After a natural disaster such as a hurricane, how do the power utilities determine where to send linemen to most efficiently restore power?
In: Technology
I actually used to do this!
The first part of the process involves visually inspecting the circuits to see where the problems are. This determines what sort of truck is needed, replacement parts, etc.
The next part is the tricky one – at my utility, we call it “work packaging.” Basically, we have a list of all the outages and how many people are affected by each one. We also know if they’re on a critical circuit, like one that serves a hospital or police station. If the outage involves wires on the ground, that also bumps up the priority. We would assign jobs to the available trucks based upon the capabilities of the trucks (e.g., if a new pole is needed, the truck needs to have an auger). Mainly, we try to restore as many customers as possible as quickly as possible, giving priority to critical infrastructure and life safety systems. Outages that are physically close to each other also tend to get assigned to the same trucks. There’s a bit of an art to it.
The line crews then go to work on repairs. At the end of the day, the process is repeated, and any jobs that were not completed get reassigned to new crews the following day. This process gets repeated each day until everyone is restored.
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