In January, Winter Storm Jonas slammed the eastern United States with snow, sleet and freezing rain – dumping as much as 42 inches of snow in West Virginia (and more than a foot in 14 other states) and causing significant coastal flooding in Delaware and New Jersey. The heavy snowfall, high winds and ice took out power to more than one million customers in states from Arkansas to Massachusetts.¹ The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called it the fourth most powerful snowstorm – of the 199 snowstorms since 1900 it has analyzed – to hit the Northeast in that timeframe.²

Clearly, in the face of a storm of this size, it isn’t possible to completely prevent outages. But, armed with the lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and other massive storms during the past few years, many utilities have made sizeable investments in hardening their infrastructure, updating their technology, and in more complete planning and preparation in advance of the storms.

Planning and preparation strategies
Those two Ps – planning and preparation – can continuously iterate, fueled both by the incorporation of lessons learned from previous storms and by the utilization of technology and in-application data analytics. Providing an effective response – and a proactive one, in cases like Winter Storm Jonas, where the storm’s path and effects were predicted with a fairly high degree of accuracy – is at the heart of any utility’s storm strategy, continually fed by actionable information.

Mutual aid has always played an important role in storm outage restoration. Here, too, technology and operational processes are playing an increasing role. For example, for Winter Storm Jonas, Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd), a unit of Exelon Corporation, proactively sent more than 200 crews and a new mobile command unit vehicle to provide restoration assistance to electric utilities PECO in Philadelphia, PA, and BGE in Baltimore, MD, with crews leaving Illinois both the Thursday and Friday before the storm was due to hit the East. In a news release, Terence R. Donnelly, ComEd’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, noted: “With millions of people facing power outages on the East Coast, we think it’s important to work with our sister utilities to get customers whose power service is impacted by this storm restored as quickly and safely as possible. This is one of the strengths of the Exelon group of utilities. We have similar processes that make it more efficient to provide assistance to each other during significant storm events such as Winter Storm Jonas.”³

Technology enabling real-time visibility and communication with field crews
Post-outage analysis, an important part of any future planning scenario, already provides utilities the opportunity to review procedures and practices and incorporate any new lessons learned into new best practices for outage restoration and recovery. As more critical technology applications are added to advanced distribution management systems and network management systems, utilities are taking advantage of this advanced technology to drive increased operational performance.

This integration of other operational technology – such as the geographic information system, SCADA, mobile dispatch, mobile workforce management and advance metering infrastructure systems – is providing a clear, near real-time, end-to-end view of the utility’s entire distribution network.

Add analytics and data visualization tools to the mix, pulling together large volumes of data from multiple sources into one ‘single version of the truth’ (aka operational system-of-systems), and the 21st century utility now has a powerful, integrated, real-time engine ready for use in coordinating its outage response and more effectively managing crew resources.

What does that look like in a storm operations control center? This ‘single version of the truth’ approach, and the ability to combine and analyze source data, model data and map data on a single web-based platform provides system operators with much more granular knowledge about the extent of any outage. As well, it provides the ability to more quickly dispatch crews with the right equipment to each outage area, and at the same time allows the utility to give its customers and other key stakeholders more clearly defined and outage-specific estimated restoration information. This means the system must be scalable and tested to handle storm volumes of events. Best practices include storm drills, system tune-ups with current software release updates, as well as system performance testing well prior to storm season.

Keeping customers in the loop
Integrating outage management and distribution management systems with other operational technologies is a boon to storm management, giving utilities a real-time, end-to-end view of the distribution network, making outages easier to identify and repair crews quicker to dispatch to the affected areas. But that’s all real-time data and information being used directly for restoration operations.

Unless that information is also used to regularly update customers, it’s only half the battle. Increased operational efficiency, effectiveness and reliability are all part of your relationship with your customers, but good communication is equally important. Regulators demand it: in recent years, more rigorous mandates for responsiveness have been imposed on utilities, particularly for more accurate restoration estimation and increased frequency of communications to customers. And customers demand it: when the power goes off, they reach for their mobile phones and cellular-connected handheld devices, looking for answers. Within the new utility, operational tools and communications tools must work hand-in-hand.

Customers demand timely and accurate updates of events affecting them provided in their preferred mediums, AVR phone calls, texts, e-mails, smart phone notifications, etc. In the past few years, social media in particular has become a new platform for utility communications. Duke Energy experienced just over 500,000 outages in the Carolinas at the peak of the weekend storm, but had reduced that number to about 50,000 by Sunday, January 24.⁴ While more than 7,000 crew members were out in the field restoring power, the utility was also busy using social media channels including YouTube,5 Facebook and Twitter in addition to its website updates and outage map to stay in regular touch with its customers in order to update them on restoration progress.

While Winter Storm Jonas was not as devastating in terms of impact and damage as was Hurricane Sandy in 2012, utilities affected did not ‘dodge the bullet’ by luck alone. Strategic hardening and modernization efforts initiated following 2012, ultimately, meant these utilities were able to launch a proactive assault, getting necessary crews in place and ready to go, monitor their networks on a real-time basis, and mount timely and efficient restoration efforts.
 

About the Author

Bradley Williams is vice president of industry strategy, Oracle Utilities. Williams is responsible for Oracle’s smart grid strategy as well as utility solutions for outage management, advanced distribution management, mobile workforce management, work and asset management, and OT analytics. Williams has spent the last 30 years driving innovation in the utility industry in roles, including T&D power system engineering, technology development, asset management, and industry analyst.

¹ Energy Assurance Daily, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, January 25, 2016. http://www.oe.netl.doe.gov/docs/eads/ead012516a.pdf
² “Putting the January 22-24 Snowstorm in Historical Context”, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Information, February 18, 2016. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/january-22-24-2016-snowstorm-in-historical-context
³ “Com Ed Sends More Than 200 Crews to Help Utilities as East Coast Braces for Winter Storm Jonas”, ComEd news release, January 22, 2016. https://www.comed.com/newsroom/pages/newsroomreleases_01222016.pdf?FileTracked=true
⁴ “Duke Energy nears goal line Sunday in restoring power outages”, Duke Energy News Center, January 24, 2016. http://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-nears-goal-line-sunday-in-restoring-power-outages
⁵ “Duke Energy Prepares for Winter Storm Jonas”, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwz5alvIn_Y. Also see “Winter Storm Jonas – Duke Energy Update #2” and “Winter Storm Jonas – Update #4”, YouTube.