CUB boasts tech success
An automated system helped Clinton Utilities Board restore power quickly during an outage earlier this year.
Clinton City Councilman Rob Herrell praised CUB’s use of the Fault Location, Isolation and Service System during Winter Storm Fern.
His comments came at the City Council meeting on Feb. 23. The storm occurred on Sunday, Jan. 25.
Freezing rain and ice accumulation caused trees and limbs to fall at 4 a.m. that day on a 161-kilovolt line to Spring City and Coalfield. The Tennessee Valley Authority lost that line, affecting 4,211 customers.
In less than two minutes, Herrell said the FLISR system restored service to 3,009 of those customers without human intervention.
“And most importantly, without having to pull CUB crews from other locations where they were already repairing storm damage,” Herrell said.
Greg Fey, CUB’s general manager, told The Courier News the FLISR system continuously monitors the status of CUB’s electric grid through automated control systems without humans stepping in to do anything.
“When it detects a fault on the system, it analyzes grid conditions, identifies the likely location of the problem, automatically opens switching devices to isolate the issue to the smallest possible area, and then restores service to as much of the affected system as possible by rerouting power from alternate sources,” Fey said. “In simple terms, FLISR functions as an automated ‘self-healing’ capability for our electric grid.”
CUB’s FLISR system operates across the entire six-county service territory. Fey said CUB’s in-house engineering and technical staff developed it, and CUB personnel continue to maintain it.
“According to the Electric Power Research Institute, CUB is currently the only utility in the country to have fully developed and implemented a system-wide FLISR platform entirely in-house,” he said.
