Dispatching truck rolls to respond to overhead faults may seem like a regular side effect of your organization’s existing lateral protection strategy. But did you know more than 80% of faults on overhead distribution circuits are temporary?
Depending on your existing protection practices, this volume of faults can present a range of challenges to your system.
Top Grid-Edge Challenges
Reliability
Faults may either cause sustained outages or widen the impact of momentary interruptions on your system, regardless of whether they were temporary. These interruptions have a detrimental impact on SAIDI, SAIFI, and MAIFI scores, preventing you from improving overall system reliability.
Additionally, distributed generation resources are becoming more prevalent on distribution feeders and are easily knocked offline by short interruptions.
Resilience
Severe weather is becoming more frequent. Fuses can’t mitigate unnecessary outages, leaving customers without power during storms and making reactive repairs more challenging and widespread.
Operations & Maintenance
Frequent outages caused by temporary faults may be costing your organization thousands in unnecessary truck rolls. Or you may have a large inventory of devices that need regular servicing, requiring you to pull equipment down and transport it to a service shop. Time-consuming O&M tasks rack up monumental costs over time and take your line crews away from grid-modernization jobs.
Customer Satisfaction
Frequent outages place undue burden on your customers—especially those at the edge of the grid who wait longer for power to be restored. Customer complaints cause headaches for your customer service representatives, public relations team, and line crews who are coming face-to-face with frustrated customers in the field. On top of this, low customer satisfaction levels are linked to less support for future system improvements.
Environmental Concerns
Oil-based byproducts from hydraulic reclosers can have harmful health effects on wildlife, human operators, and local ecosystem. Other devices, such as fuses, carry high spark risks.
Find a New Solution to Strengthen the Grid Edge
Past reliability improvements on your system have likely focused on feeders and neglected the modernization of lateral lines—to you and your customers’ detriment. As EVs, DERs, and increasingly severe weather challenge aging grid infrastructure, now’s the time to evaluate your approach to overhead fault management.
Consider integrating advanced solutions like the TripSaver® II Cutout-Mounted Recloser to enhance system reliability and resilience while reducing operational costs and environmental impact. With automation, you can address the systemwide challenges you’re facing and improve overall customer satisfaction.