The North American utility industry has been a model of reliability and resiliency for decades. The vaunted “Five 9s” of reliability are de rigueur for utilities where keeping the lights on is job #1. Leaning into the challenges around extreme weather today and on the horizon, managing distribution networks is no longer business as usual.
Many of the processes and tools that have been a part of the utility industry’s resiliency and reliability success story are now facing headwinds, literally and figuratively. Consider the growth in severe weather. Figure 1 below shows how the occurrence of severe storms is growing.
Figure 1. Occurrence and cost of severe weather events in the US, 1980 – 2023. (Source: cisa.gov).
These changes in weather have implications for how utility leaders are managing their distribution networks. Among the concerns with these changing conditions, and perhaps first among the concerns, is ensuring utility poles are designed and deployed to withstand severe weather.
Historically, much of the analysis work for distribution systems has been conducted on spreadsheets. Pole loading is a good example of this. While conducting these critical analyses on spreadsheets have worked for some time, changing conditions and the accompanying changing regulatory environment call for an analysis approach that is faster, more accurate, can be shared across the organization, and has capabilities that are beyond what spreadsheet can provide.
Regulatory and standards organizations are providing updates to meet these evolving, weather-driven safety and environmental challenges, reflecting the need for more stringent analyses of the distribution system. One of the first countries to adopt more stringent guidelines is Canada. The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) now requires nonlinear analysis for all power poles that are deployed. This shift is expected to be seen throughout other countries around the world as these weather patterns are not isolated to North America.
Utility distribution engineers and designers need to change their processes and in many cases their tools, as well, to meet this nonlinear analysis standard. One example of this is found at Utilities Kingston (UK), a municipal, multi-service utility in Ontario, Canada. “We knew the regulatory requirement for nonlinear analysis was coming, and our two-dimensional spreadsheet application was not going to cut it,” said Dan Micallef, engineering technologist at UK.
As the team at UK looked for processes and tools to meet these new standards, they discovered that the nonlinear analyses were too complex to complete manually, even with the most sophisticated spreadsheet applications. The search was on to find a tool that not only provided the ability to perform nonlinear analyses, but also one that could streamline the process by using 3D modeling tools.
Similarly, at BC Hydro, the largest utility in British Columbia, serving over five million residents, engineers and designers saw the CSA moving to the nonlinear analysis standard as an opportunity to improve their technology and processes to help ensure structural integrity. Engineering leadership at BC Hydro also saw the need for an enterprise tool that could scale to be used by hundreds of staff, interface with GIS and other systems, and be used relatively seamlessly by third-party contractors that partner with the utility for much of the design and construction work on the distribution network.
Both UK and BC Hydro landed on the SPIDAcalc solution from Bentley Systems. Among the benefits that are being realized are:
- UK was able to process 30 iterations of a pole in 10 to 20 minutes, realizing an ROI of literally months of staff hours saved.
- The team at BC Hydro was able to transition internal processes and technology across their massive design, engineering, and construction groups to meet the newer, more stringent compliance requirement while maintaining and in fact improving the structural integrity of their poles in the field.
- Also at BC Hydro, design consistency was improved, with an accessible client file that makes it easier for all users to access standards. This is critical for an organization that is not only massive and serving millions of customers, but also needs to accommodate joint pole ownership requirements with local telecom company.
As these examples from Utilities Kingston and BC Hydro demonstrate, what has “always worked” in many cases will simply no longer be enough. Applying advanced design tools like SPIDAcalc will enable improved accuracy, streamlined internal and external operations, better data access, and ultimately improved resiliency, reliability, and safety.
To learn more about how your utility can improve the resiliency of its distribution system with advanced design and analysis tools, visit here for insights on the Utilities Kingston case study, and here for information on the BC Hydro case study. For additional information on the SPIDAcalc solution visit here.