Utilities Find New Ways to Cope
December 22, 2008
Kate Rowland
Editor-in-Chief
Intelligent Utility Topics
From winter's ice and heavy snow to summer's tropical storms and hurricanes,
extreme weather has been offering North America's electric utilities
repeated lessons in emergency preparedness. Further, it has raised questions
in state after state about whether utility companies are adequately prepared
to respond to the storm-related outages, and what additional measures need
to be taken in the future to improve reliability.
Disaster preparedness breaks down into two distinct camps. One side favors a
"hardening" approach that clears vegetation near wires and replaces wood
poles with concrete, steel or composite structures, or by burying the entire
system below ground. The other side looks to developing intelligent grid
technology to better focus the efforts of its on-the-ground restoration
crews, thereby decreasing electricity outage time to a larger volume of its
customers. Both camps cite cost versus benefits, as their customers
ultimately bear the brunt of these costs.
After Hurricane Wilma in 2005, Florida regulators moved quickly to impose
new standards, which took effect in 2006, requiring tree trimming on a
three-year cycle and facility inspections every six to eight years. In the
wake of Hurricane Rita in the same year, the Public Utility Commission of
Texas began looking at similar measures, but industry there argued for a
cost-benefit analysis before making wholesale changes.
The Texas PUC agreed and went back to the drawing board at the end of
August. Less than a week later, Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, with
Hurricane Ike barreling into Texas just 12 days later. And that was only the
beginning: Once inland, Ike mixed with a cold front, knocking out power in
Pennsylvania, Ohio and parts of New York State.
Cleco Power, which serves 265,000 customers in Louisiana, was hit by both of
September's hurricanes. The utility was three days short of completing its
Gustav cleanup and restoration efforts when Ike hit land. "The biggest thing
is planning and preparing," says James Lass, Cleco's general manager of
emergency management.
Lass says Cleco, like other utilities in extreme weather areas, constantly
updates its storm preparedness plan, adapting it using the experience it
gleans from one storm to better prepare for the next. After Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita, the company brought in a consultant to try to fix the
bumps and build more teams to solve the storm-related issues the company
faces each storm season. Today, the company's storm-response organizational
chart targets specific teams within Cleco, clearly defining each team's
responsibilities. "These responsibilities are sharpened and honed after
every storm."
"We're designing to a higher standard with new construction. Where we used
to build with wood, we're now building with steel," says Steve Gauthier,
manager of transmission design and construction, noting such a transition
adds greatly to the overall cost. Cleco is also affecting other upgrades
designed to make its lines and conductor assemblies more flexible against
breakage by falling trees.
Exceeding Expectations
Any disaster requires a three-pronged approach, the company adds. The first
is to restore service quickly and safely. The second is to lessen
restoration costs and the third to minimize the expenses passed on to
customers.
"We're trying to find the right balance between cost and benefits," Cleco's
Gauthier says. "In the past six years, we've had five major storms."
Transmission repair costs have been only $25 million. This cost, he says, is
comparable to only 15 or 20 miles of burying lines. "There is no way our
customers can afford it." And Hurricane Katrina's legacy leaves other
questions about the advisability of burying lines. "You can leave them
overhead where they are going to blow down, or bury them where they'll
flood."
In Texas, CenterPoint Energy says that although it routinely buries lines in
new developments, the physical and emotional costs to customers of
retrofitting, or burying existing lines in existing neighborhoods, is too
high. "We're okay with undergrounding, but it's an expense that's going to
be borne by the customers," says Floyd LeBlanc, CenterPoint's vice president
of communications. Instead, the company, which serves almost 5 million
metered customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma
and Texas, is moving forward with its plans to build a "smart grid."
Currently, CenterPoint already builds its electrical infrastructure to meet
or exceed National Electric Safety Code standards and has placed its
substations at or above 100-year flood plains. After Ike, 100 percent of the
company's concrete and steel transmission structures were still standing.
Further, 99.2 percent of CenterPoint's wooden poles in backyards remained
standing. Nevertheless, 2.15 million of its customers were affected by the
hurricane.
In Houston, CenterPoint has been focused since 2005 on testing and
deployment of intelligent grid technology that will automate a large portion
of the emergency response work now undertaken by its mobile workforce.
Instead, using sensors on switches to gather information, the new technology
can allow the system to automatically identify damage to the lines, isolate
it and even identify what type of damage has occurred -- vegetation on lines
or uprooted poles, for example -- and route the appropriate mobile workforce
directly to the source of the damage.
In the meantime, this technology also enables the grid to automatically
reroute power around the affected lines and self-heal. "It will reroute
power around the damaged area in seconds, with an understanding of what kind
of damage we're dealing with. This makes power restoration in routine events
much faster," LeBlanc says.
State regulators are now assessing how well their domestic utilities
performed with respect to the Hurricanes that lashed out this past summer.
The power companies are not only doing the necessary leg work to get
customers back on line. Many are also updating their grid technologies.
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