By Satish Saini, HEXstream utilities industry specialist 

White House October 9 news release: Hurricane Helene Recovery Continues as US Administration Prepares for Hurricane Milton. More than 8,000 Federal personnel are on the ground across the Southeast, including in Florida, to continue Hurricane Helene recovery efforts and respond to the impacts of Hurricane Milton. More than $344 million in assistance has been provided to Hurricane Helene survivors.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper news release: More than 86,000 customers remain without power as of Tuesday, down from a peak of more than 1 million across western North Carolina.

Dominion Energy, a utility providing electricity service to 3.6 million homes and businesses in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina confirmed on Oct 9 that their teams led the herculean mission to rebuild the company’s electric grid and restore power to more than 446,000 customers following historic devastation from the mountains to the coast. Their labor-intensive work entailed replacing more than 1,000 transformers, 2300 poles, 7,000 spans of wire to get the lights back on safely and as efficiently as they could while working in dangerous conditions.

Georgia Power, a utility that is a part of the Southern Company system, mentioned that Hurricane Helene caused widespread destruction across the state of Georgia. Their updated damage estimates illustrating the extensive destruction of Hurricane Helene include 8,300+ power poles that must be repaired or replaced, 21,000+ spans of wire damaged equivalent to approximately 1,000 miles, 2,000+ transformers damaged and 3,200+ trees on power lines that must be removed or addressed to restore
power.

While the final data on overall losses has yet to be tallied, we know that Hurricanes Helene and Milton caused widespread destruction to power grids, resulting in prolonged outages and complex restoration processes due to the extent of damage to the infrastructure and the ongoing safety hazards.

My sympathies go out to all those affected. And at moments like this I usually ponder this question: Are our grids resilient and adaptive enough to perform amid increasingly severe weather challenges? It is quite obvious now that we cannot stop these weather events. But we can focus on the following two strategies:

• Enhancing adaptability of the grid through strengthening the aging transmission and distribution grid infrastructure and assets to withstand these challenges. This is a proactive strategy. Grid adaptability can be enhanced by hardening the aging infrastructure, upgrading transmission towers and distribution poles, adopting an underground distribution system in vulnerable areas, and other measures to minimize physical damage during such events. Due to the huge and scattered T&D systems in many of these communities, significant investments have to be made, and there is often resistance in this respect due to budget constraints.
• Enhancing the resiliency of the grid to recover fast from the damages. This is a reactive strategy. Boosting resiliency enables quicker recoveries after extreme weather events. Resiliency can be enhanced by adopting smart-grid technologies such as EMS/NMS, ADMS, OMS, FLISR, AMI and other automation technologies that enable quicker fault detection, isolation, and restoration of power, which shrinks outage duration after weather events such as the hurricanes we just endured.

The effective integration of distributed-energy resources (DERs) such as solar, wind and battery-storage systems through localized microgrids enhances grid flexibility by supplying power to critical infrastructure and communities. This ensures localized resilience.

And with the use of multiple automation technologies and platforms (as described above) and advancements in AL/ML, data analytics and cloud services, we are enhancing the efficiency through integration of data available from all such sources.  This further improves forecasting, preparedness and asset-health performance analysis.

Of course, support from policy makers and regulators is always helpful; they have the authority to greenlight and fund critical grid-modernization initiatives. We must also place greater emphasis on stricter regulatory-compliance standards to reduce losses and enhance operational efficiency. Extreme weather events like those we’ve just encountered can quicken the approval of such strategies. 

Lastly, continuous efforts by the grid-supporting industry—think manufacturers, vendors, suppliers and consulting companies—can provide support, expertise, incentives and roadmaps to enhance resiliency. 

An example: HEXstream’s Outage Management System (OMS Analytics), AMI use cases, and our Utility360 suite, which are currently helping most large domestic utilities address weather-related outages and enhancing grid reliability, in the face of ever-worsening challenges from Mother Nature. 

In short, we have all of the tools and technologies needed to weather these storms. Connect with us here to discuss the Outage Management Analytics component of Utility360.