IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 36

Objective 1: The Escalating Number of
Severe Weather Events is Sharpening
Utility Focus on Increasing Resiliency
For small rural utilities with widespread territories and diverse
terrain, resiliency requires an investment in automation. The
reason is simple: When an outage occurs, personnel may need
to drive hundreds of miles to identify the cause and deliver the
necessary resources and equipment to perform outage restoration. In addition to the burden these issues place on the utility's finances and resources, this can also tremendously affect
reliability and outage durations.
Despite the challenges to utility operations, today, customers in all locales have high expectations for reliable electric
service and communication of outage restoration status. Utilities must improve their SAIDI rates and make certain that
customers have increased awareness of outages, estimated
restoration times, and the work being done to ensure reliable
service. To accomplish these goals, smaller utilities are investigating the use of outage management and distribution management applications, which can be used to reduce outage
times, share real-time information among internal stakeholders, better manage customer communications, and empower
field crews to undertake restoration activities quickly.

Case Study 1: Lessons Learned From Central
Georgia Electric Membership Cooperative
Utility Spotlight
✔ Who: Central Georgia Electric Membership Cooperative
✔ What: a nonprofit electric distribution cooperative
✔ Where: Jackson, Georgia
✔ Territory: dense suburban and rural areas in parts of

14 counties
✔ Number of customers: 58,000 residential, commercial,
and industrial customers.
The state of Georgia is prone to storms and high winds that
can cause devastating damage to homes, schools, and businesses. The Central Georgia Electric Membership Cooperative
(EMC) realized that critical changes were needed to increase
its service reliability, as a very small number of outages contributed to the majority of its outage time. After benchmarking
and analyzing the outage durations and restoration solutions
of its peers, Central Georgia EMC recognized that its outage
durations were at an unacceptable level and decided to invest in
digitization and automation to upgrade its grid.
Central Georgia EMC began by updating its SCADA
system with a solution delivered on an integrated ADMS
platform. A core characteristic of the ADMS was a modelbased, centralized FLISR system that used real-time data
from the network to make a quick and accurate diagnosis,
identify the best network reconfiguration, isolate the damage
caused by the fault, and restore power to customers upstream
and downstream of the faulted area.
Using FLISR, Central Georgia EMC could quickly restore
service to the majority of customers, dramatically reducing its
36

ieee power & energy magazine

outage durations. The chosen FLISR solution was subjected
to in-lab, scenario-based testing prior to the full launch of the
system to correct any technical or operational issues before
going live. The utility loaded distribution system models into
the test application and simulated scenarios, resulting in an
automated response from the system. Testing each scenario
ensured that the FLISR system would correctly interpret data
from the devices in the field and make the right decisions.
This also enabled Central Georgia EMC to identify and correct any deficiencies in the network model prior to commissioning the system.
In addition to FLISR, the following strategies were
deployed by Central Georgia EMC:
✔ A protection settings manager: This guarantees the
correct protection settings are used after any network
reconfiguration, such as a FLISR event. It monitors
the grid and updates selected relays through an automated, rules-based process, which makes certain
that the correct settings group is always active. This
reduces the likelihood of cascading faults occurring
in the network, which results from miscoordinated
protection systems and, consequently, decreases the
potential for outages.
✔ Distribution power flow: This computes and presents
phase voltages, currents, and losses to the entire distribution network. The enhanced visibility helps Central
Georgia EMC detect system problems, including overloads and voltage violations, and optimizes system operating efficiency.
For Central Georgia EMC, system interoperability was
an important factor in rapidly improving the effectiveness
of operators. Operators were already facing the challenge
of learning new applications that use complex technology,
so forcing them to toggle between applications to interpret
system events and choose the appropriate action would only
result in valuable time lost. Interoperable systems established
that system operators had real-time intelligence across all
platforms for optimal decision making.
In addition to training operators, Central Georgia EMC
used scenario-based training to demonstrate the benefits of
FLISR, the protection settings manager, and distribution
power flow applications to other employees, including field
personnel. The applications dramatically changed the utility's
event response processes. To mitigate concerns from operators
about the impact of automation on its processes, Central Georgia EMC first introduced remote-controlled, pole-mounted
reclosers that were manually operated from the control center. This incremental approach helped operators increase their
confidence in the new technologies.
Scenario-based training for all employees was also
key for the general acceptance and use of FLISR, particularly by field personnel. The training clearly demonstrated
the potential benefits for a range of situations and helped
develop consistent organizational expectations for this automation technology.
january/february 2020

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

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