Located in the humid, subtropical heart of Florida, Lakeland Electric’s transmission and distribution network regularly faces storm conditions ranging from typical thunderstorms to the most powerful tropical storms in the world. When inclement weather strikes their service territory, Lakeland must work quickly and safely to re-route or restore power to customers in very difficult situations.

In 2017, Hurricane Irma — a Category 5 Atlantic hurricane with winds as high as 160 mph—reached the state. The impact was staggering. When it struck, it downed or interrupted a majority of the powerlines in Lakeland’s network with fallen trees and airborne debris. At the height of the storm, 90,000 customers lost power — close to 75 percent of Lakeland's customer base.

Florida residents rely on numerous critical systems to survive, from air conditioning to life-support machines. Lakeland recognized the urgency of this widespread outage: Lives hung in the balance. Fortunately for everyone in their service territory, only five-days before the arrival of Hurricane Irma, the utility went live with a real-time operating system in their control room designed to manage electric distribution outages exactly like this one.
 

Lakeland at night
 

Outage Management System

An outage management system (OMS) becomes integral to a utility’s electric service when storms or disasters that cause significant outages occur in their service territory.

Lakeland’s OMS — supplied by a Minneapolis?based provider of open solutions — allowed Lakeland’s operators critical access to the accurate, real-time status of their network, enabling them to efficiently manage outages and systematically restore power quickly and safely. With four operators and two field crew dispatchers working around the clock, Lakeland was able to restore power to about 60,000 customers within 48 hours and the remaining 30,000 customers within 12 daysof Hurricane Irma.

Lakeland’s OMS was implemented to better manage all areas of Lakeland’s outage response times while keeping customers, management and regulators well informed about the scope, status and forecast of restoration efforts. The system utilizes a powerful outage analysis engine and Big Data database technology for processing thousands of inputs per minute, producing real-time, actionable information about the number, location and extent of power outages within the distribution system.

“The OMS provides our operators with a highly configurable and intuitive user interface to see what is most important at any given time, especially during a severe storm,” said Scott Bishop, manager of system operations at Lakeland Electric. “Operators are able to quickly identify the highest-priority outage work and the nearest qualified response crew, then assign work with a click of a button.”

Some of the key benefits of the OMS software used while responding to Hurricane Irma included:

• Timely and accurate awareness of customers without power including prioritization of VIP customers (e.g., medical) via AMI, SCADA and other data
   
• Fast processing of outage calls, network electrical data and job management via Big Data database technology
   
• Geographic network model mapping of outages with visualization (e.g., highlighting, etc.)
   
• Damage assessment information and hazards visible on network model map and attached to corresponding outage jobs
   
• Ability to efficiently locate and isolate faults
   
• Ability to assign available field crews to jobs with accurate information
   
• Ability to document damage notes and hazards on the outage job as it is being worked
   
• Integrated electronic switch orders with outage job steps
   
• Communication of timely and reliable information to internal and external stakeholders via text messaging, online outage maps and read-only OMS web access
   

An OMS dashboard like that in use by Lakeland Electric
(click to enlarge)

Advanced OMS features

Lakeland’s OMS is equipped with advanced storm management functionality, which enabled the following:

• Creation of optimal repair crew deployment plans to lower estimated time to restore (ETR)
   
• Calculation of a storm type and strength-specific ETR utilizing outage data, historical performance data, current repair crew staffing levels, etc.
   
• Remote monitoring of system and restoration efforts via read-only web access for non-operations utility stakeholders
   
• Study mode and save case functionality to save actual operational storm scenarios for future training purposes
   

Lakeland’s outage awareness was increased dramatically through advanced call management functionality.In addition to call entry capabilities, call management interfaces with CIS, IVR, web portals and social media enabled customers to report power outages and learn about the status of their outage job using a variety of communication types. In the case of Hurricane Irma, Lakeland processed more than 1,800 calls to their OMS within 60 minutes.

“Utilities today must do more than simply manage outage calls and outage jobs in order to add value to their restoration process,” said Hormoz Kazemzadeh, Open Systems International’s VP of distribution and smart grid business. “Utility customers demand complete transparency and immediacy when it comes to outage awareness. Fortunately, the OMS technology available today makes it easier than ever to deliver that.”

To further enhance communication with their customers, Lakeland has also revamped their website outage map using real-time data from their OMS. This new outage map communicates where outages are located, where field crews are working and how many people are affected.

Lakeland’s real-time, web-based outage map
(click to enlarge)
 

Integrated switch order management

Like other utilities, Lakeland’s switch order management activities have historically been independent of the real-time control system operations, managed via paper and pen. Driven by the need to increase the efficiency of creating and approving switch orders, improve operational safety by coordinating SCADA tags and interlocks to safety permits, enhance reporting and electronic recordkeeping, and provide additional advanced features such as the real-time network validation of switch orders, Lakeland has worked with its provider to implement an SOM planner software, enabling the next generation of switching through a standard web-based product natively integrated to OMS and the real-time, as-operated network model.
 

Switch order management functionality
(click to enlarge)
 

Operators are now able to drag and drop modeled data points into a switch order, along with tagging and execution of steps, in order to more effectively and efficiently manage their switching workload. In addition, study mode provides operators the means to preview the results of any switch order prior to executing in the real-time production system. Electronic audit logs help track and maintain the five W’s — who, what, where, when and why — of all switching orders, making SOM a fully modern and integrated operational activity at Lakeland.

Risk versus reward

Just days before Hurricane Irma, Lakeland had a difficult decision to make: go live with a new OMS or keep the existing business processes and systems in place. The storm was rapidly approaching, forcing them to weigh the benefits versus the risks of going live. Potential risks of implementing the new system included:

• Operator learning curve – would they be prepared with the provided training?
   
• System reliability – would there be any system issues during cutover?
   
• System performance – would there be any performance issues given the inevitable flood of calls and outages resulting from such a major storm event?
   

After a brief deliberation, they agreed: The benefits of going live with the OMS far outweighed the risks. Extensive system testing, operator training, and business process training had occurred during the project implementation period, providing confidence that the system would be reliable and perform to the designed specifications. Lakeland was ready for the OMS to go live and needed the system’s capabilities to manage the upcoming hurricane.

Conclusion

Lakeland’s implementation of the advanced OMS proved to be an invaluable and immediately useful investment during Hurricane Irma, just days after go-live. Lakeland and the vendor worked collaboratively to ensure not only a smooth product go-live, but that the system performed as expected during the storm. That OMS continues to provide Lakeland’s operators with an easy-to-use, single operational system in which to efficiently manage all aspects of energy delivery, enabling them to better serve their customers while ensuring their network will recover quickly from any future outages.