What’s the first word that comes to mind about transmission reliability: outages. Damage causes them, right? Windstorms, trees flying into transmission lines, wildfires, and tornadoes knocking down massive towers like dominoes.
However, there is a less obvious culprit - when the grid frequency goes haywire. When it hits 59 cycles or 60.5, very bad things happen.
How does that happen? Wind? Fires? Nor’easters? Sure, sometimes, but mostly it is caused by us.
We Cause Frequency Problems
When our power demand exceeds supply, the grid’s frequency drops, damaging equipment even in calm weather; it doesn’t have to be during a storm or wildfire. It could happen because a major power plant fails, or sneakily, when a fast-growing tree takes out a transmission line just when everyone watches the Super Bowl.
That’s why we have Balancing Authorities, or BAs. They ensure the grid’s frequency is within acceptable limits. They make sure that demand equals supply.
And BAs are using GIS to assist with these foundational spatial issues all the time, right?
Oh wait.
No, they are not!
Walk into any Balancing Authority control room and see screens filled with megawatts, frequency traces, tie-line flows, and alarms. No maps. That’s ironic—because nearly everything a BA does has a geography.
The Texas Deep Freeze is a Great Example
In February 2021, during a ferocious cold snap, people cranked up their electric heaters, creating a very high demand. In Texas, the unusual freezing shut down pipelines and power plants.
Demand went up while supply went down.
So, the grid controller could only do one thing. Turn off power to a large swath of the population to balance demand and supply.
Problem solved. Not quite. People were without power and heat for days.
How GIS Could Help
Two words: spatial context. GIS fills a blind spot. It brings spatial awareness to what has long been treated as a purely temporal balancing problem.
Here are some concrete ways GIS could have improved situational awareness, preparation, response, and post-event analysis:
Map generation and fuel-supply vulnerabilities – create a portal that shows all the generation units (gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar) with attributes like fuel type, winterization status, and availability
Overlay weather severity (temperature drops, ice/freeze warnings) with asset locations
Visualize load zones, transmission corridors, and tie-lines
Show real-time and post-event analysis using operational dashboards that illustrate whether power plant units are derated or are offline.
The GIS provides network modeling at its exact location – something schematics can’t do. It answers the question – where are the weak points in the supply chain that could mess up the electric grid? For example, during the deep freeze, coal piles were frozen solid, gas valves were inoperable, and wind turbines couldn’t spin.
GIS can also identify other climate-related vulnerabilities—like substations at risk from rising seas or critical corridors whose loss could isolate load centers. Loss of transmission assets can dramatically impact the delicate balance of electric supply and demand.
Moments before the 2003 Northeast Blackout, there were heavily loaded lines between Canada and the US. Losing critical transmission caused excessive generation in one area and shortages in another. In both cases, equipment tripped offline, creating a massive blackout.
Who are the BA People, and Why Not Use GIS?
There are two distinct categories of BAs. In two-thirds of the US, the BA is part of the ISO/RTO. The BA people operate within the ISO/RTO but follow NERC-defined standards. The BAs in the rest of the US are located within the various transmission operations centers. In these cases, system dispatchers often handle the BA’s responsibilities.
So why haven’t the BA people embraced GIS yet? The answers are culture, technology, and GIS awareness.
Culture - operations centers move fast and face strict NERC compliance; mistakes can lead to disaster. Change is risky.
Technology - a history of using control boards that are schematically based and fast. GIS is not designed for real-time control, monitoring, and operations; it is often located outside the control room firewall, creating a physical and emotional separation.
Awareness – GIS is seen as a replacement for paper maps – not as an integral part of real-time operations.
Most utilities and ISOs already have a mature GIS, so BAs don’t have to reinvent GIS—they need to use it. It needs to creep into the BA control room environment and communicate and collaborate (using well-known technology) with the systems used by the BA employees to provide the missing link – the spatial context.
Another benefit of using GIS in conjunction with BA operation is that it can ease and support NERC compliance and audits - BAL-005, BAL-006, and BAL-002 require documentation of metering boundaries, tie-lines, and contingency analyses. GIS provides this. Auditors get a clear, dated snapshot showing every tie-line and metered boundary on a digital map. GIS provides an authoritative, visual representation (portal, dashboard) of the network - no guessing whose spreadsheet is the latest.
As renewable resources grow alongside the grid, balancing load, generation, power imports, and exports is becoming increasingly difficult. While most Balancing Authorities have not embraced GIS, their jobs are becoming harder, and regulations are becoming tougher. Embracing GIS streamlines understanding of the situation by integrating all the important factors – people, surrounding location, asset condition, and external impacts.
See what happens when you bring geography into the control room - explore GIS for the modern utility.