Casey Shull has been an engineer in the electric utility industry for 26 years in distribution, transmission and power plant engineering. His title is Operations Manager for Crisis and Outage / Team Leader of Major Overhead Engineering. In addition, Mr. Shull spent 4 years managing the design and installation of fiber optic and wireless networks in 40 states within the U.S. Mr. Shull has developed crisis recovery plans and methodologies for electric utilities and communication companies to recover from natural and man-made disasters. Mr. Shull is currently pursuing his PhD at Purdue University focusing on security analytics and statistics in the school of Polytechnic, has a B.S. in engineering from Purdue, M.S. from Purdue, MBA from Anderson University and holds a PMP certificate. His presentation in Track 1 at ET 16 is titled the Common Recovery Model which discusses the use of MBSE electric utilities can utilize during wide-spread blackouts.
Is North America vulnerable to wide spread electrical blackout from natural or man-made disasters? Yes. Are electric utilities and critical infrastructure (CI) operators prepared to maintain CI operations? No. Why? Preparations are developed to maintain operation for the Bulk Electric Transmission System (BETS) and not for the distribution system which provides service to CI. There are two distinct electrical systems operated by electric utilities. One, the bulk electric transmission system (BETS) transmitting high voltage electricity across North America, defined as wholesale sales, between states and electric utility owners as a commodity. Two, the electrical distribution system which delivers electricity at lower voltages to consumers and CI, defined as retail sales, is confined to electric utility territorial boundaries. The BETS utilize plans for electrical restoration which are continually refined and simulated to ensure restoration of electricity within the BETS after electrical outage. The problem is that electric utilities do not simulate electrical distribution restoration plans to restore electrical distribution to CI after wide spread electrical outage. The result of wide spread electrical outage to power CI can be socioeconomic chaos in North America. The literature reveals that electrical distribution system owners are not required to develop recovery plans for wide spread outage events but attempt to improve upon reliability indices by reducing the duration of outage to the largest group of customers. However, electric utilities do not focus on minimizing the duration of CI outage. Decreasing the duration of electrical outage to CI must be prioritized after wide spread disasters to provide critical services to the public affected by the electrical outage. The research discussed in this paper was used to develop a Common Recovery System creating models, processes and plans utilizing system engineering tools applicable to electrical distribution systems to decrease the duration of electrical outage to CI.
