Chris Hamon, CEO of White River Valley Electric Cooperative Missouri, explains how his team maximizes the power of PwrMetrix® AI to predict top feeders that will experience power outages based on the time of the month and certain weather condition. This allows White River Valley Electric Cooperative to plan their future, perform predictive
maintenance and limit future outages. Chris says, “when we ran the outage predictions on the AI platform and it gave us the probabilities of outages for the next month, we were a little skeptical until in the first week after all top 5 predicted feeders went out. Literally it picked all five!!!”
White River Valley is taking the AI report a step further by “looking at minimizing outage length or even keeping the outage from happening at all by taking the AI get probabilities and use it to work smarter by changing breaker settings and minimizing the effect of the outage.” White River Valley engineers are taking lightning strike data to look for damaged lightning arrestors in areas where outages happened that had no probable cause.
Chris further explains, “once we get the fault current info, then we lay it over the digitized map and get the location of the nearest lightning arrestor to the lightning strike. We then send personnel to the site to check out the arrestor in question. We are 2 for 2 using this method and not letting time take the arrestor out on its own. We are using science and artificial intelligence to improve reliability and reduce losses of revenue during outages. Again, working smarter and not harder, and reducing incremental costs while reducing revenue losses.
