Day in the life of a utility operations manager in a smart grid world

By Louis Szablya

As we move closer to a smarter grid, it becomes apparent that the innovative systems and technologies will touch nearly every person in the utility.  This is the last article in this four-part “Day in the Life” series.  So far we have explored how the daily activities of a lineman, an engineer, and a customer service representative might benefit from the new capabilities of the smart grid.  Today we look at an operations manager.

Operations managers have a difficult job because they are responsible for making sure everything works correctly all the time while working indirectly through others.

7:30 a.m.  While riding the metro to work, the manager thinks about a problem that has been bothering her—Why were the Division 25 distribution statistics the worst of any division in the system?  While still within the mandated limits, outage minutes for some feeders in Division 25 had been slowly creeping up to unacceptable levels over the last two years.

8:02 a.m.  In the office, the manager receives an alert on her screen - there is an outage in Division 25 affecting 1,500 customers.  The manager switches over to the distribution management system portal to watch how the system is responding in close-to real-time.  In two minutes, power has been restored to all but 200 customers.

The manager reviews a root cause analysis report showing the outage statistics for the feeder that just tripped are on the high side but not extreme.  It also indicated that there is a higher than normal failure rate of connectors on that feeder.

8:15 a.m.  Since all the utility’s data are in a coordinated repository, the manager can see the age of field assets and notices that the feeders with the higher outage rates were all constructed in the same year.  However, not all feeders constructed that year were having problems even though they were all the same voltage in similar neighborhoods.

10:15 a.m.  The manager meets with the distribution engineer and tells him about the correlation between the higher outage rates on some feeders and the age of those feeders.  The engineer finds this interesting and mentions that, earlier in the day, a line crew had shown him an odd construction method from the field on one of those feeders. 

10:30 a.m.  The manager receives a call from the local TV station asking about the recent outage.  The manager has all the needed information at hand and is able to give the reporter a full briefing, including how many customers were affected, for how long, and the time it took to repair.  The manager also knows exactly what failed since the field report was filed just minutes before, along with notes from engineering on the unusual construction technique.

1:00 p.m. The manager and engineer meet again to talk about the Division 25 problems.  The engineer reports that the odd construction technique had something to do with the outage.  At the time the feeders were built, there was a shortage of a particular standard connector that the line crews preferred to use.  Because Division 25 was growing so fast, the inventory of the standard connectors was depleted and an alternate connector was used.  Some of the crews were not familiar with the alternative connector’s differences and made what they felt were necessary field modifications.  This was not documented in the asset management system because the construction had occurred prior to its implementation, and therefore the correlation was difficult to see.  However, the purchasing history was available for that time period, and the engineer noticed the increased use of the non-standard connectors in Division 25.  The manager asked the engineer to come up with a plan to review all the suspect feeders in Division 25 and determine if the connectors should be replaced.

By having access to the utility’s data through a unified interface, the manager is able to perform ad-hoc queries that can provide the incremental information to direct business decisions.  This same capability can help a utility identify regions, divisions, or feeders that are operating most efficiently by tying operating performance to revenues and expenses.  This new level of business intelligence will allow utility managers and executives to better deploy their limited capital to optimize electric service.

Louis Szablya is a director of smart grid integration with SAIC, where he helps clients identify and resolve integration issues that arise as smart grid technologies are adopted.

Be sure to read …

Day in the life of a customer service rep in a smart grid world

Day in the life of a distribution engineer in a smart grid world

Day in the life of a lineman in a smart grid world