Automated reliability metrics and faster storm restoration

The challenge

Meridian Grid Co serves a large suburban and rural distribution territory. Reliability reporting was a monthly scramble: an analyst exported outage events from the OMS, cleaned them in spreadsheets, and computed SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI by hand following IEEE 1366. Major event days were classified inconsistently from one month to the next.

• SAIDI and SAIFI took days to produce and were hard to reproduce when regulators asked questions.
• There was no systematic way to rank chronic feeders that drove a disproportionate share of customer minutes interrupted.
• During storms, restoration estimates were assembled manually, so ETRs reached customers late.
• AMI last-gasp signals existed but were not being used to confirm nested or downstream outages quickly.

Leadership wanted reliability metrics they could trust on demand, plus a faster, more confident storm response.

The build

On DOTA, the reliability team built an Outage Analytics and Storm Response App that ingests OMS events and AMI last-gasp signals, applies the IEEE 1366 methodology including major event day classification, and computes SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI continuously rather than monthly.

The app ranks feeders by contribution to customer minutes interrupted so chronic performers rise to the top, and during storms it blends crew status and outage extent to generate and update ETRs that the call center can publish.

Seeing our worst feeders ranked automatically changed our capital conversation. We stopped arguing about which circuits were really the problem and started fixing them.

The outcome

Reliability indices are now computed automatically and are fully reproducible for regulatory filings. The team identified twelve chronic feeders that had been hiding in the monthly averages, and during the most recent major storm, estimated restoration times reached customers about 40 percent sooner than in prior events.

Meridian stood the app up on DOTA in roughly six weeks, without a traditional software project or a queue in the IT backlog.