Many Steps Involved in Restoring Service to CVEC Members
By Jeremy Wise
CVEC Marketing Manager
Car accidents, lightning, wind, trees, equipment malfunctions and wildlife all threaten to interrupt power supply to Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative (CVEC) members.
Despite these challenges, the average Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative member lost power for only 3 of the 8,760 hours that elapsed in 2023. While much of CVEC’s work goes into preventing outages through routine maintenance and planning, an efficient outage response effort also shortens the duration of power outages.
That process involves a mix of technology, manpower, planning and strong communication.
Outage Notification
CVEC personnel primarily learn of outages through a set of computer programs that monitor the electric grid.
The Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system gives the engineering department the ability to locate and control different types of devices along the cooperative’s system. It identifies problems like open breakers then sends text alerts to CVEC personnel.
The cooperative also uses an outage management system (OMS) that reports when individual meters are out.
During business hours, the OMS will alert CVEC’s dispatcher about trouble spots. After hours, it alerts the lineman crew chief on call — whose home is set up like a dispatch station.
Outside of the computer systems, cooperative personnel learn of outages through calls to (800) 273-7210, CVEC’s outage hotline. Once a call is received, the phone system notifies the dispatcher or crew chief on duty.
Outage Response
Once a dispatcher or crew chief receives an outage notification, he or she will verify the problem by sending a signal to the meters registering an outage. If an outage is confirmed, the dispatcher will send the lineman and apprentice lineman to investigate the cause and make necessary repairs.
During on-call hours, linemen are often responding from their homes.
“You’re getting out of bed, getting your clothes on and then you’re gone,” says Robert Smith, CVEC manager of operations. “It’s like a fire department. We try to respond as fast as we can.”
When linemen respond to an affected area, some repairs are obvious — like a tree or branch that has fallen on a power line alongside the road. Some are more inconspicuous, requiring some information from the SCADA system.
An example of this occurred in early March in the Vandiver area, says Spencer Whisenant, interim manager of engineering.
“It was rainy, windy and dark, so they contacted me and asked if I could help them locate the outage,” he says. “I found some information in SCADA, placed it in the outage management system, and it gave me a span of poles where it could be. The problem was almost exactly where I told them.”
Whisenant says examples like these are common, which gives personnel confidence that the cooperative’s grid is mapped and monitored properly.
The Power Of Planning
Planning and preparation often reduce the duration of both small- and large-scale outages.
On-call linemen carry a variety of tools and devices on their trucks so they don’t have to retrieve anything from the cooperative’s headquarters en route to the trouble spot.
“We’ve got everything they can use, even up to transformers, already on the truck,” Smith says. “That way if they get there, and everything’s the proper size, they can go ahead and change it out without calling additional crews in.”
“On holidays, we put 2 additional people on call to handle the potential outage call increase. More people are home on holidays,” Smith says. “If we have something like a severe weather threat coming, we tell the crews to be available.
“You make sure you’re covered to take care of the consumer.”