Cooperative Continuity Management

Bill WillinghamFlorida Electric Cooperatives Association, Inc.Tallahassee, FL

Approximately 900 coops and 2,000 municipally-owned electric utilities

Mitigation/Hardening

• There are several things that co-ops can do to “harden” the system, but they are not cheap or without complications

Overhead

• Pole Inspections• Vegetation Management• Design/Construction Standards

Vegetation Management

Coops Heavily

Damaged

Percent of

Customers

Longest Outage

Frances 6 50 12 days

Jeanne 9 73 8 days

Ivan 3 54 15 days

Dennis 2 64 5 days

Design/Construction Standards

• Overhead facilities can be built to withstand higher winds if money is not an issue, but even the strongest designs cannot withstand trees, debris, tornados, or microbursts– Florida Keys EC is building to

extreme wind standard

Underground

•Problems–flexibility in rural areas–cost–longer non-disaster outages–coastal areas–flood prone areas–trees