Leveraging AMI for Outage Management

By 2015, over 40 million advanced electric meters will be deployed by the US utilities. A significant number, however, it still makes up for only 25% of all electric customers. The good news is that almost all major IOUs, who are the traditional trend setters in the US electric market, have already dared the devil and are in the last laps of AMI deployment. Time has come to think “so, now, what?” All these utilities had compelling business cases to convince their commissioners, but now, billions of dollars later, the question remains whether they will really be able to offset the customer surcharge by achieving promised efficiency gains.  They have got some really cool toys, petabytes of data and some brilliantly fluffy ideas, - but they still need to figure out how to connect the dots.

I intend to write some fuzzy posts on these fluffy ideas in days (or months) to come, - but here is something that many utilities have already embarked on: enabling outage management process with AMI. There is a wide range of benefits - from instantaneous outage detection to nested outage determination to device analysis - but the biggest saver is the simplest: avoiding dispatch for those 30% to 50% of trouble calls for which there are no utility side issues.

Meter events can be leveraged to automatically determine when a meter suffers an outage and when it wakes back up. AMI systems can process this information, infer the outage and notify the Outage Management System (OMS). Upon restoration, OMS can auto-verify the restoration status by requesting AMI and detect nested outages, if any.

Implementation mechanics will vary largely depending on specific AMI technologies, but what I found thrillingly fascinating is the possibility that Meter Data Management Systems (MDMS), as they mature, will act as virtual Distribution SCADA. When it comes to outage notification, there is a huge hiatus between a SCADA-sensed breaker and a Customer-notified site – any intermediate fault location has to wait to be determined by the OMS. This gap can be potentially bridged by MDMS by utilizing the network connectivity model against the meter events. So far, most MDM vendors have been shaky about encroaching into the prohibited space of OMS, - but time will tell.