Self-healing capabilities of smart grid solutions minimize blackouts

Author: Julio Cesar Martins Schneider Electric Blog

Until recently, electric utilities were heavily dependent on customers for notifications of an outage. Now, using smart grid solutions and self-healing capabilities, utilities can remotely monitor power equipment to:

• quickly identify faults
• shorten the frequency and duration of outages
• recover faster

It is a critical advancement, since even short disruptions can inconvenience customers and cause financial and productivity losses.

One of the primary characteristics of a smart grid is its ability to self-heal. Self-healing capabilities minimize blackouts because they allow for continuous self-assessments that inspect, analyze, react to, and automatically respond to problems. This is possible through the widespread deployment of sensors and other intelligent devices and automated controls that check and evaluate the status and condition of the network to identify abnormalities and problems.

Using this information, the grid can agilely and accurately isolate network failure and react to protect the power infrastructure. This intelligent automation allows more effective monitoring and decision making without human intervention. The overall result is a more reliable grid that maximizes uptime and increases the efficiency and security of your systems.

Technology has also changed the way utilities can respond to an outage — there’s less fumbling to determine the wheres, whens, and whys of the problem. Fault location, isolation, and service restoration (FLISR) technology lets utilities:

• get power back on faster by detecting the fault location quickly using real-time information collected from field devices
• reconfigure the flow of electricity to resupply power to the de-energized parts of the distribution network
• reduce the number of customers affected by the outage

The information properly routes emergency repair crews to the precise location so they can begin fixes quickly. FLISR technology has reduced the customer minutes of interruption (CMI) by up to 51% for an outage event and reduced the number of customers interrupted (CI) by up to 45%, according to a U.S. report.

The electrical grid will always be at risk of outage, caused by weather, equipment failure, wildlife, human error, and even sabotage, but with technological advancements, you can troubleshoot problems before they occur and get up and running faster after an outage.

Learn more about how technology is transforming utilities and discover a strategy for successfully transitioning to a more digitized utility in our white paper “How distribution utilities succeed in digital transformation.”