Animal Outage Mitigation Key to Improving Reliability: The Importance of Collecting Outage Statistics and Causes

Good data provides the ability to make appropriate decisions regarding an animal-caused outage problem.

In order to understand the animal-intrusion issue, including the cause of the issue, utilities need to measure, establish targeted goals and then make informed decisions to meet or exceed those goals.

Utilities must begin by reviewing their asset management processes for collecting data relating to animal-intrusion caused outages and equipment damage. Utilities need to be more rigorous when it comes to collecting outage data. A lack of data or even inaccurate data can lead to inaction or inappropriate action being applied to a problem. There are a number of reasons why utilities may have difficulty obtaining data; however, performing a review of the data collection methods and driving improvements to the areas of weakness will address this threshold issue. Listed below are some of the top reasons why data has been incomplete or inaccurate and should be used to eliminate reasons why poor data collection processes exist:

• A low-risk outage (momentary outage, limited customers affected, occurrence at night, etc.)
• Data collection did not occur (operator/field personnel were busy, etc.)
• Inconsistent or nonexistent reporting standards (operational drift)