Protection Zone Management™ Guides Wells Rural Electric Company to Improved Reliability.

For Wells Rural Electric Company (WREC), setting capital and maintenance priorities has always been a challenge setting priorities, often settling for reactive, hastily planned projects.

Using the analytics from Protection Zone Management™ (PZM), WREC was able to use momentary and sustained outage data to identify their worst performing areas on their system.

PZM allows inspectors to input data from an iPad and instantly synce it to PZM's cloud-based software. PZM combines the number of fault operations with how many members are impacted when a fault occurs to determine the worst performing area of the electrical system.

The South Ruby Line 6 zone fed out of West Wells Substation stood out as having the highest reliability impact on the system. Line 6 was averaging over 70 operations per year and over 40 members were impacted with each operation.

Capital and maintenance dollars were approved to increase the reliability on the West Wells Line 6 protection zone. The approved dollars were used to shorten spans and increase spacing on the rural feeder.

The targeted investment worked!

Line 6 has become one of the most reliable rural feeders in their system with an average number of operations dropping from averaging over 70 fault operations per year to less than 10.

“At WREC, one of the biggest benefits and improvements to our system has been the implementation of Protection Zone Management. Our company onboarded PZM about four years ago and we are glad we did! It really provided us with the framework we needed to have a successful inspection and maintenance program and drove us from a reactive maintenance utility to a proactive maintenance operation. We gained better visibility of our systems performance, maintenance cycles, and inspections that provided data we could act on.” – Ryan Brodsho, operations manager at Wells Rural Electric Company

Wells Rural Electric Company continues to use PZM to identify the worst performing circuits and target capital and maintenance dollars to continuously improve the reliability of their system.

Improving electric utility operations.

Protection Zone Management™ (PZM) is a comprehensive, leading-edge inspection and maintenance program helping to improve electric utility operations.

The PZM program includes an iPad-enabled, cloud-based inspection experience that is electrical utility inspection programs into the 21st century.

PZM offers detailed, industry-specific inspection questions, PZM eliminates paper-based dual data collection, PZM provides instant deficiency identification and assessment, and PZM syncs the information to the cloud where it can be accessed from your office, your home, or on the road.

PZM is a simple solution that puts your inspection and maintenance program on cruise control and frees up management time for other important business initiatives.