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Eaton’s intelligent grid automation helps Carroll EMC reduce outage duration by 38%
Location: West Georgia
Segment: Utilities
Challenge: Accommodate steadily growing customer base with improved service and streamlined grid maintenance.
Solution: Eaton’s Feeder Automation Manager (FAM) software leverages real-time data to detect disturbances in the distribution system and automatically reconfigure it—delivering significant reliability improvements across both single- and three-phase lines.
Results: Established a long-term fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR) system with software and electronic devices supporting a remarkable 38% reduction in outage duration.
Every dollar invested in grid automation with Eaton has helped continually reduce outage duration for our communities. Following the success of our three-phase automation projects, we’re now applying this proven model to our single-phase network to set a new standard for a smarter, healthier grid.
Carroll Electric Membership Corporation (EMC) is a not-for profit, consumer-owned business that distributes approximately 1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually across 7 counties in western Georgia. While retaining its rural farm heritage, the utility now serves many of the new residential subdivisions and commercial areas outside of metro Atlanta. The cooperative’s vast service area covers approximately 54,000 accounts with 5,500 miles of distribution line and 25 distribution substations. Through this infrastructure, Carroll EMC supports ever increasing electrical demand from its growing rural, urban, suburban and commercial membership base.
Challenge
Carroll EMC’s electrical distribution system is designed, constructed, maintained and operated to maximize reliability at a reasonable cost for its customers. However, with a quickly growing membership and expansive service area, it can be a difficult and time consuming process to manually respond to system outages.
The customer sought to deploy a fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR) approach that could help minimize the impact of grid interruptions. The utility’s strategy was to first focus on its three-phase feeders, which contribute significantly to overall outage durations across the utility’s network. These circuits serve as a “highway” for electricity, enabling the utility to quickly restore power to large areas that are not impacted by a fault. Next, the utility wanted to expand this intelligent and automated approach to a portion of its single-phase lines located in residential areas to further reduce outages.
Starting in 2012, Carrol EMC worked with Eaton on the first part of its strategy, deploying Eaton’s Feeder Automation software. The long-term collaboration was so successful that the utility turned to Eaton to help extend its FLISR coverage to single-phase lines.
Carroll EMC values Eaton’s ability to provide a flexible and scalable architecture that simplifies integration and improves system performance in less time than competing solutions. Additionally, Eaton’s Feeder Automation software can operate both integrated with or completely independent from the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, which allows Carroll EMC to upgrade its legacy SCADA system independently, without impacting its ability to reduce outage times during the transition period.
“One of our primary goals was to implement a feeder automation solution that would provide us with complete management over control schemes so we could easily adjust the system to grow alongside the needs of our infrastructure,” said James Layton, Vice President, Engineering and Technology at Carroll EMC.
“In order to reduce complexity and costs, we also wanted to ensure the grid automation technology could operate seamlessly with our legacy equipment from many different manufacturers. Eaton’s Feeder Automation software was able to meet both goals.”
Many distribution automation solutions have limited functionality or require complex third-party engineering. Following installation, these systems are often difficult to modify because of limited configurability or the need to re-contract with the original engineering vendor. As a result, both vendors and utilities tend to approach feeder reconfiguration as a “project” rather than an “integrated process.”
Addressing this issue, Eaton’s Feeder Automation software allows utilities to easily add and remove devices using a standardized interface without reprogramming of reconfiguration algorithms. The number of sources and switching devices that can be automated is only limited by the physical load flows of the power system and communication infrastructure.
Additionally, Eaton’s interoperable solution allows for virtually any existing control and standard communication protocol to be integrated into automation systems, eliminating the need for additional hardware or protocol converters. And Eaton’s Feeder Automation software provides compatibility with existing legacy controls and the next generation of controls to help utilities meet requirements today and challenges tomorrow – with the added ability to expand feeder automation programs across single- and three-phase lines seamlessly.
Carroll EMC quickly saw dramatic reliability improvements with Eaton’s Feeder Automation software, which proved to be simple to configure, fast to deploy and easy to maintain and update. Overall, the utility’s strategy is paying off, and it is minimizing the number of members impacted during an outage and preventing entire neighborhoods from going dark.
Today, there are nearly 250 intelligent electronic devices deployed across the utility’s network working with Eaton’s Feeder Automation software to automatically isolate damaged sections and restore power to as many people as possible. And since the start of the project in 2014, the distribution automation program has helped the utility continually reduce its SAIDI index year-over-year.
In 2022 alone, Carroll EMC calculated that Eaton’s Feeder Automation software reduced outage time by about 75 minutes for members. The utility anticipates a 41% reduction in outage duration, including 34% reduction from the three-phase deployment and an additional 7% reduction from the single-phase project.
Beyond enabling advanced outage response and management, Carroll EMC is also using Eaton’s Feeder Automation software to improve:
In the past, we required an entire crew of personnel to manually isolate an impacted circuit and restore service,” continued Layton. “Thanks to our Feeder Automation software all stages of the outage isolation process can be completed automatically and from a central location, which is truly revolutionizing our approach to managing outages and improving service for our members.
