The Self-Healing Grid: Already Here and Growing

This blog was originally published on LinkedIn.

The chaos of winter storms is behind us once again: Four straight Nor’easters in March? Snowfall in Texas? Flooding in Paris? And in the calmer moments that follow major storms, our utility customers continually ask us for better ways to respond to the world’s increasingly wild weather patterns. 

My go-to answer is GE’s Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) and Fault Location Isolation and Service Restoration (FLISR). This powerful combination is delivering extraordinary results for our customers around the U.S. and throughout the world. And this message has really resonated in my conversations with numerous utilities over the last two days at GE Power’s #DigitalEnergy Americas User Conference in Seattle.

FLISR takes an overarching view of the network to restore power when outages occur via a self-healing approach. The software can integrate with both “smart” and manual switches to monitor and maintain power reliability in the face of small fault outages or massive weather events. 

When this advanced technology is leveraged on top of a modular ADMS, FLISR can also improve productivity and efficiency and simplify operational workflow, using real-time network information that spans EHV to LV.

Yet, utilities employing FLISR in conjunction with manual switches can still benefit as the software’s data intelligence is derived from the as-operated model of the network. This also means FLISR can adapt to abnormal switching (say construction around a feeder) and continue to monitor best plans for addressing outages. 

At the same time, with the computational power of FLISR, the utility operator gains the ability to run simulations, predict events, proactively train, and ultimately do more to squeeze an outage so that fewer customers are disrupted.

Several GE customers are leveraging FLISR today. One company, currently controlling about 8,000 megawatts of regulated electricity, first tested FLISR on a small group of its feeders in an advisory mode. FLISR was able to sense network faults and propose reconfigure plans, which would then be approved by human operators. When that pilot proved successful, the utility moved forward in just six months to roll out FLISR in all 1,000+ of its feeders.

Now, FLISR runs in a self-healing capacity to:

• Identify faults
• Propose reconfiguration plans
• Issue controls to address the outage
• Provide power flow analysis

Human operators do monitor what FLISR is doing, but the software at this point uses telemetry and operator input to intelligently and dynamically optimize the power distribution.

The streamlining of processes from a fully automated, self-healing network is obvious. Outage times can be reduced dramatically, and the numbers of customers impacted can also be cut down.

But the vast majority of FLISR's in use today are field-distributed, hardware-centric versions. These cost much more per end point customer being served, and the expense is linear. In other words, both the initial purchase and operation & maintenance costs do not decrease as the system grows.

ADMS provides a dynamic, model-based system, so the operations technology (OT) cost drops off dramatically once you have the ADMS model built from GIS and operating. Adding more schemes in your system is automatic from the OT perspective as you purchase and install additional (lower cost) switch gear in the field.

With this model, GE is powering our customers’ industry-leading use of ADMS-based FLISR, and we have the best overall success rate of getting full systemwide ADMS deployed -- the essential underpinning of self-healing FLISR. 

For one North American GE IOU customer running FLISR in production with closed loop operation, FLISR was able to restore 9,488 customers in less than 2 minutes during a thunderstorm. The following week it restored 5,308 customers in less than 1.5 minutes.

In a single year this customer had 32 successful FLISR events with a 3-minute average restoration time, with approximately 20,000 customers restored automatically.

At the same time, FLISR’s data insights help better target the efforts of crews reconstructing switches or addressing faults in the field. Further, when FLISR is running on the network and providing intelligence to the switches (directly to automated switches or smart sensors) or funneling the relevant information to the crews handling manual switches, the computational and engineering power needed to determine the best plan of action in an outage is minimized.

FLISR is quick and efficient at figuring out what is happening and what should happen and adapting as the environment and inputs change. With FLISR isolating faults, making decisions, and doing it that much faster, utilities are finally getting the tools they need to get back up and running fast in the face of unprecedented weather wackiness.