Outage Management’s Complex Data Brings Implications

Overview

For more than a decade, communities around the globe have experienced an increased number of storms of historic proportions and seen increased investments in the electric distribution grid.  This combination has generated expectations by regulatory authorities and customers alike for utilities to improve outage management.  In response, utility executives are spending considerable time and money to improve outage planning, gain more value from infrastructure spend, reduce response times to events, and improve communications with customers. Data management and analytics in particular are receiving close scrutiny.

Many utilities have begun to integrate more sources of new and complex data into outage management.  These include smart meters, sensors, distributed energy, mobile workforce, social media, and others. While using and analyzing these data (often referred to as Big Data or dark data) often shows utilities new ways to improve outage management, it can also increase the potential complexity of change management to previously unseen levels.

How can organizations that are so traditionally cautious harness the value of this complex data without being overwhelmed by change management? The solution lies in moving the organization toward more proactive processes in which continual improvement is the operating norm.  

Utilities Expect High Value from New, Complex Data  

The use of data is hardly a new thing for utilities, particularly for outage management. Analysis and reporting of historic performance data, also known as business intelligence, has been around for quite some time.  Storm playback, visualization, and simulation analysis have also enabled utilities to tap data to better pinpoint root causes, eliminate response lags, and speed in-event reporting. Utilities also have a long history of using data in distribution monitoring and control systems.

However, utilities are now dealing with much more complex data. Grids, devices and equipment, customer interactions, and utility processes are becoming increasingly digitized and integrated. High volumes of complex data are being produced, often in real time.

Distribution utilities see integrating and managing data as vital to ongoing business health, particularly given the volatile market dynamics they face. For outages, utilities believe they will gain high value by using the data to improve grid reliability, capital investment planning, event response, and communication.

Moving from Insight to Action Can Be Daunting

Managing massive amounts of high-volume, often real-time data is an immense challenge in and of itself. This requires new and much more advanced system and analytics capabilities than utilities have typically employed. However, harnessing and analyzing the data often represents “the tip of the iceberg.”  The complex and ongoing change management needed to extract value from complex data can be very costly and difficult to effect.

Example:  Distributed Energy Resources

Consider incorporating distributed energy resources (DER) into outage management. As regulators continue to push utilities around the globe to support a more decentralized distribution grid, DER will inevitably have a much larger role in outage management. Provided that utilities gain visibility to these assets within their network models, utilities will shift DER load to improve reliability and aggregate it to restore power more quickly when outages occur. 

However, the challenges for utilities often begin when they decide to act upon the insight provided by DER data. Difficult business strategy-level questions must then be addressed, such as:

• How will restoration processes, systems, and budgets need to change?
• What types of market agreements are necessary to use DER during outages?
• What shifts should be made in capital spending and reliability planning?

• What do the business and data-sharing relationships look like with third-party vendors wishing to deliver DER-related services?

Example:  Social Media

While social media can be tricky, utilities have benefited by using it to engage customers during outages. Social media has enabled utilities to identify and respond to outages faster and improve the accuracy and speed of status updates for customers.

Many effective solutions (e.g. monitoring, listening, mapping) are available today to help utilities leverage social media data. However, this has inherent implications for change management complexity. Similar to DER integration, the challenge with social media data becomes much more difficult when turning insight into action. Far-reaching questions arise, including:

• How are new privacy concerns identified and addressed?
• What is the relationship between social media and asset and network strategies?
• What role does social media analysis have in investment planning decisions?

• How should social media data integrate into existing systems, particularly operational ones like outage and mobile workforce management?

Expect a Bumpy Transition and Unforeseen Consequences

Extracting value from complex, high-volume data will require utilities to employ new methods and/or tools for data integration, mining, and analysis. On a positive note, new solutions likely mean that, over the long term, utilities may not have to add data scientists to their workforce. However, utilities will have to figure out how to meld data science expertise with deep subject matter experience, such as power systems engineering. Vendors are working to provide that blended expertise, but the solutions being offered still tend be niche solutions.

For outage management, the use of data is expected to reshape the workforce, processes, and systems involved, with an emphasis on prevention through improved reliability.  New high-value work, such as preventive maintenance, is likely to be identified and can increasingly be automated. This will have a transformative downstream impact on total expenditure (capital and operations/maintenance), resource allocation, and planning. However, expect a chaotic transition as more proactive processes are put into place, particularly with planning, where many fundamentals will have to be rethought.  

The workforce will also be impacted in ways that are simply unforeseen today. As an example, look at the evolution of cable and telecommunications installers. Prior to the digitization of cable/telecom networks, the core competencies of an installer revolved around wiring, particularly into the home or business. After digitization, the competencies for an installer became more rooted in network management expertise, device interconnection, and data sharing.

Recommendations

Utilities exploring data use cases must expect and embrace ongoing change, which is normal for complex-data-driven businesses. Based on ARC research and analysis, we recommend the following actions for utilities:

• Don’t mistake business process improvement (BPI) for change management. While valuable, BPI for utilities is too often characterized by set-it-and-forget-it improvement. Embrace continual improvement as the new norm.  
• Make sure the customer-facing side of the business is represented in operational solution decisions, and not just as an afterthought. As utilities become more service based, the customer side of the business will need to take more of a leadership role, with visibility to and input on operational system selection and deployment. This dynamic is particularly important to successfully manage DER growth.
• Start small with data-driven outage improvement, but make sure you think multiple improvement steps ahead. Forward thinking helps ensure that the seemingly disparate initiatives you are likely to undertake will more easily integrate into an enterprise-level strategy.
• For an analytics solution, visualization is important, but is just one factor. Look for context-based solutions. Insight is more quickly turned into action without putting an undue burden of assessment on the user.
• When exploring data management and analysis solutions, consider the Cloud beyond storage and IT benefits. Many cloud suppliers can also deliver a broad range of utility-specific process expertise.  

This ARC Insights is not intended as a warning against Big Data initiatives. To the contrary, data is the new currency of the modern grid. Despite the change management issue, use cases associated with complex data provide the basis for utilities to achieve the business agility and transformation necessary to remain viable.

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Keywords: Utilities, Outage Management, Complex Data, Analytics, Big Data, Change Management, ARC Advisory Group.