Smart Utility

Emergency Restoration Practices Followed by Utility Companies

Oct. 25, 2007

Macrosoft Inc. has released the results of its second annual survey conducted to study the restoration practices of electric utility companies in North America.

Macrosoft Inc. has released the results of its second annual survey conducted to study the restoration practices of electric utility companies in North America. The report examines pain points and documents best practices encountered while restoring power due to large scale outages. This report is the outcome of a detailed online survey conducted earlier this year. The results are based on responses from over 110 storm center personnel across 50 utilities. The report highlights the importance of standardizing operations and leveraging technology to enhance efficiencies while quickly assembling people and equipment. It studies effective deployment, tracking and managing of resources before, during and after the event..

Some interesting findings that emerged from the survey include:

75% of participants indicted they have at least one major outage every year.
40% report that a manual approach to resource management does not provide adequate post event reporting capabilities.
Over 90% deploy contract and/or mutual aid teams during emergency restoration.
52% agreed that automating their storm centers is a corporate priority.

"This year’s survey helped obtain valid data on storm statistics, common practices and challenges faced by utilities during large-scale outages” said Dr. Edward Sable, president, Macrosoft. “Though less than a quarter of the companies have automated systems to handle restorations teams, over 50% state that automation is a corporate priority.” he added. Macrosoft developed Resources on Demand (RoD), a multi-user system that provides storm center personnel the ability to manage resource requests and allocations, track personnel movements, and support logistics during power outages. RoD replaces existing manual processes with a comprehensive application to ensure consistent data integrity and retrieval by storm center personnel. The system leverages historical data and reports to establish best practices used during future events.