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Outage Management & Restoration


BIRDS AND SUBSTATION OUTAGES

Birds wreak havoc at hundreds of substations every year, undermining system reliability and costing millions. Bird incursions can have disastrous results: equipment damage, outages and expensive cleanups due to corrosive droppings.Even worse: the traditional deterrents provide only temporary,...

Infrastructure & Technologies


Weathering the Power Quality Storm

How weather affects power quality on the electric grid BY ALDEN WRIGHT & MARK STEPHENS, Electric Power Research Institute Utilities have long understood that weather and grid power quality are closely linked. As anyone who keeps up with the news will note, the last few years have seen a...

Underground Distribution


Detecting Faults in Underground Networks

Enhancing protection using directional faulted circuit indicators BY CHRISTOPHER EVANICH, Thomas & Betts Underground electrical networks provide reliable service to end users, but create problems for utility personnel in locating faults. Electric utilities who utilize an underground network...

Case Study


FERC Complaint Targets Duke, PJM Transmission Planning

A coalition of large energy consumers and ratepayer advocates has filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), urging the agency to prohibit transmission owners from independently planning "local" transmission projects exceeding 100 kilovolts (kV). The coalition argues...

Conductors & Materials


Facing Wildfire? Choose Toughened Glass Insulators

Insulators under fire, what are we talking about? A line directly in the fire is considered as lost A line near the heat of a fire can be saved What is the condition of insulators on a line nearby a fire? Reliability of insulators during or after a fire is a key consideration for T&D...

Pole Line Hardware


Overhead T&D

Smart Meters for Outage Management

Reviewing the benefits and addressing the obstacles

BY RON CLANTON & MARK HOLLIDAY, KPMG LLP

The outage management process has undergone remarkable changes over the last several decades. The need to respond to power outages when they occur has been around since the first lines were run from utility to customer. The outage management system (OMS) applications of today are far different from systems used just a decade ago. Higher customer demand for reliability and...

Overhead T&D Articles