Page 43 - CARILEC CE Journal CEMAY2021

Trees touching lines

This is particularly valuable in large, rural territories “We wanted the tool to anticipate the investigation
where visual inspections can take hours if not days a person is trying to perform and populate the
to complete—often across rugged terrain. Plus, necessary information with a single click,” Geiger
the tool can be used to validate whether or not the said about designing the user interface for TUNet
cause of a blink is within a substation or further Grid Reliability Analytics. “By making the tool as
upstream on other equipment that may not belong intuitive as possible, the user can actually learn the
to the utility. tool and the grid’s performance characteristics at
Matt West, Manager of Engineering for Crow the same time.”
Wing Power, said ultimately the tool is beginning to Because TUNet Grid Reliability Analytics tracks
change the operational stance of the organization. a high volume of minor outages and anomalies all
“Now, we can be more proactive,” he said. “We’re over the distribution network, it’s also the ideal tool
not just reactive, especially in the eyes of our co-op for auditing meter metadata. Using the tool’s data
members.” visualizations to validate and cleanup mislabeled
meters will put an end to wasted truck rolls caused
3. Orienting to Equipment in the Field by grouping errors in a utility’s outage management
Geospatial awareness is key to the intuitive user system (OMS) or other source of truth.
interface of TUNet Grid Reliability Analytics. What that
means is the tool provides contextual information 4. Strategic Planning and Reporting
about the distribution equipment surrounding a Scheduling equipment replacements and tree
user’s actual location in the field with a mobile device, trimming based on demonstrated need instead
or a virtual location selected on a map by a user in of time, is the most obvious benefit of TUNet Grid
the back office. Reliability Analytics. But it’s just the start of how the
With a tablet in hand, a crew member can step out tool can be used to prioritize and justify field work
of the truck and walk straight to a meter that is and capital projects. After TUNet analytics have
indicating a problem, greatly improving the speed revealed problem locations and suggested their
of field work. The tool’s map will follow the tablet’s likely causes, a utility can rank the severity of the
location in the field. That means no more exploring problems by generating index scores like MAIFI or
from house to house and pole to pole, trying to CEMI for each discrete problem-section of the grid.
determine what equipment is where. Alternatively, the analytics tool can help a utility

43