title: Beyond Power Outages: The Digital Grid Opportunity
author: On The Grid
contenttype: podcast
publication: On The Grid
published: 2024-09-19T15:39:05+00:00
sourceurl: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1919421437-zpryme-agency-beyond-power-outages-the-digital-grid-opportunity.mp3
word_count: 3435
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Z Prime on the grid. On today's episode, I'm talking with Peter Hanna and Priyanka Padmanabhan from Deloitte about digital transformation and how outage management is evolving as utilities continue to upgrade their systems. It's a great conversation. You don't want to miss it. And let's kick it off. All right. Thank you, Dylan. Hi, everybody. This is Peter. I'm a managing director with Deloitte out of an DC metro area. I'm part of our energy lab leadership team at Deloitte and energy lab is a digital factory that is made specifically for power utilities. We enable the digital strategy and ambitions for our clients across the sector. I'm very excited to be here today and talk to you all about digital advancements and how it relates to improving our management. Hi, everyone. I'm Priyanka Padmanabhan joining in from Atlanta. I work in the power and utilities runnable space with Deloitte where I'm deeply involved in digital transformation initiatives, specifically announcing web mobile experience and other digital touch points for users. I'm a member of energy lab that Peter just spoke about and my work with energy lab has taken me into the outer space. Here, I've had the opportunity to contribute and need the development of a personalized step-by-step outage restoration tool. This tool has revolutionized our approach to outage management, providing real-time personalized data to users. I'm currently working on reinventing the digital space for large commercial customers, which, in fact, business users typically make 10% of a utility's customer base, but they can account for over 60% of the utilities revenue and load. I'm excited to be here on this platform. Thank you for having me. Thank you both for being here today. Let's get started talking about the outage management piece that Peter mentioned. What are you seeing from utilities in how the ground is shifting in regards to the way they strategize for outage management? I think a few things to talk about that is directly influenced the industry around managing outage first. From a customer side of things, we've seen a major increase in customer expectations, largely driven by digital transformation. That's in almost every aspect of our daily lives. Users now expect the same level of convenience, responsiveness from their utility providers as they do from e-commerce platforms or social media platforms. At the same time, electricity demand is on the rise as well. Due to population growth, just increased reliance on electricity for our everyday needs. Like think about home cooling, heating, cooking, and even powering our cars. This shift has pushed the need to innovate and reaping traditional ways of managing and communicating outages. Second piece of it, I would say, and it's something we can't ignore, is the impact of climate change. It's led to more frequent and longer lasting outages. This reality has forced, again, the need to be more proactive and resilient in outage management. Another piece to it is the role of data and data analytics. Across the US, about 12% of outages occurred due to power infrastructure issues. By leveraging such historical data, by the patterns, forecasts, asset maintenance records, we can now better predict and even prevent some of these outages. Data collection, analytics, and the right technology has definitely influenced this space. I think the last factor that I have in mind is just advancing technology in general. Making sure we use artificial intelligence, the smart grid, advanced metering capabilities to an advantage are just some that come to mind that push innovation and outage management. It's definitely exciting and a challenging time to be in the industry for sure. So Peter, outage prediction and management are key aspects of the digital revolution in the energy industry. What innovations have come through recently in this sector that you're excited about? Yeah, absolutely, Dylan. Good question. And kind of building a little bit on what Priyanka had covered already, right? So it really comes down to two phases, collecting. It's all about data. It's the first phase is about collecting data and the technology around that and the second is what you do with it as well. There's been a lot of advancements in general, right? And in terms of field devices, whether it's sensors or refosers or pushing more smarts in the grid edge through other intelligent devices, bringing the ability to process data and make decisions at the grid edge, a lot of that advancement in these field devices has afforded utilities a lot of real time data and historical data around the state of the grid. And that can be very helpful in ways that I'm going to mention next. There's been other advancements as well around field inspection and growth, right? So we've seen a lot of utilities and we've helped a few utilities as well. Think about their drone strategy around how they use drones to do post storm aerial inspections that can, again, collecting a lot of aerial imagery that can help them assess damage, pinpoint the approach to dispatching crews and so on. And then last but not least, kind of on that collecting front, right? So we've seen a lot of utilities as well, invest in ADMS, GIS, system modernization, right? You know, it's almost a necessity to unlock value from the field devices that I just mentioned. You know, on each level of ADMS sophistication is requiring additional data, additional information that was never needed or collected before. And again, it's adding to that volume of of information it's available. And you know, the next it comes, you know, what you do with it. And there's been a lot of advancements on that front as well. Priyanka mentioned data in AI. So with a lot of that information that has been gathering, we've seen a lot of advancements in machine learning models, data science. Obviously, we've seen the recent advancements in the industry around gendered AI in a whole as a whole. But all of that has has unlocked very interesting use cases to help us advance the area of average prediction and outage management, whether it's around creating digital twins that can allow us to do simulations, you know, and that is very much enabled by a lot of asset data, maintenance records, weather patterns, forecasts and so on that we've been gathering. And you know, all of that is really helping us in utilities create these advanced prediction models and algorithms that can really reduce the occurrence of outages as much as possible. But also think about the enabling kind of the customer side benefits of it as well, you know, from a customer standpoint, you know, there's also advancements there through the advancements and the the field devices that I mentioned and the data that that it affords, we can start thinking about unique digital experiences and solutions that can bridge the gap between field operations and customers, you know, bringing a lot of transparency to customers and creating rich experiences around how do you communicate and manage this unfortunate event for a customer of an outage, but give them the transparency that is needed to build trust in the utility so that they have so that they have a trust in place around the information that they're receiving and when their power might be restored. I think beyond these technology advancements, there definitely other opportunities utilities can explore and outage management. So for instance, in 2022, an average US consumer experienced about five and a half hours of power outages. Now think about that volume. There are definitely creative ways in which utilities can engage there, not the most happy customers. Utilities can look into striking partnerships with, say, local counties and businesses, small to medium sized and can aim to provide resources, information, and assistance during outages. And all this can be done potentially within their existing platforms. From a customer side of things, communication is another significant area of innovation. The way most utilities deal with outages today is to an outage map on their websites. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough information there to make customers feel informed or confident about restoration efforts. Most maps lack personalization at an address level and puts the onus on the customers to seek whatever information they might need during an outage. So definitely enhance proactive or real-time notifications across multiple channels of communication improves the way in which we communicate with customer about their outage. This ensures easy and trusted access to outage information, enhancing the overall experience there. And this piece has been done in a utility that we've worked with. We've seen consistent decrease in call volumes and increase in customer satisfaction scores year over year, considering outage communication in general is just unwelcome to customers. I think a combination just as a result of combination of these innovations would be and have been transformative. We've been able to see improved operational metrics, better managed staffing, minimize regulatory risk, and manage operations and maintenance spend more effectively. So yes, digital revolution in the industry is enabling us to manage outages in ways we couldn't have imagined a few years ago. So Peter, you know, Pranka mentioned a lot about the ways in which things are developing the way that things are changing. How are we tracking those things? What are the key metrics to track for improving outage management strategies? Good question, Dylan. I like to think about it two different camps. You've got your traditional operational KPIs that are very mature in the sector. You've got a lot of utilities that are tracking their safety, KD and safety. That's your system average interruption duration index or your customer average interruption duration index and your system average interruption frequency index. These are very common sector-wide to kind of measure the reliability of power distribution to your customers. We're taking a look at advancing outage management from a digital standpoint as well. So the second way of looking at metrics as well is growing importance are KPIs around customer experience. So a lot of metrics that Priyanka and I have been measuring and for various utilities that we've helped advance some of their digital strategies and communications for outage is around ETR accuracy. You know, that's a good representation of how mature are your restoration models and calculating and creating algorithms that produce accurate ETRs? How often are these ETRs updated? It's another metric that we track. Through research, we found that, once a customer receives more than three updates to an ETR from their originally provided ETR and just to clarify ETR's estimation to estimate a time to restoration. Once a customer receives more than three updates to an ETR that was initially established, they start losing trust in that ETR altogether and there's a significant drop in satisfaction scores. And we know that through another third metric or third method of tracking KPIs and that is post storm surveys. In a number of utilities that we worked with, we helped devise post storm surveys where we collect information around customer satisfaction, customer effort around ease of information to how they could get access to the information around the restoration. So these are all unique KPIs that we start to track from a digital standpoint. Additional kind of items in top of that as well as we start to look at channel utilization, self-service adoption and cost per interruption. You know, we've through some of the digital advancements that we've worked on with utilities, we were able to see some very meaningful changes and improvements to these metrics. I think in one case, we were able to through the improvement of the digital experience and providing more personalized access to restoration information. We were able to reduce this one utility's call volume from about 360 calls per 1,000 eruptions to 70 calls per 1,000 eruptions. So almost five times less. So really investments in digital strategies and measuring KPIs is I think investments in digital strategies definitely pay off and these KPIs can really help keep that that business case going in terms of further investing in other ways of improving customer experience. Lastly, I think there's, you know, in terms of like other areas that utilities have been exploring around other KPIs and the idea is the idea of personalized reliability reports. So thinking about, you know, some utilities have done that actually where they've provided customers with a reliability report that shows a historical listing of the number of interruptions that they've had. And really that helps in providing a bit more transparency and accountability in this whole process, right? So when you're seeing the utility being transparent and sharing with you the number of service interruptions, that develops that trust that, you know, there's attention and intentions that kind of improve in these areas. So Priyanka, you were talking about data quality earlier and, you know, when you're dealing with predictive analytics and rapid response times, how can you create data ecosystems? How what are best practices for setting up and managing them? Yeah, absolutely. Data quality is definitely of most importance. Ensuring data ecosystem is set up and managed correctly is definitely the problem to solve here. I think when you think about it, it's probably best explained about thinking of it as piecing together a puzzle. First, there's like just various pieces of data that we work with. I hit through the most common ones. So we have crew status, for instance, that comes in from a handler device, a mobile data system in MDS. Then we typically have an outage cause information that comes in from either an outage management system or a mess or more recently advanced distribution management system, ADMS. Then there's definitely estimated time of restoration that Peter spoke about earlier as well. Then associated prediction model, which is another important component that also comes across from OMS ADMS. And lastly, we have communication preferences. So this involves customer information, contact details, typically sourced from a customer information system that a utility will maintain. Now, here's where the puzzle starts to come together. The real value driver here, which we've seen time and again in the outage restoration process is accurate ETRs. Now, to create models with high accuracy, we need data. And this is where we face our primary challenge. Field workers, who we need to restore power safely, timely. But we also need them to document their work accurately and quickly so that we end up getting near all time information, which can then be surface to various sources, including our customers. Now, this is a split in focus. We're asking right there, which demands a solution. One of the potential ways to address this is improving field experience, CVU's geolocation to draw information and add that to restoration data. Training is another crucial piece to this puzzle. We're empowering workers to see the value of their jobs and the data that they enter time and again. This not only improves the accuracy of the data collected, but also enhances their sense of purpose and job satisfaction. And we've seen this work in action for a couple of utilities that we've worked with. As much as we'd like this to be a simple problem that technology can solve, it's definitely about weaving together just the various data sources, technologies, and the human component to it to ultimately enhance outage management process and customer experience. With a lot of the advances in the technology that we've covered, I think it becomes very clear that integration and data becomes quite important, right? Quite integral to unlocking the value and the examples of the values that we've discussed here. So integration is never easy. So data quality and data governance typically ends up becoming what amounts to about 10% or 25% of these large modernization programs that create and generate that information. So ADMS programs, GIS programs, and so on. Data cleanup and data mapping can be quite a substantial effort in typically their own projects. But with the sophistication and the advancements and the experiences that we're creating, that level of rigor is definitely required, that fidelity in the data and the governance around managing it becomes much more important. So looking at things from a people process technology and around how it impacts data is a very crucial step to kind of make sure that data is set up in the right way and then the cleanliness and the resolution of that data is maintained during operations, well, such that the investments that were made or can be fully unlocked and realized in the experiences that are built on top. So Priyanka, can best outage practices and technologies hope to outpace the numerous and growing threats to reliability and great integrity worldwide? We're talking about this modernization. We're talking about best practices. We're talking about how to go forward with the best knowledge that we have, but there's so much that's unknown. What does the whole resilience picture look like here? Yes, I think that's a very large question to tackle. I'll try to figure that out. And I think, yes, absolutely. I believe that the best outage practices, the best investments out there can help us stay ahead of the threats that we potentially face to a very, very large extent. One major piece of it is climate change. Climate change is certainly posting a significant threat causing more frequent, longer-lasting outages. However, advancements in technology are definitely enabling us to tackle these challenges head on. The distribution grid is seeing a lot of technology disruption, think your electric vehicles, distribute energy resources, rooftop solar, such complex systems come together and make it almost a necessity for you to invest in an ADMS solution, something that integrates all of these connections together to a point where that's almost needed to grow in the resiliency aspect. This also allows the utility to benefit from kind of going to and seeing where the faults are and also enable automatic restoration capabilities. That said, utilities need to continue modernizing their base infrastructure. You're upgrading power lines, aging infrastructure, transformers, feeders, other equipment. As they make the grid smarter with new technologies, the focus to continue improving your current infrastructure shouldn't really go away. A combination of these technologies, along with field devices, advance meters, gives data at a massive scale which then when combined with data science capabilities help improve predictive models. This can also help utilities kind of optimize their maintenance schedules, replace equipment before it fails, identify threats or areas where there might be vegetation management required. There's dual impact. There's both prevention and reaction and both are crucial. On the prevention front, deploying disaster resilient infrastructure in areas that are particularly susceptible to severe weather conditions. This proactive approach then helps mitigate the impact of any potential outages and overall ensures the integrity of the grid. On the reaction side, strategically placing crews or ensuring crew availability in certain areas where outages are known to be prevalent, I think that's very important to respond swiftly effectively when an outage does occur. So yes, when we look at the whole resilience picture, it's definitely a combination of weight of technologies, smart strategies, proactive measures that together help us stay ahead of the growing threats that keep propping up for grid integrity and reliability. Yeah, a few other things I would add. So there's obviously, I think there's a cyber security measures. It's also kind of a big topic around managing the resilience and the reliability of the grid and the threats around it. So we're continuing to invest in advancing technologies to monitor and prevent cyber threats as it's still as a growing importance with utility. So that's certainly going to be front in mind. And policy and regulatory support, I think we're going to require a lot of that as well. The support from policies and regulators is going to be crucial for for grid resilience overall. We're going to need to figure out ways of continuing to incentivize utilities to invest in grid modernization. And that could go a very long way in enhancing grid resiliency. Right. Well, Pranaka, Peter, thank you for joining me today. Thanks for breaking down this outage management picture and where we're heading, where we still have to go and all that good stuff. I hope to chat with you again about this topic. Pleasure speaking with you. Thank you to Ben. This was interesting.