EPB’s famed smartgrid has allowed the company to better respond to power outages and expected failures after storms and other problems, but during a board meeting on Friday, leadership talked about how it may allow it to do much more.
Chief Operating Officer David Wade said that thanks to innovative analysis by employees at EPB, they’re learning how to better utilize the immense amount of data that is constantly collected by the grid.
The first example he cited was a situation in which they were able to identify a broken transformer that serves a three-phase customer, a business that uses more power than the average Chattanooga residence, before the transformer fully failed.
By retroactively examining the voltage of that unit, employees were able to determine that it was underperforming and was actually going to fail in the coming weeks, leaving customers without electricity.
From that situation, they were able to identify similar patterns in eight other transformers operating for three-phase customers that also required maintenance. Now they are developing algorithms to do the same thing for one-phase customers, residences, which make up the bulk of their customer base.
Mr. Wade also announced that in-depth analysis has allowed employees to reliably pinpoint sections of wire prone to damage from contact between wires.
He said that when electrical lines come into contact with one another as a result of high winds or a sudden power surge, outages occur leaving customers without power.
But finding the problematic section of wire has always been a problem.
Previously, EPB could only narrow down the search to anywhere between 10 and 30 miles of wire and employees would spend weeks searching for burn marks indicating an issue.
Now, through the use of data and modeling tools, that search through a haystack may be at an end.
In the example Mr. Wade presented, an instance in which wires made contact was identified and geographically pinpointed by sifting through a mountain of data that the grid is constantly collecting. Here, 25,000 data points over 1.5 seconds showed exactly where and when the outage occurred.
Instead of searching for what would have potentially been weeks, workers were able to go directly to the issue and address it by moving the lines further apart.
As EPB continues to reap the rewards of data collection from the smartgrid, the company has high hopes that customers will also benefit from solutions to problems that were previously thought impossible to overcome.