We’ve all seen the commercials on TV with the elderly person lying on the floor, unable to move or get to a telephone. And then comes that classic line: “I’ve fallen… and I can’t get up!” Irritating (and/ or amusing) though it may be now that we’ve all heard it countless times, it’s actually becoming a very real scenario for our aging population and subsequently, our aging workforce – and yes, even the grid itself.

Indeed, the vast majority of challenges we face in our everyday lives extensively, if not predominantly, emanate from either the very young (mainly our children) or from the elderly (mainly our parents and grandparents), depending on your age group. But there’s also a corollary to these metrics in our professional lives. Terms like “infant mortality” and “end of life” are very familiar to us in real life, but they also have significant meaning in the power industry as well as in practically any industrial field.

Despite temperature cycling and other stress tests, we are still plagued by the early component failures that we collectively refer to as infant mortality – usually occurring within the first few days, weeks or months after a device is deployed – as well as lifecycle failures that start to appear when a device enters into the final trimester of its life – end of life, if you will. For the uninitiated, this latter term is the “decline” portion of what reliability engineers fondly refer to as The Bathtub Curve, characterized as a bathtub lying upside down.

Or, another way to visualize this is to picture the letter “D” lying on its back with the curved sides facing upward. The leading curve is the infant mortality period when most early failures are most likely to occur once the device is placed into service and starts to experience the real-world environment. The lagging curve marks the decline into this last phase when things finally just wear out and ultimately fail. (The long, relatively flat period between these ups and downs is the most reliable period, of course!)

But it’s really just a matter of when – not if – these failures will occur. That is, the harsher the operating environment; the more rapidly the infant mortality appears. The more hospitable the environment; the longer it takes for the end of life (“lifecycle”) failures to start. But in both cases, infant mortality and lifecycle failures will appear, especially where electrical and electronic components are involved – of that much you can be assured. Something else you can take to the bank is that the older a device becomes – the lagging curve of the “D” – the less reliable it will become until it finally fails altogether. These same principles can be applied to the grid as a whole, which rather than being a single device, is merely a giant collection of devices – and in many cases, OLD devices.

Anyway, as you might have guessed by now when we talk about the grid we’re already way past the infant mortality phase, and we’ve spent most of the past 50 years or so enjoying that long flat line between the up and down curves. That’s the part where everything just sort of works, provided you don’t stress it unnecessarily or otherwise abuse it. But that nice long, smooth ride is coming to an end.

Where we are today is on the backside of that Bathtub Curve – the part where things start failing for no other reason than because they’ve reached the end of their useful life. Whether measured in years, hours of run-time, number of operations or some other lifecycle metric, the vast majority of devices comprising the underpinnings of the grid today are staring down their own mortality with a large portion of the devices that comprise the grid reaching that critical 35-50 year age when reliability becomes an increasingly prevalent factor.

And making matters worse is the fact that the human component of this equation is in roughly the same place as the physical infrastructure when it comes to lifecycle issues. As we’ve been hearing and reading for some time now, a very large portion of the utility workforce is composed of Baby Boomers, which are now retiring at the rate of about a thousand workers a day – a trend that will continue for the next 19+ years. But before you panic, this doesn’t mean that everything is going to come to a screeching halt at some predetermined deadline – this is not a Y2K (Year 2000) kind of problem and certainly not a doomsday scenario.

However, unlike Y2K this problem is real, and failure to address it could be catastrophic. For example, there’s a tendency to forget – or at least gloss over the fact – that a large contingent of our existing automation and IT infrastructure is also heading down the backside of that Bathtub Curve, with many of our SCADA, GIS and even some OMS installations celebrating their 30th, 40th, or even 50th birthday.

To offset the effects of the decline (in both equipment health and human resources terms), some companies are starting to make plans for combating the coming crisis by adding an entirely new layer of sensors designed to keep a much closer eye on the grid. By adding this blanket of sensors – usually very low-cost, ultra low-power single sensor endpoints – we’ll have the ability to monitor grid operations much more closely, much more accurately, and much more reliably – and with far fewer people than some would ever imagine possible.

The deployment of these devices – sometimes called USNs (Ubiquitous Sensor Networks) is projected to gain momentum and rapidly accelerate over the next few years until we achieve a point where we’ve got ‘eyes’ on virtually everything, in one form or another. That way, if something starts looking like it’s about to fall down, we’ll know about it and have the time needed to take corrective action, well before any serious damage is done. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? – Ed.