Every second counts when it comes to minimizing the duration of power outages. When a tree falls on a power line, field crews may take several hours to locate the problem and repair the damage. Meanwhile, thousands of frustrated customers must put their lives and businesses on hold. This is particularly damaging to commercial and industrial customers who can incur significant financial losses with even a brief service interruption. Loss of voltage events are equally disruptive.

Regulators are equally dissatisfied with frequent, sustained outages. Utilities must keep their SAIDI, SAIFI, and CMI rates low to avoid regulatory scrutiny and justify rate increases.

As a result, field crew and control room staff are under immense pressure to restore power as quickly as possible. The pressure increases exponentially during storms when they’re dealing with multiple fault locations.

Utilities need a self-healing grid that rapidly identifies faults, isolates them, and automatically redirects power to turn sustained outages into momentary events to as many customers as possible.

SurvalentONE Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR) is an industry-leading centralized solution that uses a sophisticated fault location algorithm to identify and isolate faults, and automatically resupply power, restoring service to non-faulted areas in seconds versus hours. The solution includes our Loss of Voltage (LOV) application, which monitors the network for sudden voltage drops, attempts to isolate the cause of the voltage loss from the network, and reroutes power for minimal power disruption.

When lockout devices are tripped, SurvalentONE FLISR immediately limits the severity of the ensuing power outage by isolating the faulted area and restoring power to customers upstream and downstream of the isolated area. SurvalentONE automatically analyzes the capacity of adjacent feeders to pickup the load before transferring it to downstream customers.

Narrowing down fault locations to a smaller search area allows field crews to find and fix problems faster, reducing labor and fuel costs, wear and tear on service vehicles, and time to restoration.

SurvalentONE FLISR and LOV can automatically do the isolation and restoration for the utility (automatic mode) or propose its recommended actions to an operator (semi-automatic mode). In semi-automatic mode, the solution creates a switch order that isolates the fault and provides service restoration around the isolated area, but the operator must approve and execute it. In automatic mode, the solution automatically executes the switch order.