Cass County Electric Cooperative Inc.
Cass County Electric Cooperative Inc.
27/08/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 28/08/2024 11:41
Lighting the way: CCEC's innovative approach to power reliability with FLISER technology
Reliability has always been at the forefront of Cass County Electric Cooperative's (CCEC) commitment to members. Keeping the lights on at an affordable rate will always be your cooperative's top goal.
Our numbers prove it; through July of this year, our reliability rate sits at 99.9957% (excluding major events). Despite rising inflation, CCEC is proud to have kept rates stable since 2017 without a rate increase.
Yet, as we saw last winter, living in North Dakota means that outages are an unfortunate reality from time to time. And while outages are often out of our control, how we respond to them is.
CCEC prides itself on being at the cutting edge of technology to best serve its members. One of the most recent examples? Fault location, isolation, and service restoration technology, best known as FLISR.
What is it?
Implemented this year, FLISR provides a cutting-edge approach to limit the number of residents without power during an outage.
"In the past, if a substation breaker opened up, you could have 1,500 or more people out of power, and all 1,500 would be out until lineworkers were called into the shop, able to locate that area and get out there and isolate it," CCEC SCADA and Relay Technician Tony Tasa said. "There was no technology in our system that allowed us to automatically lower the number of members without power in a geographic area."
That's not the case with FLISR.
"With FLISR, the system can auto-reconfigure on its own to isolate the faulted area, so fewer people are out of power," Tasa said. "So instead of 1,500 people out in a six-mile radius, there are only 500 out in a two-mile radius because the system knows right away where the problem is."
When an outage occurs, FLISR hops into action right away, isolating the fault in under a minute. Yet the complexities of the technology and CCEC's commitment to it expand far beyond a computer screen.
"We've been adding switches in the field (that make FLISR possible) for the past two decades," Tasa said. "FLISR can't happen without those and increased technology at our substations that isolate faults."
When 2022 rolled around, CCEC updated its SCADA system (a technology that draws in data from the field), presenting a perfect opportunity for CCEC's team to begin testing out FLISR in a concentrated area.
"We chose an area of our system with a large number of switches already installed in the field to test it and implement it," Tasa said. "Now that we know how to do it, we will continue implementing it in more areas."
Two years later, CCEC was one of the state's first electric cooperatives to implement the system for its members. As FLISR is implemented in more areas, Tasa credits CCEC's commitment to reliability and technology.
"Reliability has always been huge for us," he said. "We'll always have outages, but this will help reduce the size and duration. The more switches we have, the more we can shrink that number."