OMS, it’s a blackout!

Recent extreme weather should serve as a lesson to network companies – next time they need to act more quickly, or suffer financial and reputational damage, says Thomas Crawford.

Extreme weather has battered the UK and the rest of Europe since just before Christmas. Last month Serbia declared a localised state of emergency because of the snow storms that have blitzed the centre and east of the continent. In the UK the impact of these sustained nationwide storms has been huge disruption to national power networks. Approximately 750,000 properties were cut off, some left without power for up to five days over Christmas.

Subsequently, energy bosses and network management companies were publicly criticised by a select committee for their tardy response to these events. The energy firms were ordered to review their policies and processes for compensation where customers without power for between 48 and 60 hours were paid a “pittance” of  £27. Ministers will expect a far greater compensation scheme, which means future power outages (as a result of extreme weather) will affect the profitability of energy firms in future.

So now that network operators and their respective chief executives and managing directors have regrouped, questions will be asked of their operational infrastructure teams about contingency plans for the next wave of adverse weather. This process usually begins with “what went wrong?” and then progresses to “how do we fix it?”

This will lead to an evaluation of embedded outage management systems (OMS) and processes to remove weaknesses and upgrade legacy systems with advanced technology based on geographical information systems (GIS).

Leading edge OMS is required to integrate varied operational systems together such as advanced metering infrastructure, GIS, customer information systems, interactive voice response, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, distribution management systems and mobile data systems to link near real-time and dynamic data from the field with customer and asset information to provide an accurate means of predicting the location and cause of the power outage and enable effective power restoration.

However, there are some challenges and problems with the current way many OMS are used that could cause the delay in restoring the full network. These include:

•    a customer calling to report an outage is still the main input for traditional OMS. During severe storms, phone lines to the call centre can be jammed and important outage information can therefore be missed or delayed;

•    dedicated call handling and interactive voice response is not intelligent enough to filter outage calls from other customer calls accurately;

•    OMS has limited intelligence to detect and verify nested outages, which can go unnoticed for several hours during severe storms;

•    crews dispatched to the incorrect location or return trips for nested outages have cost implications;

•    dispatchers relying on customers reporting outages often have limited visibility to the electrical network conditions.

Utility firms are in luck. Over the past decade there has been significant improvement to OMS, largely due to the advent and large-scale use of smart meters and the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) network. AMI extends to the ends of a utility network, in this case the customer’s home. It can provide remote monitoring of homes to properly assess the scale and gravity of outages prior to receiving the first call from a customer.

Smart meters are designed to send an alert when they experience a sustained interruption of electrical supply. This alert is often referred to as a “last gasp” after the outage occurs and before the meter loses its capability to communicate due to the loss of power.

This can be used not only to pinpoint outages but also to verify power restoration, enabling utilities to proactively identify customers whose power is still out, and those who have been restored. This is crucial because call centres deal with large call volumes and power-out requests. The importance of the customer power-out request naturally escalates and becomes more severe over time. It is important for decision-makers to prioritise restoration efforts with real-time information. The effective dispatch of appropriate personnel and equipment will save time and expedite full power restoration.

The OMS, through AMI and other processes, will collect messages from all smart meters and then analyse this information for the utility control centre dispatchers. They will be armed with more accurate information about where the fault is located on the network, which is valuable for understanding the magnitude of outage incidents and prioritising restoration efforts. While in the process of repairing the faults, dispatchers can also ping an individual meter or a group of meters to confirm that power has been restored. Pinging a group of meters often results in identifying nested outages that were previously hidden under a larger, known system outage. Crews can then be dispatched to attend to the nested outages before they are moved to a different area.  

All of these benefits help to expedite the speed of repairs and ultimately the restoration of power. Almost understated, it also helps reduce the operational expenditure when managing a power outage, and properly validates compensation claims.

Because customers depend on electricity to survive, utilities are sensitive about publicly discussing the costs of managing power outages. However, cost is a real concern. The utility industry is facing many cost challenges in replacing ageing infrastructure, maintaining customer satisfaction, meeting a growing demand for power, improving reliability, and regulatory issues and environmental concerns. An overhaul of OMS may now jump up the list of priorities, if it was not there already.

Europe will endure more adverse weather. How power firms look at OMS and its capability to efficiently identify power outages with AMI, recognise potential faults and manage repair crews, could mean that customers are not at risk unnecessarily. It may also mean firms avoid huge compensation claims from customers.

Thomas Crawford, senior manager, Global Smart Energy Services, Capgemini