As customers demand reliable power, utilities rely on technology to adapt | Environment

Over the past decade, Eversource Energy, the state’s largest public utility, has been upgrading its distribution infrastructure to build resilience. The company is deploying automation and “smart” switches to isolate outages and reroute power to its customers here and in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

More than half of New Hampshire customers affected by outages in 2023 saw their power restored in less than five minutes, Eversource officials said.

In 2015, that number was just 11%.

In subsequent years, “We’ve gotten better at switching and rerouting power,” said Brian Dickey, vice president of operations for the New Hampshire Electric System.

Eversource’s distribution system serves about 723,000 New Hampshire customers — about 540,000 of its own retail customers and another 180,000 wholesale customers, including New Hampshire Electric Coop, Unitil and municipal utilities.

“We own the highway,” explained Peter Glynn, distribution system operations manager.

Most people don’t think about where their electricity comes from – until they lose it.

But at Eversource’s operations center in Manchester Billion, that’s all they’re thinking about.

The electrical system control center looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Massive computer screens fill the walls, colorful lines trace the flow of energy from the seashore to the north side.

An alarm sounds and all eyes turn to a part of the screen. It signals an outage on the line—in this case, scheduled maintenance at Deerfield.

But during a storm, as outages increase, these alarms take on greater urgency.

“These operators have to go from zero to 100,” said Marc Dion, manager of distributor operations.

It’s a tight-knit team, he said, and isolating outages and restoring power to their customers is a point of pride. “If Humpty Dumpty falls, they can put him back together,” Dion said.

At these times, he said: “Chief shift is like the conductor of an orchestra.”

During a big storm, “It’s all hands on deck,” said Dickey, who rose through the engineering ranks.

They will take care of the biggest outages first. But Dickey said: “We’re going to stay here until all customers are restored.”

The system is automated, “self-healing,” as Dion calls it.

After the circuit breaker trips, the system turns it back on to verify that the incident is really a fault or a temporary interruption—a tree branch bouncing off a wire, for example. If that’s all, power flows through the line again, just a momentary interruption.

When an outage occurs—a tree snaps a branch or a car hits a utility pole—”smart” switches shut down problem areas, and operators can remotely reroute power to restore nearby homes and businesses in minutes.

Have you ever had it turn off and then turn back on? These are the smart switches at work.

Adjacent to the Power System Control Center is the System Operations Center with its own wall of screens and clusters of computer terminals. When an outage is reported, operators send line crews to the scene via electronic messaging and also send messages to affected customers letting them know when they can expect power to be restored.

These days, Glynn said, “Everyone expects the Amazon experience.”

“They expect to know why their power went out, when it’s going to come back on and when the crews are out,” he said.

Planning for Thursday’s windstorm began days earlier, when the sun was shining and temperatures neared 60 degrees. Eversource contracts with three different weather services to forecast upcoming storms that could cause outages.

Crews have been called in for a night shift on Wednesday and contract crews have been notified. Linemen were pre-positioned in areas where the greatest impacts were predicted, mainly in the southern tier from Rochester to Keene. Additional line crews showed up at 6 a.m. Thursday and crews from Massachusetts came in to help out here after the recovery was done down there.

William Hinkle, a spokesman for Eversource, said downed trees and tree limbs caused damage to the electrical system in every part of the state, especially in the western region. By 8 a.m. Thursday, power had been restored to more than 52,000 customers — including 22,500 in less than five minutes, thanks to distribution automation technology.

Douglas Foley, president of New Hampshire operations, said the infamous 1965 blackout was a wake-up call for electric companies. The entire Northeast and parts of Canada were plunged into darkness after a power line in Canada snapped, causing a cascading failure that affected an estimated 30 million people.

Dickey said at the time that managing and responding to massive power outages “was done with people.”

“The substations were manned. They would open circuit breakers and monitor the loads,” he said.

Foley recalls that when he was a field supervisor years ago, “We used to tell businesses, Hey, sorry, the lights are out, it’s probably going to take a day to get back on.”

“You’ll light candles and everyone will play board games,” he said.

“We’re so connected now to the electrification of everything,” Foley said. “Our customers expect us to be active all the time.”

As a result, “We are evolving with technology as our customers and society demand more from electrical infrastructure.”

The catastrophic ice storm that hit the state in December 2008 was a toll for Eversource, then called Public Service of New Hampshire. Trees and branches fell under the weight of the ice, leaving hundreds of downed power poles — and thousands of residents across the country without power in the cold and darkness for two weeks. The outage was the company’s biggest ever, affecting more than 322,000 PSNH customers at its peak.

“We’ve taken a lot of flak, deservedly so,” said Dickey, vice president of operations.

The recovery effort after that storm involved 1,200 line crews, and costs were estimated at $75 million in a post-storm PSNH report.

About five years ago, Eversource hired an outside engineering firm to evaluate its distribution infrastructure. “We looked at the reliability and frequency of outages for our customers in New Hampshire,” said Foley, head of New Hampshire operations.

This review resulted in a number of upgrades to the existing infrastructure.

The company is replacing wooden utility poles with larger steel poles in the rights-of-way, using fiberglass composite material on the cross arms of the poles and installing spacer cables that better protect power lines. They also instituted a five-year tree-trimming cycle along Eversource’s 12,500 miles of distribution lines.

New Hampshire is the second most forested state, Foley noted. So it makes sense that trees are the main cause of power outages here.

“It is a fact that there are many trees there. We’re constantly trimming and looking at it from a hazard perspective,” he said.

Eversource has also established a troubleshooting department staffed by line workers located throughout the state who can respond immediately. They work 12-hour shifts and someone is available 24/7 to respond to outages on site.

“So when a limb falls on a wire or a car hits a utility pole, we don’t need to call crews,” Foley said. “They can respond much faster.”

Part of the change at the company is “cultural,” Dickey said, focusing first on restoring power. “So when crews go out there, they’re looking to do what they can to rebuild before they do any repairs,” he said.

That could mean linemen install temporary poles first, move on to the next emergency and return later to make more permanent repairs, he said.

Eversource system operators constantly run outage simulations to make sure the system is quickly isolating problems and rerouting power, Dickey said. If a problem occurs, they analyze what went wrong so it doesn’t happen when a real storm hits.

For people in the industry, climate change is not a theoretical conversation.

As storms become more severe, happen more often and last longer, energy companies need to make sure their systems can withstand what nature delivers. Customers expect no less these days, with more people working from home and depending on electronic devices for work, school and play.

“We’re seeing these crazy snow storms, rain storms and winds, so we have to make the system more resilient,” Foley said.

Three storms in the 2022-2023 winter season rank in the top 10 for storm-related outages.

A storm two days before Christmas in 2022 left more than 220,000 Eversource customers without power. A month later, a snowstorm affected 219,000 customers, and on March 13, 2023, a nor’easter left more than 176,000 customers in the dark.

“That tells me the number of storms is increasing and they’re getting more severe,” Dickey said.

But even in those storms, the new reliability measures made a difference, Eversource officials said.

During the pre-Christmas storm, over 71,000 customers were restored within five minutes. During the January storm, more than 83,000 customers were remotely restored within five minutes, and during the March storm, it was nearly 59,000 customers.

“The work we’re doing on the system has made it more resilient,” Foley said.

“So even though we’re seeing more severe weather and storms are still causing damage, we have the ability to recover and activate the system faster.”