STEM

Smart Grids and Power Outages

Wednesday, September 13, 2017, By Sawyer Kamman
Jason Dedrick, professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, who studies smart grid technologies and adoption by electric utility companies, is available to discuss the ongoing power outages and related issues in Florida post-Hurricane Irma.
“To make resources more resilient would require much greater levels of investment than what has been put into the smart grid. For instance, running power lines underground can protect them from wind and flooding, but is an expensive proposition.  The same would hold true for raising substations above the level of possible flood waters,” says Dedrick.
“To put this in other terms, the smart grid is a cyber-physical system, with the cyber at least partly connected to the physical (e.g., a smart meter attached to a destroyed house, or a sensor attached to a flooded substation), and are subject to the same forces that damage the physical grid. Other parts of the smart grid, such as software running in command centers, may not be affected directly.  However, computers and communications networks do require electricity, so power outages can knock out the cyber resources of the system as well,” says Dedrick.
“Hopefully the repair and rebuild process will include enhancing the resiliency of the physical grid and not just go about replicating the system that has been damaged in this hurricane. If so, the usefulness of  the smart grid will be greater as well,” says Dedirc.
Prof. Dedrick is available to speak to media via phone, email, Skype, or LTN studio. Please contact Ellen James Mbuqe, director of news and PR at Syracuse University, at ejmbuqe@syr.edu or 315.443.1897 or Keith Kobland, media manager at Syracuse University, at kkobland@syr.edu or 315.443.9038.