Doing More with What You Have: A Utility’s Grid Modernization Journey

Electricity demand keeps growing. Supply—the physical infrastructure to meet it—grows slower. New substations require years of planning and permitting. Transmission projects face community opposition and regulatory hurdles. Meanwhile, customers add air conditioners, electric vehicles, and data centers that push existing infrastructure toward its limits.

This tension defines the central challenge facing utilities: How do you serve growing demand when adding new assets can't keep pace? One North American utility, which was not identified, serving more than a million customers decided the answer wasn’t just building more, but getting more out of what it already had. That decision launched a grid-modernization initiative now entering its second decade.

Operating in the Dark

Before modernization, operators had visibility at substations but limited insight beyond them. Feeders serving thousands of customers operated as black boxes. Load profiles were estimates. When faults occurred, the first indication was often a customer call. Crews might patrol miles of line before finding the problem.

The modernization strategy targeted three interconnected capabilities: visibility into what's happening across the network in real time, control to act on that knowledge remotely, and automation that responds without waiting for human intervention. Each enables the next. Skip one, and the others underperform.

Design, Build, Prove, Migrate

Utilities can't experiment on live systems. This initiative followed a four-phase methodology that minimized risk while building institutional confidence.

Design started with operational problems, not technology shopping—identifying specific gaps and defining requirements based on what solving them would require.

Build involved rigorous evaluation: security testing, interoperability assessments, and vendor stability analysis for equipment expected to remain in service 10 to 15 years.

Prove meant deploying in non-critical areas for extended pilots—typically six months minimum. This phase surfaced integration challenges and workflow failures that looked elegant in planning documents but broke in practice.

Migrate scaled proven solutions while avoiding "forklift upgrades." New systems coexisted with legacy equipment during extended transitions, with careful sequencing to minimize disruption.

Without Communications, Smart Devices Stay Dumb

Every smart device on the grid (e.g. sensors, automated switches, intelligent relays) depends on communications to deliver value. A fault locator that can't report findings in real time is just expensive equipment. An automated switch that can't receive commands is just a manual switch with extra complexity.

The utility's legacy wide-area network used SONET technology approaching end-of-life: scarce replacement parts, declining vendor support, and bandwidth constraints limiting new applications. The replacement—MPLS-TP—provided higher bandwidth, deterministic transport for protection applications, and true network convergence.

The full network will encompass approximately 300 MPLS-TP nodes. By late 2024, 56 nodes were built and ready, with 17 already migrated to live service. Full cutover from legacy SONET is scheduled for 2026—a multi-year migration maintaining continuous operations while systematically replacing aging infrastructure.

64,000 Customers Restored in Under a Minute

A communications backbone doesn't deliver customer value on its own; it enables the applications that do. For this utility, the modernized network reliably transports data and commands for mission-critical applications including Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR), current differential protection, and distributed automation.

FLISR illustrates what increased visibility into operations makes possible. Automated sensors and switches can detect faults, isolate damage, and reroute power within seconds. But that visibility depends on reliable backhaul to transport growing streams of operational data with the low latency and high availability these applications demand.

With that infrastructure in place, FLISR operations restored power to more than 64,000 customers in under one minute during 2024, eliminating over 13 million customer minutes of interruption. Customers on automated feeders experienced outages 23% shorter than before, and coverage expanded from 13% to over 23% of the customer base.

What Goes Wrong, and What Mitigates it

Multi-year initiatives inevitably encounter obstacles. Three categories of challenges proved persistent, each requiring deliberate mitigation strategies.

Specialized expertise gaps. Grid modernization requires skills utilities may not have in-house. Partnering with vendors who maintain deep benches of experienced talent—and commit resources for multi-year projects—helps ensure continuity and reduces implementation risk.

Field conditions versus records forced design revisions when asset databases didn't match reality—poles lacking structural capacity, conduit paths that didn't exist. Thorough field surveys before finalizing designs prevented costly rework but extended timelines.

Resource competition meant grid modernization competed for workers needed elsewhere. The utility addressed this by shifting complexity away from field installation: pre-configured equipment, factory testing, and detailed procedures let less-specialized crews complete work that previously required experts.

Building for 2035

The grid of 2035 will face demands barely visible today. Electric vehicles will transform load profiles. Distributed resources will turn customers into active grid participants. Extreme weather will test resilience with increasing frequency.

None of these challenges can be met by utilities operating blind. The communications, sensing, and automation being deployed now aren't just solving current problems; they're building the foundation for managing a fundamentally more complex grid.

The demand-supply tension that launched this journey hasn't disappeared. But the tools to address it, to do more with what you have, are finally in place.