Lessons Learned: Central Georgia Electric Membership Cooperative

The Challenge

As the state of Georgia is prone to storms and high winds that can cause devastating damage to homes, schools, and businesses, the Central Georgia Electric Membership Cooperative (EMC) decided that critical changes were needed to increase its service reliability. In particular, it wanted to improve its outage durations, and decided to invest in digitization and automation to upgrade its grid.

System interoperability was also an important factor for Central Georgia EMC as it looked to rapidly improve the effectiveness of its operators. Operators were already facing the challenge of learning new applications that use complex technology, so forcing them to toggle between applications to interpret system events and choose the appropriate action would only result in valuable time lost.

The Solution

Central Georgia EMC began by upgrading from its SCADA system to the fully integrated SurvalentONE ADMS platform. A core characteristic of SurvalentONE ADMS was a model-based, centralized FLISR system that used real-time data from the network to make a quick and accurate diagnosis, identify the best network reconfiguration, isolate the damage caused by the fault, and restore power to customers upstream and downstream of the faulted area. Using FLISR, Central Georgia EMC could quickly restore service to a majority of its customers, dramatically reducing its outage durations.

Since unifying its ADMS platform, Central Georgia EMC has made significant energy distribution and operational efficiency improvements. The cooperative saw its SAIFI fall by 32% in the first year of FLISR operation, and SAIDI also decreased dramatically. Prior to its FLISR implementation, Central Georgia EMC’s SAIDI was 130 min, but two years later, it decreased to 65.8 min. The utility estimates that field crews now spend roughly 20% less time restoring outages, which has improved productivity and reduced overtime costs.