Fortnightly Magazine - October 25 2021

Association of Edison Illuminating Companies' Top 10 Awards 2021

AEIC

We celebrate this year’s AEIC Top 10 Awards for operational innovation: Commonwealth Edison for advanced distribution protection and for an arc flash simulator, Con Edison for its safety leadership system, Duke Energy for its customer delivery builder concierge, Eversource for its Give Me a Moment tools to address momentary outages, Florida Power & Light for tackling human error in switching, New York Power Authority for private LTE network applications, PPL for vegetation management risk modeling, Tampa Electric for its BlockEnergy distributed energy system, and Tennessee Valley Authority for its safety blitz process.

They're Innovating Undergrounding

Resilience

As we have experienced the effects of innovation in all aspects of our industry, so too has innovation revolutionized the conversion from “overheading” to undergrounding. Converting selected overhead wires to underground cables has consequently become a compelling option for utilities across the country.

Undergrounding: Les Carter

Dominion Energy

“The idea behind this program is to reduce total length of restoration from specific storms, from any kind of catastrophic event. The best way is to find the most outage-prone zones and put them underground.”

Undergrounding: Jerry Cook

Florida Power & Light

“We use the latest horizontal drilling technology – directional boring and missile boring equipment – to minimize disruptions to customers’ properties.”

Undergrounding: Dave Plusquellic

TECO Energy

“The program required a comprehensive look at benefits versus costs, with a focus on extreme weather events, so we conducted a thorough and robust data-driven analysis.”
V