However, that would be a normal day in the office, which is sometimes quite rare. I regularly meet with other utilities to work on joint projects and studies, participate in an audit, attend a class or conference, and occasionally I’m helping to teach a class. This doesn’t mean the study work ends when you travel, it just means you have to be proficient at working on studies in hotel rooms, Starbucks, and from the back of a meeting room. High power laptops, mobile internet connections, and inter-utility coordination requirements have made this less of an office job and more of an “ everywhere” job.
As far as everyday problems, our biggest everyday problem is computers. If someone could invent a PC that did what I wanted it to do, instead of what I asked it to do, that would make life a lot smoother.
AS: We will be working on re-conduc-toring part of the McIntosh–Taft 230- kV corridor, and the site preparation for a coal gasification power plant at our Stanton generating facility.
UAE: What does the OUC do to ensure reliability, as your tagline is “The Reliable One”? What sort of steps do you take? AS: At a transmission planning level, reliability is about preventing widespread outages rather than individual outages. What OUC does at a planning level is look very closely at our transmission system and that of our neighbors to make sure that we are meeting the latest NERC (North America Electric Reliability Corporation) standards. When our studies find a future deficiency, we work with our design engineering group and neighboring utilities to develop solutions that can be constructed prior to the problem actually occurring. We also
pay attention to what is going on in the industry nationwide—to see if they are experiencing problems that may not be addressed in the current standards but are worth examination.
When we build a project, we examine the best industry practices available for enhancing the performance of our system, especially those where cost is relatively small for the benefits gained. For example, at all of our 230-kV stations we have redundant high-speed protection and redundant communications links. The cost for this is small relative to the project cost, but is large enough that many companies choose not to install
this redundant protection. For OUC, the benefit outweighs the cost. This redundant protection means that we are very unlikely to have a sustained fault on our system or a fault that results in backup protection clearing a larger area of the power grid than necessary. When NERC category C and D testing is done, this difference in design philosophy shows clear benefits.
Generally at OUC the first question we ask is what “should” we build, and, if the price for performance is reasonable, we build it. We don’t look for the lowest cost solution; we look for the solution with the best balance of price and performance.
UAE: Tell our readers about the nuts and bolts that you work with at OUC. How many miles of transmission, distribution? How many substations? AS: OUC has 32 substations and 377 miles of 230-kV, 115-kV, and 69-kV lines and cables. We are right in the middle of the state transmission grid and have twenty-four 230-kV interconnects and several 115-kV and 69-kV interconnections.
I like to say that our system is the per-
fect size to learn transmission planning
on. We are small enough that you can see
all of it on one sheet of paper and visual-
ize it in your mind, but large enough
that you can experience a little bit of
everything.
AS: Our large number of 230-kV interconnections. We are right in the middle of several utilities, and, in some cases, we have a utility’s generation on one side of our system and their load on another. Our 230-kV system is far more affected by what these other utilities do than our own activities. It is quite challenging to explain to our customers why they are investing in projects that are due to the activities of others. Our 230-kV system was originally built to transport power from our power plants to our load, but now has to handle “parallel” and sometimes direct flows between entities on either side of our system. OUC is, fortunately, not alone in this; it’s a challenge for the entire industry.
UAE: You must have a million interesting stories from the field about outages or interesting people met during calls. Can you tell us one of your favorites? AS: Well the most interesting outage I worked on was as a distribution engineer for an investor-owned utility—an outage
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