Electricity Canada’s upcoming Service Continuity report revealed some interesting data about the reliability of our electricity grid. From extreme weather events, to squirrel disruptions, all power interruptions, no matter how small, are recorded and categorized for utilities to find ways to minimize the impact to customers and maintain grid stability.
Current Affairs sat down with Dan Gent, Director of Transmission and Reliability and Lakshmi Venugopal, Data Analyst to talk about what they learned.
Hi Dan and Lakshmi, tell us a little bit about the Service Continuity report and the type of information collected.
DG: This report is going to cover 2022 and 2021. It’s really the meat and potatoes of reliability.
LV: There are five things that the report captures. The first is SAIFI (system average interruption frequency index) which will tell you the frequency of the outages in a given year and we have SAIDI (system average interruption duration index) which will tell you the duration of the outages in a given year.
CAIDI is about customer impact, the customer average interruption duration index. And then we have interactions per kilometer (IKM) and the customer hours of interruption per kilometer (CIKM).
Utilities use these reports to benchmark against other Canadian utilities and they develop programs for improvement. It shows how much you should be investing on a particular type of equipment that failed and what needs maintenance.
DG: They also use this report for rate filings with the regulators. They take the report and say, ‘Hey, this is what's happening in the industry in terms of outages, and this is how we're performing against the national average’. This gives them a case to adjust their rates to help improve their reliability.
LV: Our report also clearly indicates what the impact was of any given major weather event that utilities have experienced throughout the year. It will give out information such as how many hours has gone and how many customers were impacted because of that.
We’ve seen some intense storms in 2022 including a derecho right here in Ottawa as well as Hurricane Fiona in Nova Scotia. How was this affected this year’s data and what can we learn from it?
DG: We've seen last year that major weather events are increasing and this just highlighting it to a whole other level. Outages were led by three major events: the derecho, Hurricane Fiona and the pre-Christmas storm.
With over 220 million customer hours of interruption, it's the largest number of blackouts or outages since 1998. When you take out the major events, though, the numbers fall back to normal. And that’s the problem, when these events happened previously we’ve said, ‘Oh, it's a hundred-year storm’, but it's now happening every three years.
Besides major weather events, what causes the most power outages? Anything that would surprise us?
LV: Tree contact interruptions have increased by 27% from 2021 to 2022. Apart from major weather events, this is one of the key concerns that members have.
DG: It's trees falling on to the lines, tree branches, as well as trees hitting the lines or damaging other pieces of equipment like insulators or pole mounted transformers. One in five outages actually happen because of a tree. They have contributed over 90 million hours of interruptions.
For other causes, adverse weather might fluctuate depending on the year and equipment failure is generally up there too because it's an aging grid that is getting hit by these hundred-year storms every three years!
What do you want people to know about the reliability of our electricity grid?
DG: It’s still pretty damn good.
LV: Yeah, that’s exactly what the data says. If look at the index of reliability, it’s always been above 95%.
DG: Even with 220 million customer hours of interruption, the index of reliability is still 99.98% for 2022. I mean, there is there is a push for having 4 nines (99.99) but with what happened last year, I’ll take 99.98%.
Finally, how do squirrels impact the grid?
DG: Contrary to popular conspiracy theorists, squirrels do cause outages. They might be sitting on one piece of equipment, lean over, and then ZAP… You’ll lose power for a few minutes until there’s an automated recloser. They just get into places they shouldn’t be, and that’s what it comes down to.
Electricity Canada’s Service Continuity report will be available late July. |
