Storms Don't Stop Smart-Grid In Chattanooga

On November 27th, the Chattanooga area was pelted with rough storms. According to the city's Electric Power Board (EPB) spokesman John Pless, the utility smart-grid kept the lights on for 90 percent of the city’s electricity users who would have otherwise experienced an outage. A smart-grid detects where damage occurs and allows the network to self-heal when possible, often in seconds and undetected by electricity users.

"Smart grid automation either prevented or automatically restored more than 23,000 customer outages, with almost 2,100 customers experiencing outages of greater than five minutes," Pless said.

In addition to the security of maintaining electric service during severe weather, businesses lose productivity when the power goes out. By 2014, EPB officials estimated the technology had saved local businesses approximately $50 million in two years; it had reduced outages by 60 percent. Since then, they have worked with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to get maximum efficiency from the EPB smart-grid.

Harold DePriest, retired President and CEO of EPB, spoke with Christopher recently in episode #230 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. During the conversation, Harold talked about how the smart-grid has positively impacted the community:

"[T]hat one thing is saving our community's businesses somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 million dollars a year. That's pretty substantial. [F]rankly, the revenues are now staying here in Chattanooga. We'll be, this year, about $150 million in revenues. That means there are additional monies for taxes. Our in lieu of tax payments are actually up about $8 million because of our smart-grid, on an annual basis. Roughly half of that goes to the school system, so that's a pretty neat thing in my opinion. The other is it's supplied the money for EPB to invest in other things that are of value to our customers, a new control center, GPS in all of our trucks, the ability to respond quicker and more efficiently on a daily basis, and in large outages. All of those are pretty neat things."