I like to compare what digital technologies do for the grid to what steel did to enable the modern city. Before steel, there could be no skyscrapers; steel bears more weight to support city infrastructure as we know it today. Digital communication technologies enable more information to pass across the modern grid and this has greatly enhanced our reliability and made our system more resilient to disruptive events.
Some of the biggest benefits of smart grid technologies are increased system visibility and control and data collection when managing storm restoration. For example, following the storm in August 2020, when an unprecedented derecho and tornadoes interrupted power to more than 800,000 customers, the information we gathered from the grid helped us restore more than 500,000 customers in less than 24 hours. If not for the investments made to improve resiliency, this storm would have caused nearly twice as many families and businesses to lose power. It also would have raised the cost of the storm by many millions of dollars and it would have taken two weeks to restore all the outages – which is exactly what happened in parts of Iowa that were hit by the same storm.