When there are large storms or natural disasters that knock power out across whole towns or areas, how do the power companies figure out where to fix to restore power?
In: Technology
Part of it is on what lines are drawing how much power. But a big part of it is people calling the company and crews driving around.
Power is distributed in grids. If you have grids A,B,C and D, people from grid B keep calling in saying they don’t have power. You know whatever is feeding A,C and D is still working, so you need to go to what is feeding B and inspect those areas.
They have monitoring on each feed, which covers maybe 500 houses, by internet or radio. Their control room can tell on a computer screen which feeds are down. They send out a guy in a pickup to start at the substation and follow that feed until they find a tree, pole or wires down. They report in by radio so control can send out the right kind of truck to repair it, with the poles and enough men to handle that. Then they keep driving to see if there’s anything else broken.
Once it’s repaired, they turn the breaker on again and see if the guy missed anything. This is why the lights often blink on and off before they finally come back on. There was another line down that they missed.
They have maps of the grid, where the disconnects are, and many disconnects have remote monitoring. This are probably the primary way, when a car hits a pole and it falls, the lines short. That will trip a circuit breaker and the circuit breaker will tell the utility it tripped. Their maps will identify that if that breaker trips then this section of wire and these accounts are offline.
Now we also have smart meters, and these can monitor the power from every house and also do this.
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