I think you built a great product. It worked very well and made the management of a complicated situation much easier to work through.
The Challenge
The southwest region of the United States experienced unprecedented winter storms in early 2021, causing an unforeseen rise in power demand. Millions of residents in the state of Texas endured widespread, prolonged outages. Utilities in Texas quickly implemented rotational load shedding to meet the massive shed targets mandated by their electrical grid operator, ERCOT.
Farmers Electric had faced a similar situation in 2011 where they had to shed load manually and understood the significant challenges associated with it. This time, they were better prepared with SurvalentONE Rotational Load Shedding (RLS) already in place.
The Solution
Having experienced the intensive, high pressure, and challenging work involved in manual load shedding in 2011, Farmers Electric decided to automate load shedding for similar situations in the future. They therefore implemented and pre-configured the priority of breaker control sets in SurvalentONE RLS so it would be ready to activate when the time came.
This time when storms hit, all they had to do was enter the shed amount into RLS upon activation without worrying about regulatory compliance. SurvalentONE RLS eliminated the manual analysis and effort required by Farmers to comply with mandated shed targets. It automatically de-energized and re-energized different portions of their distribution grid every 10 minutes for 3 days, alleviating the pressure on the control room and enabling operations to focus on storm-related activities.
Farmers Electric Cooperative is a member-owned electric utility serving more than 50,000 homes and businesses, headquartered in Greenville, Texas, USA.
