substation ‘down’ the grid misses the actual customer
experience ‘looking’ up the grid and this creates a blind
spot of what the customer experience is – and the
pandemic working from home allowed all of us to notice
those blinks at the edge of the grid! Many utilities, and
their regulators, use the System Average Interruption
Duration Index (SAIDI) excluding major events as their
key reliability metric. By that metric, most utilities
continue to do an excellent job operating their grid’s
reliability. However, in a world where climate change is
driving an increase in extreme weather events, it doesn’t
make sense to measure how good a utility is at keeping
the grid on when the sky is blue. Utilities must refi ne
their key metrics to ones that track every outage — true
grid resilience measures are needed that reveal how
well the utility keeps on or quickly restores power when
major events like hurricanes and snowstorms occur.
It’s an axiom in business that what isn’t measured can’t
be managed. Once utilities measure for resilience, they
can seek the rest of the answer to why grid reliability
is getting worse. That answer starts with the fact that,
unfortunately, most utility grids in the United States
just aren’t that smart … yet. But they can be.
Over the past decade, many utilities have made earnest eff orts to transform their distribution networks into
“smart grids.” But if the average utility grid has gotten so smart, why is the reliability of the U.S. grid as a whole
getting worse?
On average, Americans spent eight hours without power in both 2020 and 2021 — more than double the rates
seen in any year from 2013 to 2015. Major blackout events increased by more than 60% from 2015 to 2020.
How to Make the Smart Grid Smarter 3
Defi ning a Smart Grid Built
for Resilience
Utility leaders are speaking in good faith when they say
they have invested in a smarter grid. The confusion is
that the term “smart grid” can mean diff erent things to
diff erent people.
Utilities across the U.S. have invested in advanced
metering infrastructure (AMI), often known as smart
meters. AMI is a critical building block for a smart grid,
off ering utilities vastly improved insights into customer
power usage and the ability to produce critical analytics.
Unfortunately, AMI provides important information,
but no means to take action. Utilities need capabilities
such as smart switching on the distribution grid to
maximize the number of customers who keep power
during extreme weather and minimize the length of
outages for those who don’t.
True smart grids built to enhance resilience counteract
the impact of extreme weather, enabling faster and
even automated fi xes to the grid through smart control.
Achieving smart control requires the installation of
smart distribution grid technologies, such as replacing
110-year-old fuse technology with advanced lateral
protection devices, such as S&C’s TripSaver II, that
automatically test whether faults are temporary or
permanent, saving customers from unnecessary or
extended outages. By turning the distribution grid
into an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), it meets the
modern defi nition of a smart grid — one capable of
making switches to avoid a disruption such as a power
outage or identifying and isolating problems instantly
so that restoration is safer, quicker and easier.
Let Emerging Grid Challenges Shape
Smart Distribution Grids
Understanding what a smart distribution grid built for
resilience should look like starts with assessing the
resiliency challenges that lie ahead. While each utility
faces unique issues depending on its geography, climate,
customer demographics and existing infrastructure,
several trends shared across the industry are capturing
the attention of utility leaders, including:
• The growing use of electric vehicles (EVs) and
electric appliances in buildings
• The rise of distributed energy resources (DERs)
• The increase in extreme weather events
How to Make the Smart Grid Smarter 4
Electrifi cation
Bolstered further in 2022 by the Infl ation Reduction
Act (IRA), EV adoption and the electrifi cation of
buildings in the form of heat pumps and electric hot
water heaters will drive a wave of new electric load
and demand peaks in many utility service territories.
The Edison Electric Institute predicted a third of all
light-duty vehicle sales will be EVs by 2030 in a 2022
report released before the IRA created tax credits
for new and used EVs. The Rocky Mountain Institute
estimates IRA incentives will spur the installation of
7.2 million electric heat pumps.
Much of the grid edge isn’t up to the task of powering
a homeowner’s large EV — much less a fl eet of EVs.
While grid operators are doing their best to avoid
such situations, utilities that don’t take decisive action
risk facing the very unpleasant task of telling new EV
owners that they can’t charge their cars because the
electrical infrastructure where their home connects
to the grid can’t handle it.
DERs
A mix of state and federal programs, including more
funding from the IRA, will accelerate the adoption of
DERs — particularly home solar systems, battery storage
systems and combined solar plus battery storage systems.
In places like California where distributed solar adoption
is high, homeowners have already felt the frustration
of months- or years-long processes to get their systems
connected to the grid. DER interconnection delays are
as big a disappointment to utility customers as not
being able to charge their EVs, yet more utilities will
face that pressure as DER adoption grows.
Extreme Weather
Extreme weather in the U.S. is expected to get worse.
From recent hurricanes such as Hurricane Ian, which
knocked out power to nearly 3 million homes and
businesses in Florida in September, to the deadly
Christmas weekend winter storm that led to rolling
blackouts and power outages across the East, extrem
Utility leaders should assess the extent to which
electrifi cation, DERs and extreme weather will impact
their grids in the coming years, then establish a vision
for strategic grid investments designed to effi ciently
and cost-eff ectively tackle each challenge. While each
utility’s vision for its smart distribution grid will diff er
based on its unique challenges, they will likely have
several things in common:
• Investments in technology that help make an
increasingly complex grid easier to manage and
address the rapidly evolving needs of customer
behavior. These investments should include
technologies that enable distribution automation,
self-healing, lateral protection or undergrounding.
• A plan that spans the entire system to ensure
reliability and resiliency for all customers, regardless
of where they are or what the weather is like.
• Devices that work together to understand what is
happening on the grid and can work autonomously to
restore power, ultimately mitigating or minimizing the
scope of an outage.
Achieving a smart distribution grid vision with those
elements will result in positive impacts for the utility
and its customers. While modernizing the grid requires
an investment, a well-thought-out and well-executed
plan results in a resilient grid that can support homes,
businesses and critical infrastructure and doesn’t need
rebuilding after each storm. Those benefi ts amount
to direct returns for both utilities and customers that
make the case for modernization.
Case in Point: Florida Power & Light
Extreme weather is the most clear and present use case
for a smart distribution grid. Before a storm, utilities
must implement a system of smart technologies from
the substation to the grid edge that works together at
all levels of the distribution system so that problems,
such as faults or other stresses, can be minimized when
the storm hits, then enable return to service faster for
those who lose power.
When powerful Category 4 Hurricane Ian struck Florida’s
southwest coast on Sept. 28, 2022, roughly 2 million
Florida Power & Light (FPL) customers initially lost power
amid catastrophic winds, storm surge and fl ooding.
However, before the storm had even cleared FPL’s service
territory, the utility began restoring power to customers.
Less than 24 hours after the storm moved through, FPL
had restored power to more than 1 million customers
and nearly all customers were back online days later.
How to Make the Smart Grid Smarter 6
How did FPL accomplish this feat, given the long outages
customers of other utilities faced after the storm or the
lengthy outages faced throughout the Southeast in
2021 after Hurricane Ida?
The answer can largely be attributed to FPL’s refusal
to let regional weather challenges dictate its ability to
provide reliable power and its implementation of a
comprehensive system-improvement plan.
In addition to grid-hardening eff orts and redefi ning
system performance on major event days, such as severe
storms, FPL decided to smarten the grid by investing in
industry-leading distribution automation technologies.
Having worked with S&C Electric Company for years, FPL
upgraded its feeders and laterals by installing thousands
of S&C’s fault-testing devices. When faults occur, faulttesting devices keep temporary issues from becoming
permanent outages. If persistent faults occur, self-healing
technologies can isolate them and reroute power from
alternate sources — minimizing the scope of an outage
to the fewest number of customers possible. Many faults
occur during the severe storms Florida experiences, and
these smart devices act as “fi rst responders” that can
automatically restore power, even in the eye of the storm.
By investing ahead of Hurricane Ian, FPL’s modern
technology helped the utility operate at a high level to
keep customers online during the storm and make it
easier to quickly restore sections of the grid that did
lose power.
4 Steps to Start the Path to a
Resilient Smart Grid
After utility leaders assess how emerging trends
will challenge their distribution grid and establish a
vision for a smart grid that will deliver resilience and
reliability, they must set a strategy to make their vision
a reality. This starts with a series of planning and
implementation steps:
1. Choose a trusted partner with smart grid technology
expertise that can provide an unbiased assessment
of the utility’s entire distribution system — from
substations to the grid edge. Utility leaders sometimes
think their grids are “smart enough” because of prior
investments in minor automation capabilities, so it’s
critical for them to receive an independent assessment
of how far their grids must go to become truly smart
and ready for the future.
How to Make the Smart Grid Smarter 7
2. With a grid assessment in hand, it is time to update
distribution system planning to bring recommended
investments onto the investment roadmap. To earn
approval for rate increases that may be necessary to
fund grid investments, it will be important to craft a clear
and compelling case outlining the benefi ts customers
will see — and the cost of not investing in a smart grid.
3. Once investments are mapped, utilities can conduct
pilot programs to test new devices on the grid. Proving
benefi ts and showing success through pilots can help
convince regulators an investment is worth making.
Maintain consistent communication with customers
about the benefi ts they are receiving, such as avoided
costs and reduced outages. During this scaling-up phase,
it’s critical to avoid analysis paralysis and death by 1,000
pilots. Extreme weather and a wave of electrifi cation
and DERs won’t wait for endless pilots. Pilots should
last months, not years, and utility leaders should be
prepared to scale up successful pilots quickly.
4. When utilities identify successful pilots in which new
technologies are strengthening grid resilience, it’s time
to make big, bold decisions because the changes facing
utility grids are coming fast. Pursuing smart distribution
grid investments with proven technologies minimizes
risks, reduces costs and speeds up the process of creating
a cutting-edge smart distribution grid.
Conclusion
The data are clear: When including major events like
extreme weather, utility grids are becoming less reliable. A
growing lack of resilience is already leading to frustration