STEP 2. CREATING A RESILIENCY PROGRAM 10 Mutual Aid: Continuous communications between the Reliability Coordinator (RC), Transmission Operators (TOP), and Balancing Authorities (BA) in the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council (FRCC) Region ensured coordinated efforts throughout the event and the subsequent restoration. Modernization: Advanced meters and intelligent grid devices were effective to pinpoint outages, operate equipment remotely, and increase efficiency. Modernization: Installation of flood monitors in substations located within the 100-year flood plain resulted in the ability to de-energize substations at the notification of rising water and avoiding catastrophic damage to sensitive station equipment. Modernization: Aerial drones were effective to assess the damage, evaluate work conditions, and enable real-time situational awareness. Infrared capabilities helped identify equipment that needed further inspection. General Readiness: Leveraging social media enabled first-ever communications with Facebook Live and other platforms providing customers with the most current outage and restoration information. Hardening: Hardening and resiliency programs implemented prior to the hurricane significantly reduced the storm damage sustained due to high winds and storm surge. (Author Note: Hardening typically refers to constructing or improving an overhead system asset or facility beyond the typical National Electrical Safety Code (NESC) requirements for a specific geography. Security Measures: Utilities should consider working with local government agencies to develop plans for control and access to heavily impacted areas following a devastating event. From this list, “redundancy” and “modernization” show up frequently. In Exhibit 2.4 various reliance options are described. First on this list is “hardening,” which includes undergrounding of electric infrastructure. In all cases, there is an upfront cost associated with the resiliency actions – both capital and operations and maintenance (O&M) expense. The business case or ratepayers’ justification combined with geographic or risk exposure will dictate the nature and size of the resiliency program. Scenario modeling, using probabilistic risk models to assist in predicting outage impacts after various events, will allow the forecasting of annual impact on infrastructure investment and O&M expense in the following areas: Cable repairs Line modification options Equipment modification options In addition, modeling of customer satisfaction in the areas of outage frequency, duration, and scale paired with other benefits including aesthetics, etc. are linked to traditional reliability performance measures (SAIDI, SAIFI, etc.) and as is pointed out in the following section, non-traditional measures (Total Length of Restoration – TLR) that might better capture the impact of undergrounding strategies that can be swamped or made invisible using traditional performance measures. After establishing a potential resiliency program objective and how a resiliency program can support the pursuit of the objective, the next step in the Playbook is to develop the resiliency program plan.
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