How Do You Pick the Circuit – Gene Wolf
Rhonda Welch
CenterPoint Energy has 100 armies working the storm restoration. The armies are assigned to 100 substations. They make sure the substation is operational and then work the system outward. Cornelius Fisher Jr. and his team moves the resources to the 12 services areas to supply the crews assigned to the substations. They keep track of resources, crews, who needs what and where, from the CPE control center. Cornelius and his team also study the type damage to the distribution system. They identify the damage and the number of customers serviced by each of those feeders. If a couple of hours work on one feeder can restore 1,000 customers vs. a couple of days worth of work will restore 50 customers, they repair the feeder with the 1000 customers.
Restoration follows the 80/20 rule. 80% of the customers can be restored with 20% the effort, but that last 20% will reverse the 80/20 rule. At this point, CPE will be working the feeders and laterals running down the lot lines (backyards). This area is full of trees, and many of those trees have fallen into the distribution lines.
Don Mathews,
director of operations
Rhonda Welch is the director of distribution control. She tells about the graphical switching program and the Internet systems that allow employees to work faster and more accurately. She points out it has been 25 years since Houston had its last big hurricane, but CPE has been training for storms. Unfortunately, you can’t predict a storm of this magnitude. Who would have expected a storm 600 miles in diameter that took 12 hours from the time hurricane winds started until the eye came ashore?
Don Mathews, director of operations took his job six months ago. He said it was a real challenge – talk about OJT! Don pointed out they apprentice operators worked along side the veterans and what a training opportunity that was.
