Beyond that, MCEC plans to offer its customers the means to access information about current, in-process outages via the Web and give them the ability to report outages to the utility electronically. MCEC also plans to procure an automatic vehicle location (AVL) system that the utility can directly integrate with the outage management system so dispatchers will have access to real-time positioning of the crews. This will help improve safety and customer service because dispatchers will be able to pinpoint the exact location of its service vehicles. MCEC will use this data in its day-to-day operations to predict arrival times for scheduled and emergency appointments and also to locate service crews for re-routing in case of an emergency.
Lessons Learned
MCEC has worked to make its grid smarter for more than 20 years. From its experience, the utility offers the following lessons learned for other cooperatives and electric utilities.
- Evaluate and decide how well your present technical situation is serving you.
- Do your research, and find a solution that fits your co-op.
- The technical and non-technical challenges of installing such a system are significant, but with persistence and a good plan, the end result proves to be worth it.
- There will a unique solution for every utility; therefore, each must understand its own needs and develop its own solutions.
- As with any major IT project, be sure all parties have a full understanding of the goals and expectations. It is important to get organizational buy-in and leverage the knowledge base that already exists in the utility.
Conclusion
As electric utilities look to the future, they face huge pressure to improve reliability and customer satisfaction. An outage management system – integrated with other pertinent solutions like CIS, GIS, and AMI – can be the most important component to any electric utility’s response strategy. When every second counts, and customers are left in the dark, it is essential to have the best and most reliable outage management system available. Utilities that invest in this technology will reap the benefits for years to come.
About the Authors
Keith Sturkie is Vice President of Information Technology for Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative. Prior to joining MCEC in 2002, Sturkie was Principal and co-founder of Southern Business Services (SBS) from1980 – 2002, a designer and marketer of CIS and Financial Software Systems for electric cooperatives in NC, SC, GA, AL and MN.
Lee Ayers is a System Engineer at Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative, where he has been employed since 1986. Ayers has 27 years experience with integrating computer and automation systems for electric cooperative power systems, including OMS, load management, mapping, SCADA, AMI, RF communications, wide area fiber optic networks and all forms of substation and distribution automation. He holds a BSEE from Clemson University (1982).
