Targeting high-risk circuits to improve infrastructure reliability and reduce customer outages

The challenge

While electric distribution infrastructure is built to be resilient, weather and device failures can cause power outages. Because of this, a northeastern electric utility hoped to find a way to minimize the frequency and duration of outages while optimizing its costs to achieve reliability goals.

The solution

The utility teamed up with E Source Data Science to quantify and predict system-wide, condition-based risk at the circuit level, defined by:

• Outage frequency
• Outage duration
• Customer impact

To do this, E Source developed an interactive, user-friendly dashboard for the utility that shows a system overview, circuit risk heatmap, circuit risk detail, and performance monitoring (figure 1). The dashboard allows the utility to assess a variety of risk scenarios to see how different mitigation decisions could reduce overall risk and enhance the mitigation response.

Figure 1: E Source’s interactive dashboard targets higher-risk circuits to reduce outage frequency, duration, and impact

The results

Using the interactive dashboard, the utility can identify high-risk circuits and take action to reduce outage frequency, duration, and customers impacted.

Moving forward, the utility will be able to more efficiently prioritize and plan work across its distribution infrastructure. As a result, the utility now has a tool that allows for data-driven decision-making to increase reliability, decrease costs by adjusting outage mitigation, and support grid modernization efforts.