With the latest super storm hitting the Northeast in October, the discussions began anew on how electric distribution systems can be made robust to withstand storms. At its core, this type of event is not new – it’s been repeated time and time again, since the first distribution systems went into service in the 18880’s. Is there anything new to discuss?
One topic that always receives more discussion after major events is undergrounding the system. One does not have to look far to see many studies and analyses that have been done, showing the high expense in undergrounding distribution facilities en masse. Undergrounding isn’t without its faults as well – higher O&M costs, its susceptibility to events such as flooding, and longer restoration times in some cases all have to be considered. Underground entire systems just isn’t practical.
Another topic that is now frequently discussed in whether smart grid investments should be increased to help withstand storms. Depending on what you call “smart grid”, many of these investments help in system restoration efforts, not as much as in enhancing the robustness of the system. This particularly includes distribution automation, whose effectiveness, it can be argued, isn’t as nearly as strong when the large amounts of system damage de-energize widespread areas. Other “smart grid” investments, particularly the IT systems that are used in outage restoration – the outage management system (OMS), mobile workforce management, GIS, distribution operations analytics, and customer communications tools - improve situational awareness and provide tools for improved coordination of restoration resources, reducing restoration times.
Personally, I think changes in the discussion on service continuity has to flow from the policy and regulatory level. First, a more comprehensive effort has to be done to look at the value of electric service during major events. The value of electric service is different for different end users, and it has to be treated as such. Distribution companies have taken this into account for years – service continuity is more important for critical customers such as hospitals, nursing homes, police and fire stations, and water pumping stations. Other loads aren’t as critical. One question to be considered is whether our way of living, and society’s values, have increased the value of electric service to other loads. Namely, the importance of loads such as gas stations and cell-phone charging were evident when watching the video coming from New England after Hurricane Sandy. These are just examples – the question is, for what specific loads has the value of service continuity changed, and in particular, increased due to changes in our world?
Second, in line with revisiting the value of service continuity to particular loads, the economic costs of increasing the reliability to those loads needs to be considered. Undergrounding may be a part of this solution, but we are not talking about undergrounding large parts of the system, or the whole system, as many studies have analyzed. Instead, a focused analysis on the costs of different alternatives for maintaining service continuity to different loads is called for. Alternatives could be hardened overhead lines, undergrounding in selected locations, mobile generation, and many more, some enabled by new technologies.
