Connecticut learned a lot in the past year.
Since an unusually early snowstorm on Oct. 29, 2011, broke leaf-laden tree branches and cut power to more than 800,000 businesses and homes — some for up to 11 days — the state’s policymakers and utilities placed a new emphasis on electricity reliability.
While this effort led to enhanced tree trimming, a new microgrid program, and improvements in the national mutual aid system, Connecticut hasn’t reach its desired level of preparedness just yet.
“When it comes to the weather, there are no guarantees and major and unusual storms will always present challenges to utility services,” said Dan Esty, commissioner of the state Department of Energy & Environmental Protection. “We do, however, have a better understanding of how we must address these challenges as a result of our experience last year and we are moving forward to put necessary improvements in place.”
One reliability initiative is the $15 million microgrid program launched by the Connecticut General Assembly in the spring to protect critical facilities — such as police and fire stations, grocery stores, gas stations, and shelters — during outages. A microgrid has its own power generating facilities onsite — usually a diesel generator or a fuel cell — that can provide electricity if the main power grid ever goes down.
DEEP has been meeting with stakeholders since the program was launched and will solicit proposals for building microgrids starting Nov. 1, said Alex Kragie, special assistant to the DEEP commissioner. The agency hopes to award funding to 7-15 projects by February to proceed toward establishing the microgrids throughout Connecticut.
“This is the first statewide microgrid program, as far as anyone knows, in the country,” Kragie said. “We are looking for projects that greatly increase the safety and quality of life for residents in outage situations.”
The goal is to get the most projects for the least money, Kragie said, and keep pushing the concept forward until microgrids are established and ready for the next outage.
“Usually what happens is storms happen, outages happen; there is a great public cry, and then nothing happens,” Kragie said. “This is not just a study sitting on a shelf. We are actually doing something.”
Because similar outage problems were caused by Tropical Storm Irene on Aug. 28, 2011, Connecticut viewed the snowstorm as more than an isolated incident. Both the public and state officials are seeking better ways to prevent and mitigate outages.
“While we can never know exactly what Mother Nature may have in store for us, the state is in a much better position than it was just a year ago,” said Andrew Doba, spokesman for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. “We can’t prepare for every eventuality, but the governor is committed to making sure that we are better prepared to handle storms in the future.”
Berlin electric utility Connecticut Light & Power, which faced the brunt of the public criticism as its outages were bigger and longer, filed a $300 million infrastructure hardening plan with the Public Utility Regulatory Authority in July.
The plan includes strengthening poles and crossarms, making wires less vulnerable to interruption, and targeting electric circuits with a history of poor performance. A major part of the plan included $58 million for CL&P to do enhanced tree trimming around transmission and distribution lines in 2013 to limit outages. PURA held its first public hearing on the plan on Oct. 24, although it has not made a final decision.
CL&P placed such strong emphasis on tree trimming that the utility doubled its vegetation management budget to $50 million for 2012 before even seeking PURA approval. Trees are the No. 1 cause of outages in CL&P’s service territory, officials said, responsible for 90 percent of power losses.
“Eventually, those branches are going to hit the ground because gravity always wins,” said Dave Goodson, manager of vegetation management for CL&P parent company Northeast Utilities.
In terms of density, Connecticut is the fifth most heavily treed state in the nation, with two-thirds of the state covered in trees. That makes vegetation management difficult for the utility, Goodson said, and CL&P has expanded its clearance zone around wires and boosted its budget for identifying hazardous trees.
Since the snowstorm and Irene, the public and Connecticut’s municipalities have been more accepting of CL&P cutting down trees, Goodson said. Before the storms, the utility faced public criticism when clearing an area of vegetation.
“More and more people are understanding how important tree trimming is,” said Tricia Taskey Modifica, spokeswoman for Northeast Utilities.
The national utility trade organization Edison Electric Institute is conducting a study, to be completed in December, looking at the most cost-effective methods of preventing outages and hastening recovery, including tree trimming, microgrids, undergrounding power lines, pole hardening, and other options used by utilities from around the nation.
“In Connecticut, if a tree falls on a pole, I don’t know how much you can harden it to prevent it from falling,” said Jim Fama, EEI vice president for energy delivery. “Tree trimming and undergrounding might be a better option for Connecticut.”
EEI wants to put the study in the hands of regulators to determine which option works best for their state for the most reasonable amount of money, Fama said.
EEI also is working on better coordination of the mutual aid system, where utilities in need of restoration assistance request crews from unimpacted areas. The system was largely regional until last year, Fama said, with utilities tending to rely on crews in their vicinity.
Irene and the Oct. 29 snowstorm changed the mutual aid system because the large regional nature of the storms left nearby crews unable to respond to calls for assistance as they dealt with their own outages.
After meeting with the utility companies and the nine regional mutual aid groups, EEI devised a process and communications system where utilities could predict outages before they happen and respond with crews to minimize travel time.
In the case of a storm such as Irene, which made landfall in the mid-Atlantic and headed north toward New England, the mutual aid groups can predict the outages in Connecticut and Massachusetts while New Jersey and Maryland are requesting crews for outages that already happened.
“They shouldn’t just do things unilaterally,” Fama said.
That way, the regional systems can respond with crews that are nearest to the need, sending crews from the South to the Mid-Atlantic and crews from the Midwest to New England, rather than responding with Midwest crews to the Mid-Atlantic and leaving New England without a nearby mutual aid crew for its outages that happened later.
“Travel time is really important in outage situations,” Fama said.
