As customers demand reliable power, utilities rely on technology to adapt
Mar. 1—If it seems like power outages are happening less frequently and ending more quickly, it's not your imagination.
And it's definitely not by accident.
Over the past decade, Eversource Energy, the state's largest public utility, has been upgrading its distribution infrastructure to build resiliency. The company is deploying automation and "smart" switches to isolate outages and re-route power to their customers here and in Massachsetts and Connecticut.
It seems to be working.
More than half of New Hampshire customers affected by outages in 2023 saw their power restored in under five minutes, Eversource officials said.
Back in 2015, that number was just 11%.
In the intervening years, "We got better at switching and rerouting power," said Brian Dickie, vice president of electric system operations for New Hampshire.
Eversource's distribution system serves about 723,000 New Hampshire customers — about 540,000 of its own retail customers and another 180,000 wholesale customers, including New Hampshire Electric Coop, Unitil and municipal utilities.
"We own the highway," explained Peter Glynn, manager of distribution system operations.
Most people don't think about where their electricity comes from — until they lose it.
But at Eversource's operations center in the Manchester Millyard, it's all they think about.
The Electric System Control Center looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Massive computer screens fill the walls, colored lines tracking the flow of power from the Seacoast to the North Country.
An alarm sounds and all eyes pivot to a section of the screen. It signals an outage along the line — in this case, planned maintenance in Deerfield.
But during a storm, as the outages mount, those alarms take on greater urgency.
"These operators, they need to go from zero to 100," said Marc Dionne, manager of distribution operations.
It's a close-knit team, he said, and isolating outages and restoring power to their customers is a point of pride. "If Humpty Dumpty falls, they can put him back together," Dionne said.
At those moments, he said, "The shift supervisor is like the conductor of an orchestra."
During a big storm, "It's all hands on deck," said Dickie, who came up through the engineering ranks.
They'll take care of the largest outages first. But Dickie said, "We will stay here until every customer is restored."
The system is automated, "self-healing," as Dionne calls it.
After a breaker trips, the system recloses the breaker to test whether the incident is truly a fault or a temporary blip — a tree limb that bounced off a wire, for instance. If that's all, the power again flows through the line, just a momentary disruption.
When an outage does occur — a tree takes down a limb or a car strikes a utility pole — "smart" switches close off problem areas and operators can remotely reroute power to restore nearby homes and businesses in minutes.
Ever had the power go off and come right back on? That's the smart switches at work.
Next door to the Electric System Control Center is the System Operations Center, with its own wall of screens and banks of computer terminals. When an outage is reported, operators dispatch line crews into the field via electronic messages and also send messages to affected customers, letting them know when they can expect power to be restored.
These days, Glynn said, "Everybody expects the Amazon experience."
"They expect to know why their power went out, when it's coming back, and when the crews are out," he said.
Planning for weather
Planning for Thursday's wind storm began days earlier, when the sun was shining and temperatures approached 60 degrees. Eversource contracts with three different weather services to forecast coming storms that could cause outages.
Crews were called in for the overnight shift on Wednesday, and contract crews were notified. Linemen were pre-positioned in areas where the greatest impacts were predicted, mainly in the southern tier from Rochester to Keene. Additional line crews reported in at 6 a.m. Thursday, and crews from Massachusetts came to help out here after restoration was finished down there.
William Hinkle, spokesman for Eversource, said fallen trees and tree limbs caused damage to the electric system in every part of the state, particularly in the western region. By 8 a.m. Thursday, power had been restored to more than 52,000 customers — including 22,500 in under five minutes, thanks to the distribution automation technology.
Douglas Foley, president of New Hampshire operations, said the infamous blackout of 1965 was a wakeup call for electric utilities. The entire Northeast and parts of Canada were plunged into darkness after a transmission line in Canada tripped, starting a cascading failure that affected an estimated 30 million people.
Back then, Dickie said, managing and responding to massive power outages "was all done with people."
"The substations were manned with people. They would open breakers and monitor loads," he said.
Foley recalled that when he was a field supervisor years ago, "We would tell businesses: Hey, sorry, the lights are out, it's probably going to take a day to come back."
"You would light candles and everyone would play board games," he said.
Society has changed.
"Now we're so connected with the electrification of everything," Foley said. "Our customers expect us to be on all the time."
As a result, "We've been evolving with technology as our customers and society have demanded more from electric infrastructure."
Cutting trees, upgrading equipment
The catastrophic ice storm that hit the state in December 2008 was a reckoning for Eversource, then called Public Service of New Hampshire. Trees and branches toppled under the weight of the ice, leaving hundreds of broken utility poles — and thousands of residents statewide without power in the cold and dark for two weeks. The outage was the company's largest ever, affecting more than 322,000 PSNH customers at the peak.
"We caught a lot of flack, deservedly so," said Dickie, the operations VP.
The restoration effort after that storm involved 1,200 line crews and the cost was estimated at $75 million in a PSNH post-storm report.
About five years ago, Eversource hired an outside engineering firm to assess its distribution infrastructure. "We looked at reliability and frequency of outages for our customers in New Hampshire," said Foley, the New Hampshire operations head.
That review prompted a number of upgrades to existing infrastructure.
The company has been replacing wooden utility poles with larger steel poles in rights-of-way, using a composite fiberglass material on the poles' cross arms, and installing spacer cables that better protect the power lines. They've also implemented a five-year cycle of tree-trimming along Eversource's 12,500 miles of distribution lines.
New Hampshire is the second most-forested state, Foley noted. So it makes sense that trees are the top cause of power outages here.
Eversource also set up a troubleshooter department, manned by line workers stationed around the state who can respond immediately. They work 12-hour shifts, and someone is available 24/7 to respond to spot outages.
"So when a limb comes down on a wire or a car strikes a pole, we don't need to call in crews," Foley said. "They can respond that much quicker."
Part of the change at the company has been "cultural," Dickie said, with the focus on power restoration first. "So when the crews get out there, they're looking to do whatever they can to restore before they do any repair," he said.
That could mean line workers installing temporary poles first, moving on to the next emergency and returning later to do a more permanent repair, he said.
Eversource system operators constantly run simulations of outages to make sure the system is quickly isolating the problems and rerouting power, Dickie said. If a problem arises, they analyze what went wrong so it doesn't happen when a real storm arrives.
Expecting more storms
For those in the industry, climate change is not a theoretical conversation.
As storms become more severe, occur more often and last longer, power companies have to make sure their systems can withstand what nature delivers. Customers expect no less these days, with more people working from home and depending on electronic devices for work, school and play.
"We're seeing these crazy snowstorms and rain storms and wind events, so we need to make the system more resilient," Foley said.
Three storms in the 2022-2023 winter season rank in the top 10 for the number of storm-related outages.
A storm two days before Christmas in 2022 left more than 220,000 Eversource customers without power. A month later, a snowstorm affected 219,000 customers, and on March 13, 2023, a nor'easter left more than 176,000 customers in the dark.
"It tells me the number of storms are increasing, and they're getting more severe," Dickie said.
But even in those storms, the new reliability measures made a difference, Eversource officials said.
During the pre-Christmas storm, more than 71,000 customers had their power restored within five minutes. During the January storm, more than 83,000 customers had their power restored remotely within five minutes, and during the March storm, it was nearly 59,000 customers.
"The work we're doing on the system has made it more resilient," Foley said.
"So even though we're seeing more severe weather and storms are still creating damage, we have the ability to restore and get the system up quicker."
