Electricity Today T&D Magazine

Examining the evolution of outage management systems

BY GERALD GRAY & JOHN SIMMINS, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)

Once again, a major storm event, in this case Hurricane Sandy, has brought increased attention to a utility’s capability to respond to and mitigate damage to its infrastructure. With all of the investment that the utility industry has seen in infrastructure over the last few years, with major projects and the U.S. Department of Energy matching funds, ratepayers rightly want to know where their money has gone and why they are still seeing significant outages and outage durations of such lengths. This is a reasonable concern. However, what people outside of the industry typically do not understand is the challenges facing the utility industry as the grid evolves.

A significant portion of the funds for Smart Grid efforts are focused on smart-meter acquisition, deployments, and communication infrastructure investments. Ratepayers probably recall...