THE WINTER OF 2003-2004: A MAJOR STORM RAGES across the Lake Tahoe area for nine days, dumping 15 ft (4.6 m) of snow on the higher elevations and 12 ft (3.7 m) of snow outside the offices of Truckee Donner Public Utility District (TDPUD; Truckee, California, U.S.). Most, if not all, of TDPUD's 13,000 customers' meters stop turning; a permanent population of 15,000 and possibly another 35,000 visitors are affected by the power outage. Besides damage in TDPUD's service territory, a key transmission line between Reno (Nevada, U.S.) and Truckee, operated by Sierra Pacific, is out of commission. Sierra Pacific will have to hike out to find and fix the problem; thus some of TDPUD's customers will be without power for seven days.

As the TDPUD management team begins to work on the situation, they find themselves in a large conference room with a large white board and no idea where the damage is or where the crews are working.

NO REPEATS

This storm-management scenario will not recur in the winter of 2005-2006. TDPUD has put automation in place to ensure it won't happen again. Serendipitously, much of the automation put into service since that fateful winter has been completely cost-justified by productivity increases in construction design.

According to Ian Fitzgerald, GIS coordinator, TDPUD knew it needed automation tools long before the big storm. The utility installed a SCADA system in 1999 and a geographical information system (GIS), the ArcFM, from Miner & Miner (M&M; Ft. Collins, Colorado, U.S.) in the fall of 2000. And in 2003, they began working with M&M as an early adopter on an outage management system (OMS), M&M's Responder. Final testing of the Responder took place in fall 2004 and the OMS went live in January 2005. Other new automation-based tools were also installed.

Today, customers phone the call center (CC) to report a power outage. The CC representative enters the information into an M&M Web portal and the outage information reaches OMS. If it is a call-out situation, OMS pages the on-call person, who may live in Reno. (This early notification reduces outage time by at least 10 minutes.) Based on several calls, the OMS predicts the root cause of the outage. The on-call person gets the outage information on his field computer via a wireless node. Arriving at the field site, if examination reveals the root-cause prediction to be wrong, the service person can use his field device to obtain an upstream feeder trace and a GIS-based travel map on how to get to the next upstream device that may be the source of the outage.

If the damage is too extensive for the service person to repair alone, such as a tree down on the lines, he can “draw” a red line of the situation on a GIS map and upload the information to the office via a wireless node. Thus, management is being constantly updated on the evolving field situation through GIS, OMS and wireless field devices.

OMS keeps track of all customers who called in an outage. After restoration, CC staff uses this information to personally call back all those customers to confirm their power has been restored. The TDPUD governing board has decreed that all customer contact will be personal: no interactive voice response (IVR) systems allowed.

Fitzgerald noted that the information available to the field service person enables an inexperienced junior person to be as effective as a senior who thoroughly knows the whole distribution system. Furthermore, Fitzgerald has been pleased to learn that the senior people use the GIS/OMS just like the juniors do, which shows that staff has confidence in the accuracy of the systems.

SERENDIPITY

Construction designs are now done completely electronically. The designer “draws” the design in the GIS using M&M's Designer product, using predefined compatible units. An in-house developed software application links the completed design to TDPUD's accounting system, which produces a construction materials list and estimated costs of parts and labor. Comparing the old manual method of design to what's in place today, Fitzgerald stated that large jobs take 100 hours, compared to 300 hours previously, and small jobs take 3 hours, instead of 16 hours. Construction design productivity alone has justified all GIS costs.

THE FUTURE IS THEIRS TO SEE

TDPUD recently installed a drive-by automated meter reading (AMR) system from Itron (Spokane Valley, Washington, U.S.), reducing the meter-reading time from three days manually to three hours with drive-by. TDPUD is assessing fiber optics to customers, which will enable completely automated meter reading, plus provide real-time power-outage notifications to OMS.