IntelliTEAM II Saves Thousands from Extended Outages During Colorado Snowstorm

The recent operation of S&C’s IntelliTEAM II® Automatic Restoration System during a major snowstorm prevented extended outages in downtown Blackhawk and Central City, Colorado, located in a remote area in the mountains west of Denver. Xcel Energy’s Distribution Specialists Bob Leeper and Norm Palm noted that the 37-hour storm, on April 16 to 18, resulted in substantial snow accumulation and whiteout conditions.

The storm knocked down distribution lines throughout the area and caused at least six different events. And SCADA communication was impacted as well. In the past, service restoration in this rugged locale would have taken hours . . . or even days. But the “distributed intelligence” of IntelliTEAM II automatically restored service to customers in Blackhawk and Central City in about a minute.

Leeper pointed out that the company was able to concentrate its crews in the nearby town of Evergreen to restore service there. “We didn‘t even need to send crews to Blackhawk or Central City until the storm was over,” he said. And Palm noted that “due to IntelliTEAM, the total outage times for the two towns was very small compared to what they were in the past. This is in a very remote area that would have been difficult for our line crews to get into and operate manual switches during major snow storm conditions.”

Xcel Energy installed the first phase of their IntelliTEAM II system in 2006, on the two overhead feeders serving the towns of Blackhawk and Central City. Each town has numerous casinos that require highly reliable electric service. IntelliTEAM II is designed to provide power to these critical loads using any available sources, without overloading any line segments. In this case, the sources are two feeders from the same substation that go around different sides of the mountain to reach Blackhawk and Central City.

In 2007 and 2009, the IntelliTEAM II system was expanded to incorporate a third feeder—a new dedicated underground feeder from the same substation that goes directly to Blackhawk. The system consists of five S&C Scada-Mate® Switches that communicate directly with each other via a mesh network radio system. The switches decide locally how to quickly and automatically restore power to as many customers as possible.

IntelliTEAM II is a self-healing, scalable feeder reconfiguration system that can automate new as well as existing circuits. It’s an interoperable solution that can be applied with a variety of DNP-compatible intelligent electronic devices, including S&C’s IntelliRupter® PulseCloser, conventional reclosers, relays, and switching devices of S&C or other manufacture.