Reducing Residential Outages Has Never Been So Critical

It has never been more important to reduce the impact of outages on residential customers. With more people relying on electricity for work, learning, communication, and entertainment, even brief interruptions can cause significant disruption to daily life.

Responding quickly to an outage now means more than just restoring power. It means keeping students connected to their virtual classrooms, supporting employees working remotely, and ensuring families stay comfortable and connected. In many cases, it can even play a role in protecting the health and wellbeing of those who depend on electricity for recovery or care at home.

ADMS applications like an outage management system or Fault Location, Isolation & Service Restoration (FLISR) can help you maximize uptime no matter what the need may be, and can help you ensure residential outages are as short as possible.

How can OMS reduce outage durations?

With features like predictive outage analysis, an OMS can help quickly locate the probable fault location, allowing you to get started on restoration faster. Access to detailed outage information enables you to dispatch field crews within minutes of the first outage report, while real-time damage reports from field crews provides a first-hand account to the control room of the situation. This lets them assess the situation and send out the right specialists and materials required to resolve the situation as soon as possible.

A mobile component for OMS is key for keeping all stakeholders up-to-date. For example, the mobile component to SurvalentONE OMS, Polaris, allows the control room to communicate directly with field crews and reduces the chance of miscommunication, as both teams see the same real-time network connectivity model. You can also receive real-time reports on restorative operations and up-to-the-minute Estimated Times of Restoration (ETOR). Your crews can interact with each other and the control room to coordinate response efforts, and get power restored to your customers quickly and efficiently.

An OMS doesn’t just help you minimize the duration of outages in your network, however. It also improves transparency, leading to higher customer satisfaction. An outage portal integrated with your OMS, for example, lets your customers report outages directly from the website – decreasing the strain on call centers. They can view important details like an ETOR to help them plan accordingly. Other options include the ability to receive updates on outages via social media, text, or telephone, keeping your customers in-the-know at all times.

An outage portal is a key component of Oakville Hydro’s OMS. Their portal includes an outage map for customers to see affected areas, the cause of the disruption, and an ETOR. Using Integrated Voice Response (IVR) with their OMS has also helped the utility deal with the volume of calls coming in during outages and helps assure customers that the outage is being dealt with. (Watch the Oakville Hydro story here.)

Using FLISR to minimize the impact of outages

When outages occur, a FLISR solution can ensure that as few customers are affected as possible. FLISR automatically detects the fault, isolates the faulted area, and reroutes power to restore power to upstream and downstream customers within seconds.

This was the solution Central Georgia Electric Membership Corporation identified to keep the lights on for as many customers as possible during storm season. Since adding FLISR, their System Average Interruption Frequency Index dropped by 32% in the first year of FLISR operation, their SAIDI decreased by 50% within two years, and they estimate that field crews spend about 20% less time restoring outages. (Read the Central Georgia EMC story here.)

There’s a lot riding on your utility’s ability to minimize outage durations for residential customers right now. The COVID-19 curve will flatten and shelter in place practices will be lifted, but it’s unclear if remote working and learning practices will become more commonplace in the future. Solutions like OMS and FLISR can help you keep your customers working and learning effectively – no matter where they are.

Learn more about SurvalentONE OMS, Polaris, and FLISR.