STEP 1. DEFINING PROGRAM OBJECTIVES 5 over five years with two or more standard deviations from the system average will be made more resilient and reliable where 100% will fall below historic two standard deviations of the system average. Customer satisfaction: Outage duration reduction – Routine and traditional root cause analysis can identify geography, line segment, or equipment type that exhibit longer duration outage occurrence. Once analyzed, strategies and tactics undertaken can reduce the potential for long-duration outages and improve both resiliency and reliability. An example goal: Line segments or equipment types that exhibit outage duration over the previous 10 years with a duration beyond 36 hours will be made more resilient and reliable to shorten the duration to no more than 24 hours. Customer satisfaction: Outage scale or impact reduction – Routine and traditional root cause analysis identifies geography, line segment, or equipment type that drive large scale outage with significant customer impacts. Once analyzed, strategies and tactics undertaken can reduce the potential for large scale customer outage. An example goal: Line segments or equipment types identified as the root cause for large scale customer outage over the previous 10 years with impacts of X customers will be made more resilient and reliable to reduce the scale to no more than Y customers in a 24-hour period. Poor performing underground cable replacement program – Poor performing underground cable identified by the utility through systematic diagnostic testing requires replacement. An example goal: Replace all identified poor performing underground cables over ten years with measurable performance improvement in the number of failures per mile on the replaced line segments or equipment versus the historical line segments or equipment. Align with “Smart Grid/Advance Metering” installation phasing – “Smart Grid/Advance Metering” initiatives offer the opportunity to link these efforts to broader reliability and resiliency that incorporate undergrounding. An example goal: Through routine analysis of outage data and traditional root cause or “Ishikawa” analysis1, identify geographies, line segments, or equipment that yield the highest resiliency and reliability gains when paired with an existing “Smart Grid/Advance Metering” installation effort. Consider a Phased “Targeted” Approach Undergrounding of line segments or equipment can be more expensive in upfront costs than traditional overhead construction. However, these approaches intend to reduce long-term ratepayer cost, improve customer satisfaction, reduce outage time or achieve other areas of value. Because these programs are different from traditional asset construction techniques, often the development of implementation phasing is necessary. Drivers of this phasing might include: Reduced ratepayer cost impact compared to more aggressive implementation. Public Utility Commissions tend to support the use of phased implementation to have multiple opportunities to reassess implementation success and ratepayer impact. State legislators tend to support the use of phased implementation to have multiple opportunities to reassess implementation success and ratepayer impact Less of an impact on the current workforce shortage to complete the work. Mitigation of construction cost impacts in a resource-constrained and highly competitive market. In addition, clearly understanding the weather and related risks to which the utility’s assets are exposed and how this exposure drives decision making on resilience program design is discussed in the following section. Once clarity exists on potential resiliency program objectives, the next step in the Playbook is to develop the potential strategies and tactics for the program and how it supports pursuing the resiliency program objective. 1 Ishikawa analysis, also known as root cause analysis, fishbone diagrams, herringbone diagrams, and cause-and-effect diagrams, was created by Kaoru Ishikawa to identify potential factors causing an overall effect. It is one of the “seven basic tools of quality” and is a simple technique to analyze an outage and identify the root cause of the outage.
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