Intelligent Utility Jan-Feb 2013

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Hurricane Sandy envelopes the East Coast. Courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
by power sector players. Jeff Lewis, who heads the global energy
consulting practice at PA Consulting Group, which is
tracking utility performance during Sandy, tried to put the
matter into perspective.
“Damage to physical assets was severe,” Lewis said.
“Obviously if a bunch of trees come down, the effectiveness
of schemes of smart technology such as sectionalizing and
automated restoration is quite limited.”
Smart grid, so far
“Such risks are going to persist and we’ll see more and more
extreme events, more variability will hit our systems and
infrastructure,” said Massoud Amin, an IEEE senior member
and a professor of electrical and computer engineering
at the University of Minnesota, where he also serves as
director of the Technological Leadership Institute. “This
brings a wider range of uncertainty to future events. This is
both a local challenge and a regional and national opportunity
to upgrade and harden the system.”
Now, to “the system.” Advanced metering infrastructure
(AMI) and distribution automation (DA) remain the most
widely deployed smart grid technologies, along with geographic
information systems (GIS) and outage management
systems (OMS). All four technologies have been touted to
regulators and customers as contributing to outage detection
and self-healing, as well as customer notification of estimated
time to restoration (ETR). But these systems present
integration challenges. And, currently, fully integrated smart
grid systems are a rarity.
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