Imagine if the Internet completely crashed due to a failure of a single router somewhere, and you had to wait for an expert to locate the problem and fix it. While this sometimes happens, we are more accustomed to the Internet automatically "self-healing" and routing data around the problem areas. So many problems on the Internet occur and are detected and avoided without us ever knowing.

The grid of today operates more like an office network than the Internet, and there is often little warning of brewing issues. Grid intelligence brings aspects of "self-healing" and automation—or at the very least, monitoring—to the grid, helping prevent trouble before it occurs.

Transformers are key components of an electric grid. A catastrophic failure of a critical transformer would result in power outages in the downstream network and could cause significant economic and environmental challenges. Smart grid monitoring and diagnostics technologies help utilities maximize asset performance and reduce unexpected transformer failure and subsequent power outages through alerts, detection, diagnosis, and prognosis. By monitoring different conditions within the transformer, such as gas levels, smart sensors will detect and report potential problems back to the utility in real-time. The information sent to the utility can be stored and analyzed by advanced software, helping predict and prevent potential transformer failure before it happens.

Compare this to the past, when utility personnel would drive around manually inspecting transformers on the grid and periodically extracting transformer oil for laboratory testing—typically, not as often as they should.

Smart grid asset optimization technologies help maximize asset performance and life for just a small fraction of what it would cost to replace them all together. In addition to improving grid reliability by predicting and preventing asset failure, these technologies also have environmental benefits -- preventing spills of oil and other environmentally hazardous material when transformers unexpectedly fail.

Automation, Monitoring & Control

Smart grid technologies help utilities improve power reliability through smart devices, automation technologies, and applications that adapt in real time. Utilities are able to monitor performance and identify outages, restore power, and precisely dispatch crews. The result: less "downtime" and happier customers. In fact, by 2020, smart grid technologies could decrease power interruptions by over 75% and save American industry more than $50 billion dollars.¹

Smart grid automation technologies, such as distribution management systems and outage management systems, can work in conjunction with smart meters and advanced metering infrastructure to provide real-time knowledge of the grid's status, enabling utilities to prevent trouble before it occurs.

In the case of an outage situation, these technologies will help alert the utility to exactly which homes and businesses are out of service-before a customer ever has to call. Geospatial information systems (GIS)—much like Google maps for the grid—will help utilities more easily and efficiently direct repair crews. In fact, mobile workforce applications empower smarter crews with this information on the road.

In advanced applications, monitoring and control technologies—known as fault diagnosis, isolation and restoration—can help mitigate the problem before deploying a repair crew. Using monitoring and control software, utilities will be able to identify problems on the grid and automatically reroute power to isolate damage and impact. Technically, these technologies help detect and isolate faulted feeder sections by opening and closing the necessary switches to restore power to the healthy feeder section within seconds. Once isolated, crews will immediately be dispatched to correct any problems.