Question Of The Week: Resilience To Extreme Weather

Have you adopted measures to track weather conditions that might impact your facilities in order to improve resilience to these events? If so, does this involve communication with your utility providers?

Last month, Schneider Electric announced a long-term partnership with the University of Connecticut (UConn) and Eversource Energy to combine the companies’ storm outage prediction technology to create a single, more accurate model. UConn’s analytics model is being integrated into Schneider’s WeatherSentry Online (WSO) platform, with the aim of enabling utilities to better understand the expected impacts of storms on their utility infrastructure and to make smarter decisions in preparing for storms to minimize restoration time, cost, and impacts to customers.

With service in Connecticut, Massachussetts, and New Hampshire, Eversource transmits and delivers electricity to 1.2 million customers in 149 cities and towns and provides natural gas to 226,000 customers in 72 communities in Connecticut.

The project will be housed at the Eversource Energy Center on the UConn campus. The Center is a partnership between the university and Eversource to develop state-of-the-art approaches for delivering reliable power and responding to severe weather and security events. Becoming a member of the partnership, Schneider Electric will apply its weather technology, weather data, and expertise in developing scalable solutions for utilities globally. With this new project, Schneider and Eversource will expand upon their long-term relationship in supporting storm preparation efforts by combining UConn’s Outage Prediction Model (OPM) with Schneider’s WSO platform and other weather services.

“We are excited to see the world-class research from our UConn team expand into the market,” said UConn Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Mun Choi. “We are confident that the utility industry throughout the country will see this technology as an opportunity to leverage their outage and infrastructure data with Schneider’s weather information to make informed decisions when severe weather strikes.”

Meanwhile, National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), The American Institute of Architects (AIA), and 38 other organizations involved in the nation’s design and construction industry released a report on progress made on the resilience front since the Resilience Building Coalition announced the Building Industry Statement on Resilience in 2014.

CEOs of nearly two dozen design and construction industry associations, along with building owners and operators, agreed to promote resilience in planning, building materials, design, construction, and operational techniques as the solution to making the nation’s aging infrastructure more safe and secure.

“We recognize that natural and manmade hazards pose an increasing threat to the safety of the public and the vitality of our nation,” reads the statement. “We further recognize that contemporary planning, building materials, design, construction and operational techniques can make our communities more resilient to these threats.” (See full list of participating organizations.)

What measures have you implemented to track weather conditions in order to better protect people and facilities? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the Comments section below.