ACES Up Our Sleeve

By Erin McKnight

Outages are frustrating for everyone. OEC works hard to keep power disruptions to a minimum. We are among the top co-ops in the nation regarding outage times, but we want to do more. We are constantly working to find new ways to increase our reliability.

OEC Fiber is known for the internet, phone and TV services we provide, but one of the largest benefits to building a 100% fiber network throughout OEC territory is the ability for OEC to revolutionize the way we manage our electric system. The fiber-powered ACES Project is our latest step in reducing outages and building a more reliable grid.

“ACES stands for Adaptively Controlled Electric System,” said OEC manager of system engineering, Nick Shumaker. “It is our in-house project for building a better grid.”

The electric grid is an elaborate network of lines, poles and other devices that deliver power to your home. It is carefully constructed to function in the safest, most efficient way possible using a combination of sturdy equipment and technological innovation. A disruption at any point in the chain can cause an outage.

“Eighty-five percent of outages that happen in the United States are temporary,” Shumaker said.

These can be caused by anything from a tree branch falling onto a line or a squirrel finding its way into a transformer. The grid is designed to sense these disruptions. It quickly opens and closes the connection to allow the issue to resolve itself before the energy can back build, resulting in more permanent damage.

“In the same way that the breakers in your house will open up if something abnormal is going on, that is exactly what happens on the electric grid today. If you can open and wait two seconds, that branch falls to the ground. Squirrel falls to the ground. Maybe the very high wind gust is gone, and now you don’t have any permanent damage. You don’t have anyone out of power.”

The ability to rapidly open and close connections on power lines is great for stopping these seemingly small outage occurrences. But what about the big stuff? What can OEC do to prevent an outage when a car hits a pole or a storm system takes out an entire block? That’s where OEC Fiber and the ACES Project steps in.

“If a pole has been knocked down, there’s certain people who can’t get back online until you bring that pole up and do some construction, but for a vast majority of people, if you were able to reroute power from another power station that doesn’t have any issues, you can bring those people back online,” Shumaker said.

That is what the ACES Project does. It uses a series of devices connected to the OEC Fiber network called reclosers to almost instantaneously reroute power. They act as pivot points to help direct the flow of electricity along power lines to restore power to as many people as possible before a crew has arrived at the outage site.

“Before we can call our crews, the switching’s complete,” said Bobby Herring, OEC manager of maintenance.

While it may not instantly restore power to everyone, this network of automatic switches allows crews to respond more quickly and efficiently in outage situations. Say you have 1,000 people experiencing an outage. The crew responding to that outage must find the cause and isolate that section of line before working to restore service. ACES-enabled areas are able to not only cut down on the time those members will be out by rerouting the power to their homes, but it also helps the crew identify the cause by narrowing their search area. The quicker the cause of an outage is identified, the quicker it can be resolved.

The ACES Project is still in the pilot phase. It includes 11 devices impacting four electric feeders and three substations in the Norman and Noble area. Since the project launched in October of 2021, this area has seen an outage reduction of nearly 40%.

Let’s break that number down. Sixty three thousand minutes. That is 1,050 hours. That means nearly 43 days’ worth of outages have been prevented since October 2021. That is incredible!

A perfect example of this was an outage on October 1, 2021. Western Farmers, our energy supplier, experienced an outage that resulted in a loss of power to one of our substations.

“We lost transmission,” Herring said. “The sub opened, so this whole line was dead.”

Substations are the first part of the OEC power grid. An outage to a substation shuts everything connected to it down. Depending on the cause, these outages could take hours or even weeks to be resolved. With the ACES Project, OEC avoided a long-lasting outage and instantly restored power to a large number of our members.

“It picked that whole feeder up. So, there were 1,400 people off for less than 20 seconds,” Herring said.

All of these numbers show how revolutionary the ACES Project is, but they raise a question. If this self-healing grid is such a great solution, why doesn’t every power company have something like it in place? The answer is simple. Communication. All the devices that make ACES automatic switching possible must be in constant, rapid communication to function properly. The difference between our network and others is ours is built on 100% fiber.

“OEC Fiber has brought connectivity to the middle of Oklahoma that wasn’t there before,” Shumaker said. “That connectivity is something that we as an electric cooperative had not had before. We have instant communication with all these devices in the field by utilizing fiber. And that’s how we communicate to all of them in 1/1000 of a second to get the necessary up-to-the-minute data, to get people’s power back online.”

The speed and reliability of OEC Fiber enables lightning-fast communication across the ACES Project. It makes the real-time switching of electric current possible where previous efforts had fallen short.

“[What] really helped this project over the ones in the past is the fiber,” Herring said. “A lot of the other stuff was cell phone signal, and the technology was not what it is now. With the equipment that we have and the high-speed fiber on top of it, that’s given us the capability to really do that.”

Building a self-healing electrical grid is the next step in increasing reliability and reducing outage times. The joint efforts of OEC and OEC Fiber is what makes this innovation possible. The addition of fiber’s speed of light communication is building a safer more reliable electric grid, ensuring your lights stay on when it would otherwise be dark.

To learn more about the ACES project and how OEC Fiber is helping improve the electric grid, visit www.OECFiber.com/ACES.