Accelerating Restorations

Reliable electric power is an essential service and tenet of a thriving community and a vibrant economy. Providing reliable information on storm restoration progress, especially during summer’s peak demand and severe winter weather, enables utility customers and communities to be well prepared alongside their utility.

The combination of a utility’s tools to assess storm damage to the electric distribution system and deploy resources to expedite the restoration process enables UConn to develop models forecasting the length of time required to restore power following a range of storm impacts.

With outage prediction modeling, we are enhancing utility readiness and response, and keeping our communities energized.

Project Goals and Updates

The primary scope of the proposed project is to develop tools to improve the electric restoration process for residential and business customers, and to provide actionable information to utility emergency response management, community and State government officials, residential customers and businesses.

We have begun work on calculating a gridded “tolerance” parameter from socioeconomic data sources that reflects the resilience of local communities to adverse weather events. We are also analyzing historic outage data to develop models to predict restoration times for future storms.

• Following a storm, line and tree (e.g. mutual aid) crews can be called in from across the country and across international borders to help restore power.
• The Edison Electric Institute coordinates the Mutual Aid Network, a volunteer network of investor-owned utilities that helps coordinate the allocation of mutual aid crews during natural and man-made emergencies.
• After a storm, utility crews work with first responders to address life-safety locations (e.g., downed wires on a house or car) and to clear blocked roads. At the same time they work to restore critical facilities (police and fire departments, hospitals and town buildings), and the largest number of customers as quickly and safely as possible to expedite the restoration for all customers.

Team Members

• Diego Cerrai, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut
• Emmanouil Anagnostou, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut
• Buket Sahin, PhD Candidate, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut