Electricity Today T&D Magazine

Prevent animal- and bird-caused outages to improve reliability

BY MARTY NILES, Cantega Technologies

Utilities in North America are under enormous pressure from regulators, customers, and investors to improve reliability performance. Many of the mergers and acquisitions of utilities around North America are being conditioned on how combining two or more companies would improve statistics from utility indexes and indicators including SAIFI (System Average Interruption Frequency Index), SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) and CAIDI (Customer Average Interruption Duration Index). Utility executives should leave no stone left unturned when addressing this challenge.

While storm hardening with stronger poles, undergrounding of circuits, and lifting substations out of flood areas is being aggressively pursued with billions of dollars in capital spending, many utilities recognize some “low hanging fruit” exists to improve reliability.

“Whereas outages caused by vehicle accidents and storm events are difficult to tackle, animal-caused outages can be addressed using straightforward methods...