Outage management applications and methods panel session: outage management techniques and experience

Fast and accurate outage management applications are a key to the success of today's distribution utility company. Providing "real time" outage information to the utility operators is the goal of every outage management process. Each utility currently has some form of outage management process in place. This process can be anything from a paper based tracking system to a completely computerized outage system employing fuzzy logic algorithms. Most outage management processes are adequate during normal operating conditions. The time during storm conditions is when the success of the outage management process becomes most critical. A high percentage of all power outages are generated during this time. The intent of this paper is to discuss the applications associated with outage management and some of the methods which they employ. The possible applications include: trouble call systems, outage management systems, crew management systems, fault isolation and service restoration, fault location, switching procedure management, dynamic graphical displays, tracing, voice recognition unit (VRU), calculations, etc. References are made, throughout this paper, to the Chugach Electric Association (CEA) distribution applications.