pwr_february-2025 - 33

OUTAGE MANAGEMENT
Building Better Ways to
Keep the Lights On
Utilities and power grid operators walk a fine line when it comes to providing
reliable and resilient power while also protecting valuable assets in the electricity
transmission and distribution system.
Darrell Proctor
P
ower outages are disruptive, and
in some instances life-threatening.
More frequent outages, often
caused by extreme weather events,
mean utilities and power grid operators
are looking for better ways to detect outages,
restore electric service more quickly,
and even prevent blackouts altogether.
It can be a daunting task. The evergrowing
global list of major outages has
grown in just the past few weeks and
months. Thousands of electricity customers
were left without power as winter
storms moved across much of the
U.S. in January. Millions were left in the
dark on New Year's Eve across Puerto
Rico due to blackouts there, as the island
continues to struggle with upgrading its
electricity transmission infrastructure
after numerous storms, beginning with
Hurricane Maria in 2017.
A major storm left more than 600,000
without power in Washington state in
November. Cuba, with a population of
about 10 million, sustained a nationwide
power outage in October due to the unexpected
shutdown of a major power
plant-adding to a series of blackouts
that have plagued the island in recent
months. Ecuador has sustained several
power outages in the past year, with the
country's leaders calling the situation an
" unprecedented energy crisis. "
Utilities and power grid operators are
looking at infrastructure upgrades, along
with technology such as outage management
systems (OMS), to help mitigate
the impact of blackouts.
" Our daily lives depend more than
electricity service to
ever on reliable
our homes and businesses: computers,
smartphones, and networking
equipment
for home-based work, electric
vehicle [EV] chargers for transportation,
etc., " said Tom Eyford, global industry
specialist at Oracle Energy and
Water. " At the same time, electric grids
are operating much closer to their limits
than ever before as utilities strive to
February 2025 | POWER
they escalate, ensuring the reliability and
resilience of the electric grid under the
most demanding conditions. "
Thomas L. Keefe, vice chair, and U.S.
1. Eaton Experience Centers in Houston,
Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, provide
hands-on training in real world application
environments, advancing industry education
on the technologies vital to power reliability,
safety, and security. Courtesy: Eaton
keep electricity affordable while seeing
a resurgence in system load growth
due to the expanding consumer energy
technology as well as larger, centralized
loads such as cloud-based computing
and artificial intelligence (AI).
" Given the shrinking operating margins,
modern grid control capabilities
such as advanced distribution management
systems [ADMS] are needed to
predict where problems are likely to occur
on the network, and to recommend
and execute pre-emptive actions to
mitigate them before they happen, " said
Eyford. " All of this requires a steady diet
of real-time data from grid devices, sensors,
smart meters, weather stations,
and more. "
" Real-time insights into grid condifor
reducing outages
Power, Utilities & Renewables Sector
leader for Deloitte, said having real-time
information available " is very important
because the impact of electric disturbances
due to weather events [Figure
2] has significantly increased over the
past few years, and they mostly hit the
distribution grid, where 90% of outages
originate. Demand losses have more
than doubled between 2014 and 2018,
and over the past five years, the disruption
of 317 gigawatts of electricity impacted
66 million customers for longer
durations [Figure 3]. "
" Real-time information is absolutely
crucial for modern grid management,
particularly when dealing with extreme
weather events or demand surges. The
key is having systems that can process
and analyze millions of data points simultaneously,
enabling
operators
to
tions are critical
caused by extreme weather or managing
peaks in electricity demand, " said Jasmin
Giroux-Maltais, product manager-feeder
automation at Eaton, a company with
training centers (Figure 1) that provide
hands-on experience across the electricity
sector. " We at Eaton are working
closely with utilities to identify the
event signatures needed to better detect
disturbances early and enable rapid
response through automated grid services.
This capability helps utilities minimize
the impact of potential outages by
identifying and addressing issues before
www.powermag.com
identify potential issues before they
escalate into outages, " said Nate Walkingshaw,
CEO and founder of Torus, a
company building energy storage and
management products. " Our approach
integrates multiple data streams to
pinpoint outage locations and impact
assessment. Our real-time monitoring
gives us incredible visibility and insights
into the distributed energy resources
[DER] across the network. This compre2.
With severe weather occurring more
often across the U.S. and the world due to
the effects of climate change, finding ways
to harden power grids and transmission and
distribution infrastructure has taken on new
urgency. Courtesy: StockCake
33
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