Uncovering the Root Cause of Reliability Failures

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It is critical for electric utilities to be able to quickly and efficiently determine the root cause of any reliability failure.  This is especially true when you consider that weather-related outages have increased 78% in the past 10 years.  Simply put, the faster an issue can be diagnosed, the lower the impact to customers, employees, regulators, and other critical stakeholders.

How to Determine and Mitigate the Root Cause of a Failure

Oftentimes, the same root cause can create repeat failures.  For this reason, one of the best things you can do is to conduct an initial baseline grid resiliency assessment.  Ideally, this assessment would incorporate data from a variety of systems into a model that can then be analyzed for insights by artificial intelligence and/or machine learning.

The types of systems that might be involved in this baseline analysis include but are not limited to Outage Management Systems (OMS), Geographical Information Systems (GIS), SCADA systems, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Meter Data Management (MDMS), Customer Information Systems (CIS), Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), and Work and Asset Management Systems (WMS/AMS).

Once the resiliency assessment is complete, you’ll be able to:

• Identify both short-term and long-term repair needs.
• Optimize labor, time, and costs.
• Improve the accuracy of root cause identification protocols.
• Reduce outages and enhance customer satisfaction.
• Identify network optimization opportunities.
• Gain a better understanding of equipment loading and utilization rates.
• Obtain financial insights for OPEX and CAPEX planning.
• Understand the relationship and impact of external factors like vegetation, fire hazards, and contamination on grid modernization initiatives.

As time goes on, additional completed enhancements will uncover additional challenges and opportunities to incorporate into strategic and tactical plans.

In the final analysis, utilities cannot mitigate problems they are not aware of, and this awareness must be framed in data.  By performing a grid resiliency assessment, the overall ability to detect and resolve the root cause of issues will increase dramatically.