One of those areas pertains to a “measurement gap” between reliability and resilience, which could influence investment decisions. Only 48% of the utilities surveyed agree that their current methods for measuring power grid reliability accurately reflect how well they perform during major disruptions from severe weather events or grid failures.
Another gap highlighted centers around affordability. Nearly 60% of respondents stated most customer-impacted outages originate from the distribution grid, yet only 12% of utilities have fully deployed advanced self-healing distribution automation technologies such as fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR).
According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), FLISR adoption, which promptly detects power outages through grid integrative technology, can cut both customers affected and customer minutes of interruption by half during an outage event. However, S&C Electric’s recent survey found that more than half of utilities (52%) pointed to capital cost as the biggest barrier to its broader deployment.
The final area ties into investment toward load growth, which is putting additional pressure on grid systems. A little over 80% of utilities expect data centers and artificial intelligence to be a leading driver of this load growth across the grid, but only 54% expect this projected growth to be “very or extremely” significant for their specific systems over the next decade.
To address these gaps, Zpryme noted that utilities should measure what customers actually experience during major disruptions. Reliability metrics outlining restoration times and customers affected during major events remain essential for day-to-day tracking to capture the value of investments during such crises.
Through these documented customer experiences, Zpryme added that investment linked to resilience becomes easier to present to regulators and customers for key decisions.
By improving how these events are tracked, utilities can further limit how many customers are ultimately impacted during these types of outages. The full report further explains how targeted data collection can result in better grid hardening and automation, helping utilities shorten outages while also planning for load growth and resilience.