Hurricane Sandy: Can Smart Grid Limit Power Outages?

Or at least keep customers from hating their utility even more?

Katherine Tweed: October 29, 2012

At Connecticut Light & Power, most of the preparations for Hurricane Sandy have involved tree-trimming, lining up extra work crews and sandbagging critical substations that lie in the flood zone. The utility is aiming to have a far different outcome than one year ago, when an October snowstorm left 800,000 Connecticut residents without electricity. CL&P is hardly alone in its Hurricane Sandy planning.

Jersey Central Power and Light told reporters on Friday that outages from Hurricane Sandy could last more than a week. One computer model estimated more than 10 million people across the Eastern Seaboard will lose power as the category 1 hurricane slams into the coast close to a full moon. However, that model is built from looking at outages from previous hurricanes, so increasing smart grid technologies could help to dull the magnitude of that prediction.

Utilities from Virginia to Massachusetts are already reporting power outages, with more than 30,000 without power by one report. Connecticut Light & Power had about 7,700 customers without power Monday morning. Long Island Power Authority had more than 20,000 people in the dark midday Monday.

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