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Three Major Shortcomings of Legacy Processes and Policies

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1. Utilities are discouraged from proactively identifying risks.

Picture this — an inspector spots new construction converging on safe clearance to an existing pole. Some agencies would require that inspector not leave the field until they have satisfactorily mitigated the risk — in this case, relocating the pole.

Many regulatory jurisdictions mandate utility personnel to remediate risks immediately, or within a tight timeframe, upon discovery. No one wants risks festering unattended, but this expectation actively discourages proactive behavior, as you can only prevent risks from unleashing danger and damage if you know about them in advance. But in today’s regulatory landscape, utilities are fearful of retribution for knowing about anything in advance — especially when they don’t have the resources to address every risk right away.

Is it better to force utilities to keep reacting to a mixed bag of tasks with unknown impact and look the other way from ticking time bombs for fear of criminal liability? Or to make sure utilities have the support and resources they need to proactively deliver on their resilience and reliability promises?

Processes and regulations must acknowledge that risks are not created equal and must be proactively prioritized and addressed in order of impact, not discovery. Today’s black-and-white ‘it’s a risk or it’s not’ framework must evolve to reflect well-defined, context-rich shades of gray. This way, both utilities and regulators can standardize exactly what constitutes “urgent” and “high-impact” and encourage utilities to adopt a more proactive approach to reliability and resilience.

2. Risks are defined in a vacuum.

Inspectors often flag risks, such as leaning poles, during field visits on a fair weather day. On a > 100-degree day, sagging conductors can create vegetation risks you wouldn’t see on a fair weather day. 75 mph winds may cause conductors to gallop, causing outages, on spans that seemed to bear even tension on inspection day. Flash floods could destabilize vegetation and cause fall-in risks you might not otherwise worry about.

It’s never been more critical to understand how your assets will behave in every scenario, not just the conditions where it’s safe to conduct manual surveys.

Too often, risks are defined in a vacuum according to decades-old standards, not in the context of real-life operational conditions. Someone somewhere might have decided that >40 mph constitutes “high winds”, creating standards dictating that poles must withstand 40 mph winds. But what if pockets of your network actually routinely experience >60 mph winds? Today’s high stakes demand that utilities and policymakers define risks in the context in which they become dangerous, with the flexibility to stress-test and recalibrate existing assumptions.

3. Remediation is a one-size-fits-all exercise instead of targeted cost-benefit trade-offs.

When you are required to respond to risks immediately upon discovery, there isn’t much room to thoughtfully evaluate the best solutions. For example, rather than defaulting to pole replacement, simply adding a stay or replacing just the cross-arm can often achieve the desired effect. If only you knew where and could execute as such, this approach could save millions of dollars annually.

How much stronger would your request for pole hardening dollars be if, instead of suggesting you replace all wooden poles with composite or steel, you could prove exactly which wooden poles present failure risk and the expected network performance improvements?

If utility executives, network operators, inspectors and regulators all agree that risks and mitigants aren’t created equal in urgency or impact, why is the default approach so at odds with what they know to be true?

While manual inspections will continue to play a critical role in network governance, they are dangerously insufficient as a standalone strategy for improving reliability and resilience. Relying on manual inspections for risk discovery instead of focusing them on validation and triage hinders utilities’ ability to align actions and philosophy.

Read the full Primer on Digital Risk Mitigation

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