How to Rapidly Decentralize Your Utility’s Outage Response Workforce During Periods of High Activity

With many electric utilities currently in the midst of digital transformation, electric utility operators with Advanced Distribution Management Solution (ADMS) software have the advantage of a comprehensive, real-time view of the grid that features a multitude of data points. Sitting at their consoles, they see streaming information from across the grid allowing them to expedite outage response and restoration and efficiently communicate with both field crews and customers.

But during times of severe weather, or even short but intense activity after-hours, control center staff can become overloaded and look to augment the restoration process with non-control center personnel. This division of labor allows the control center to focus on high-priority, high-impact outages while off-loading much of the routine restoration and crew management work. As a customer recently told me, “You can’t train dispatchers while you’re preparing for a storm.” As a response to this need GE Digital launched Storm Assist, an easy-to-use application that allows utilities to decentralize outage dispatch as well as rapidly expand their outage response workforce during times of intense activity.

The Control Center is the nerve center of the operations process. It is built around physical security and the needs of a relatively small number of people. Space is at a premium. Storm Assist was designed as a “multiplier,” that is to say an application that maintains security while giving the utility an almost limitless capacity to expand. Storm Assist provides a subset of ADMS capability, focusing on those functions essential to restoring power associated with routine outages. And importantly, this secure browser-based solution is simple to deploy and use, and efficient.

Storm Assist offers real results:

• Frees up control center staff to focus on complex outage restoration activities
• Creates a near limitless number of outage restoration workstations during severe weather events
• Scales rapidly without need for specialized hardware, licenses, etc.
• Provides real-time data access to the ADMS
• Security is built-in with high-level ADMS authentication model

The recently released version, Storm Assist 1.5, features integration with AMI systems and improved support for major event days, single customer outages and in-service incidents.

Storms don’t necessarily happen every day, but when power goes down our customers need a solution they can use to reliably and securely scale the number of dispatching personnel. By providing data in the lightweight Storm Assist solution, utilities can quickly augment staff cost-effectively without sacrificing security. Storm Assist uses the core ADMS authentication model to validate users and protect data.

Under constant pressure to improve response time, many of our customers had developed similar workarounds or rely on third-party integrations. But these tend to be complicated from an IT perspective and are often costly. Storm Assist users benefit from both a tabular and geographic view, and smooth navigation between the two, similar to our primary ADMS clients.

Storm Assist gets the mission critical data to the right people at the right time in an secure, browser-based system. Whatever the situation, Storm Assist allows an occasional user to assign one or more crews to outage restoration work and interact with the crew during the outage lifecycle (assigned, dispatched, in-route, onsite and close out activities). Users have access to real-time network data, customer calls and comments, real-time crew locations and status updates. Restoration information associated with that outage (regarding a failed device or any kind of ancillary data) is captured as well.

This durable yet low-profile solution is also useful in off-shift situations. After hours, work may be transferred to a smaller branch office. There’s not always a lot happening, but when something does go wrong these users need the data access without the full ADMS. Storm Assist is designed for a single screen such as a standard laptop. And the Storm Assist application needs little-to-no training. Someone who is familiar with the outage restoration process can generally quickly figure it out. The application is simple, straightforward, and natural to someone who already understands the process.

Whether its summer thunderstorm, a winter ice storm, or a hurricane or flood, Storm Assist enables quick augmentation of control center staff. Though these staff members are not replaced by Storm Assist functionality, the solution allows these outage pros to focus on the difficult tasks requiring switching, partial restorations, or multiple crews. Meanwhile, using Storm Assist they can offload simple, routine tasks to people who are not day-to-day ADMS users.

Ultimately, Storm Assist enhances the core competency of outage restoration in a highly secure, high-performance tool. This GE application lives very well in lower-security zones outside of the control center without requiring specialized hardware or software.

The need to empower decentralized and secure operations has never been more evident. With Storm Assist utilities can help their employees stay safe from a health perspective, maintaining their well-being while enabling them to keep their community safe by continuing to deliver effective outage response. With Storm Assist we are offering a powerful functionality to let utilities do what they have to and do it the right way.

The latest version of Storm Assist, part of GE Digital’s ADMS solution, is now generally available.  Learn more.