This month I attended the 12th Annual Marcus Evans Outage Response and Restoration Management conference in Atlanta, GA. It was an excellent forum, with 160 attendees focused on finding better ways to prevent and respond to electric system outages.
Typical for this conference, there were engaging and very useful presentations on events that the speakers had worked through: hurricanes and tropical storms, blizzards, floods, and wild fires. At times, the presentations turned personal, and the emotional impact on the audience was almost palpable. The speakers had been through the events, and they shared stories, photographs, and videos of the tremendous impact of the events on the people and their communities.
Certainly there was a lot of sharing of best practices, in terms of continuous storm planning, immediate event preparation, activities during the storm, and post-event restoration.
It’s particularly interesting to see how technology advancements get adapted for storm preparation and response. This includes:
Weather forecasts and damage prediction – The sophistication of weather forecasting has grown over the last thirty years, particularly with the advances in computer modeling of meteorology. More efforts are being made, including my company, to take the weather forecasts and predict the amounts and types of damage that will occur, based on weather forecasts and past records of damage with similar storms. This feeds directly into forecasts of required resources, materials, and the Estimated Times to Restore, which are so important to customers.
GPS/AVL for tracking resources – GPS and Automatic Vehicle Location, while not new, continues to gain acceptance as a more effective way to track resources over a wide area.
E-mailing of work packages – This is an interesting one, in the sense that it is relatively simple, from a technology standpoint, but saves so much time and effort during storm restoration. Typically, in a paper-based system, work package materials such as work orders and circuit maps were printed out, assembled, and then driven over in large stacks to the staging area to be given out to the work crews. This typically would take hours. With electronic documents and e-mail, if the crews have a mobile device with an e-mail address, the work packages can be e-mailed to them directly, saving time and resources.
Mobility packages, given out to mutual aid crews and contractors - Some utilities assemble mobility packages, which might consist of a laptop computer, GPS, and other materials in something like a Rubbermaid bin. This provides the mutual aid crews and contractors with tools to access the utilities’ IT infrastructure.
But the topic that received the most amount of new discussion was the use of social media in storm events. Utilities described how they are increasingly devoting more resources to the use of applications such as Facebook and Twitter, as more and more people use them with regularity. And because of the strong linkage between social media and mobile technologies like smart phones, it means everyone gains an improved awareness of conditions, even during the storm, that is almost instantaneous, distributed throughout a service territory, and not dependent upon having power from the grid (at least until the batteries are discharged in the mobile devices.) Utilities are already using these tools to collect outage reports, gather photos of damage from customers and employees, and communicate pictures of system damage and restoration efforts to a wide audience. Challenges remain: how to separate fact from fiction on the social networks, how to manage “trolls” that want to use social media to make destructive and unhelpful positions on every topic imaginable, and how to make use of all the unstructured data and knowledge that is coming from the social network. But that will be the subject of much future development, and the topic of a future blog.
