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
How all of this works could be subjected to legal requirements. Or voluntary agreements between the power company and local authorities. Or just a matter of acting according to what is most financially sound.
First of all, there may be laws that request that certain things get their power restored first. Hospitals. Waterworks. Treatment plants. Care facilities. and things like that.
Second, the power company may have received a list of “priority addresses” from a local municipality authority; service homes. Daycare facilities. Public bath houses. Schools. That kind of thing.
Second and a half, It’s also often considered A Good Thing^tm to make sure that traffic lights function, because traffic will be a mess not just for the general public, but also for the power company and various rescue services. Everyone benefits from giving this small detail some attention, even though it sounds kind of dumb.
Third, the power company may themselves have realised that since they can’t do everything, it’s wise to give some priority to things that makes people…you know…less upset that everything in their freezer is getting rotten. Which means that they may put higher priority on gas stations and bakeries and restaurants and grocery stores than a thousand villas in a suburb. Because it means that people can still get by, somewhat. Instead of most definitely not being able to.
Fourth, there may be financial incentives for making sure that as many customers as possible regain their power as soon as possible. Not just because they start to pay money for consumption again, but also because there may be laws that force the power company to forfeit income if the outage lasts too long. This means, typically, that spending ten hours restoring power for 100 customers is more worth than doing ten small on-hour jobs that restore power for 99 customers in total. I.e, the faults that get low priority are the ones with the lowest impact on the restoration progress.
Along the way here, it’s also super-important in the beginning that the line workers spend their time actually being line workers, instead of being truck drivers. Which means that no matter which direction you send them off in, you make sure to give them ALL of the work orders from a certain suburb/direction so that they can spend time fixing as much shit as possible there, instead of driving back-n-forth for no particular gain.
Since the power is out, you also have problems with actually communicating with your workers. Cell towers, radio towers for comms radios and all kinds of stuff have flakey availability. You need to give them work orders on paper, in a binder, and get to hear about the end result the morning after.
The high voltage lines have monitor systems. The network operations centre probably knows pretty well what’s wrong with it and can send crews out to fix the known issues.
But with the low voltage lines, they depend on the general public (or the affected customers) to call in a problem so that they actually know that there is one. This phonecall, obviously, will be a true pain for everyone involved. When you call them, have your lastest electrical bill in front of you, because there are some identifying numbers on it that they need to speed up the process of accepting your report. You’ll wait on the line for hours anyway, try to make it quick when you get through…
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