Navigating Storm Response: Improvements and Lessons Learned

From December 31, 2022, to January 16, 2023, SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) experienced an unprecedented series of storms, prompting the utility to launch a “Storm Response Team.” In February 24, its service territory was once again battered by a strong winter storm.

Michael Champ, manager at SMUD, will share the improved processes SMUD’s response team created in 2023 at a T&D World Live session in October. The session will cover how those processes and lessons learned were put to the test in its 2024 storm response efforts.

This presentation will include:

Damage Assessment - increasing from 15 to 100 damage assessors utilizing new damage assessment mobile applications.
Estimated Restoration Time (ERT), which set a new metric to provide ERTs within 8 hours of each outage start time and measuring the accuracy of each ERT.
Customer Communications, upgrading the external website for customers to receive latest information on their respective outage and ERTs.
Line Crew Capacity, which increased capacity through several strategies to run more crews safely and expedite the repair work.

Champ is responsible for a variety of analytic projects and process improvements, including optimizing storm response, evaluating gross margin risks, and long range financial modeling. He started his utility career with SMUD over 10 years ago, managing enterprise performance metrics and capital investment prioritization. Champ earned a Bachelors degree and an MBA from UC Davis.

T&D World spoke with Champ about his background, industry issues and solutions:

TDW: How did you get into the utility industry? Is this something that you always knew you had wanted to do?

Champ: I was working in strategic planning and risk management in the financial sector, but found the work quite abstract and hard to relate to what tangible problems we were solving in the real world. When an opportunity came up to move to SMUD, it seemed like a great opportunity to work on problems directly affecting my community. I did not realize at the time how true that was, and have since had the opportunity to look at where and how we invest our capital, how we support electrification and solar adoption, and how we respond to storms.

TDW: Is there anything from your past that really pointed you to where you are now in your career?

Champ: I have always liked volunteering for projects and initiatives where I can learn new parts of the business. Over time, this led to me working on more diverse and complicated projects. Early in my career in the utility industry, I was focused on reviewing the business cases for all the capital projects. This made me research how different parts of the organization worked, and gave me the opportunity to talk to different engineers across the organization. This has been foundational to help me understand the broader organizational context.

TDW: Have you had a particular person or mentor that has helped you along the way and how did they do that?

Champ: SMUD has been an incredibly supportive environment. The manager who hired me into SMUD gave me a lot of leeway right from the start to push for change in how we prioritize and track capital projects. After he moved on, my director encouraged me to expand my scope of responsibility, and recommended me to work on several enterprise initiatives that helped me build the background knowledge and relationships that allow me to bring together different parts of the business.

TDW: What do you enjoy most about your job now?

Champ: I like having the opportunity to work with talented people from across the organization and learn from their expertise. I get to work on some of the most pressing issues in our industry, and see our projects bring real impacts to our customers and community.

TDW: From your corner of the industry, what are the major problems do you see that need to be addressed?

Champ: There are two main areas I believe will be critical over the next decade. The first is decarbonizing our generation. This includes working through land acquisition, permitting, supply chain, and contracting challenges to build renewable resources, and building a resource portfolio that integrates and manages variable resources. The second is managing shifting load patterns and their impacts on our assets. As customers electrify buildings and fleets, we will see load growth in ways that were not anticipated when we put in infrastructure. Understanding when and where load growth will occur, and its impacts on our assets will be critical to ensure we can meet our customers needs and maintain the reliability they expect.

TDW: Any ideas on what can help those problems?

Champ: To achieve our renewable targets, we need to set ambitious but achievable goals, use project management fundamentals to speed up decision-making, and use an "all of the above" strategy including both grid and distributed resources for composing a portfolio. Managing electrification and asset management will require investments in capturing more data on our assets to monitor their health, and building data pipelines and data science support to augment our engineers in making predictive models that can help us plan and optimize our work.

TDW: What do you think has been one of the most exciting technologies or events that has happened in our industry in your lifetime?

Champ: The growth and maturation of analytic technologies has been impressive. When I started, almost all analyses were done in excel, with data manually copied from one system to another. Today, we are gradually stitching together our data systems so that meter data flows to our outage system, and outage data flows into our maintenance planning. The new technologies allow for far greater data volumes, that let us make meaningful inferences from larger sets of telemetry. All of this together lets us increasingly focus staff on the most meaningful questions, and continually improve our operations.

TDW: What are highlights of your session, or what will you talk about?

Champ: We will be discussing SMUD's experience in recent large storms, and how we have revamped our processes related to damage assessment, restoration, and customer communication. We have build an in-house system that combines outage data, damage assessment data, and our crew schedules to model various scenarios for restoration so that we can provide better communication to customers, and make informed strategic decisions in managing restoration.

TDW: Why is this topic important to the electric utility industry?

Champ: In the wake of Hurricane Beryl, we have plenty of evidence of the impacts of storm response. We can't restore everyone immediately, but as restoration times grow, so do personal hardships, economic losses, and political backlash to utilities. We need to get the lights on as quickly as is safely possible, and communicate with our customers so they can manage the disruption to their lives.

TDW: Why are you passionate about this topic?

Champ: Like most people, I have friends and relatives for whom extended power outages can be especially painful. This includes elderly people with medical needs in a cold dark house, small business owners losing days of sales and inventory, and parents who can't go to work because their children's schools are closed. I have experienced the frustration of not knowing the status of my outage, or getting conflicting information. Over the years, we have greatly improved our visibility to the grid with SCADA and smart meter investments, and to our crews with enhanced mobile apps. We need to make sure we are fully leveraging that data to rapidly understand the storm impacts and share our best information with our customers.

TDW: What will attendees walk away with?

Champ: Attendees will get a window into the strategies SMUD has used to speed up damage assessment, improve situational awareness in a storm, and enhance the customer experience of power restoration on both blue sky and storm days.