The Challenge of Successful Storm Recovery
Aside from maybe a billing dispute, no one cares about their electric utility during so-called “blue sky days,” but during an outage, if storm recovery fails to meet customer and regulator expectations, you better believe that public relations problems are sure to follow. Therefore, it’s critical to develop strategies, processes and protocols designed to overcome the most common challenges of storm restoration.
Reasons Why Storm Recovery Often Falls Short
There are many common shortcomings associated with efficient outage restoration and recovery. Take a look at the abbreviated list below – do any of these sounds familiar?
- Outdated plans or processes that fail to account for changes in staffing, organizational structures, and systems.
- Insufficient succession planning.
- Poorly-defined second roles.
- Lack of stakeholder communication.
- Lack of training or failure to execute an adequate number of exercises and drills.
- Missed opportunities to capture and act upon lessons learned from previous storms.
- Inaccurate event profiling or damage forecasting models.
Luckily, these issues can be fixed with the proper level of attention. For example, the first four shortcomings listed above can be mitigated by conducting an annual review of plans and processes, making updates based on analyzing changes in staffing and systems, and communicating the updates to all stakeholders. Additionally, a formal succession plan should be developed and followed.
Obviously, training, exercises and drills are extremely important so that employees can learn what to do during storm recovery and restoration, and then put this knowledge into practice. Training programs must also be developed and launched for new technologies, and systems and processes should be stress-tested regularly. Similarly, a formalized lessons learned process must be developed and followed in order to help prevent the same mistakes from being made over and over.
Regarding the last bullet point on the list, storm profiling is critical in order to help frame and optimize the decision-making process. Check out this extremely detailed article to learn more about how to do this. It’s not very recent, but many of the same issues still ring true.
The bottom line is that, in the eyes of customers and regulators, an electric utility is only as good as the last thing it does. Improving and optimizing storm recovery and restoration efforts will help ensure that the last thing you do is consistently positive.
