Georgia Power Invests in New Technology to Improve Restoration
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Georgia Power is making all the right moves to improve outage restoration times by leveraging innovative technology. It’s all part of a $1.3 billion power grid investment plan designed to improve the operational efficiency of the company as well as the lives of the company’s customers.
What New Technologies have Georgia Power Implemented?
Much of what the company is doing falls into the “smart grid” category. One element involves devices that can pinpoint the cause of an outage. This not only helps address problems more quickly or even prevent the outage from occurring in the first place, but it can also be used to isolate the compromised lines and reroute the power, all of which helps minimize the customer impact.
The isolation aspect is the most interesting, because the technology can actually divide power flow for customers sharing the same line! In other words, if an outage occurs, not everyone who shares the line would lose power. It’s a level of granularity that was not possible in the 20th century. This is huge and can really help minimize the overall impact.
Some other improvements the company is rolling out include undergrounding some if its power lines, replacing older poles with poles that are stronger and more resistant to damage, and raising the elevation of substations in areas prone to flooding or windy conditions. In other words, “storm hardening 101.”
So far, customer prices have not increased, which is impressive but unlikely to hold true over time. That said, I applaud what Georgia Power is doing. Any infrastructure investment north of a billion dollars is a huge undertaking, but these are the kind of steps that need to be taken to fortify the grid over the long haul. And, perhaps somewhat selfishly, any and all fortification efforts to the grid can only help from an emergency planning perspective.
