ComEd: ‘Smart Grid’ might help reduce outages

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Mike Gardner, a certified arborist with the Oak Lawn Public Works Department, uses a chain saw to remove a maple tree off two vehices in the 10300 block of Kedvale Avenue on Monday, July 11, 2011. | Brett Roseman~Sun-Times Media

Updated: January 23, 2012 3:03AM

If you still don’t have electricity — four days after the big storm came barreling through these parts — then you’re among the very unlucky few.

As of Thursday evening, only about 63,000 of the estimated 870,000 customers who lost power Monday remained in the dark, according to ComEd, and only 700 of those were in the Southland.

Ninety-nine percent of all customers were expected to have service by midnight Friday, ComEd said.

The worst-hit area remained the northern suburbs, where 54,000 customers were without power. In Chicago, only 900 did not have service.

If the “Smart Grid” that ComEd wants to create would have been in operation this week, hundreds of thousands of homeowners and businesses likely would have been without power for just a few minutes rather than days, ComEd said.

The company is eager to push Senate Bill 1652, which authorizes the Smart Grid — along with rate increases.

According to ComEd spokesoman Tabrina Davis:

The current grid “is not a grid that will support customers’ growing demands and our future economy,” With the Smart Grid, after recent storms, “ComEd would have known customers were out of power without them having to call us. Technology would have pinpointed outages, allowing us to dispatch crews more quickly to restore service. Digital automation would have rerouted power or corrected a problem before an outage occurs, meaning fewer customers would have seen outages, and thousands of customers may have never experienced an outage. ... With the July 11 storm, we estimate that approximately 175,000 customers would have never experienced an outage.”

A Smart Grid wouldn’t be completely weatherproof itself, but “the integration of multiple technologies and the integration of the vast amount of information facilitate a ‘self-healing’ grid, meaning the overall system is more robust and less susceptible to issues with individual elements or devices. Essentially, information and electricity can be automatically routed around a problem area.”

Contributing: Sun-Times Media