David Cooke and his colleagues get called in on the hard cases.
When power goes out repeatedly in the same area, for example, Cooke and his fellow Commonwealth Edison reliability engineers will have a look at the equipment.
“We look into the more chronic problems,” Cooke said. “If customers continually have problems, or if circuits perform poorly, we will go review those lines to determine what is wrong and then issue corrective action.”
When they review the lines, the engineers do what Cooke calls “patrolling the circuits,” which means visually inspecting all of the electrical equipment used in the problematic circuit.
“I physically go and I put my eyeballs on every single pole,” he said. “I will patrol the entire circuit and check out all the poles, the wires and the transformers.”
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The thing is, some of that equipment can be hard to find.
“Some of the electrical wires, for example, are along the street, which you can drive. But some of them have no road nearby, so you have to walk it,” he said. “And other times you’re in a residential area and you have to go through everybody’s backyards.”
And then there are those large, green transformer boxes in suburban developments, which often are hidden from view by bushes, trees and grasses. Cooke said some people try to hide them from view by putting sheds in front of them.
Plus, ComEd, which provides electricity in northern Illinois, operates what Cooke estimates to be hundreds of thousands of miles of electrical lines, making the reliability engineers’ job of patrolling the circuits extremely challenging.
“Some circuits are 35 to 40 miles long,” Cooke said. “Sometimes you’ll come across a circuit that will take you two weeks to patrol.”
So how are these ComEd engineers able to locate every component of every circuit on the utility company’s massive network? By relying on about 800 custom-modified Garmin global positioning system devices, Cooke said.
The model used by ComEd, called the GPSMAP 60C, retails for about $430 (www.garmin.com) and features a 2.6-inch color screen and 56 megabytes of internal memory to store maps and locations.
Like other GPS devices, the units “triangulate the signal from three or four satellites to determine where you are,” Cooke said. “It gives you your latitude and longitude coordinates.”
And like other, more affordable units, the GPSMAP 60C uses points-of-interest (POI) data to indicate the location of hotels, restaurants, gas stations and other establishments.
“You can even look up the type of restaurant: Mexican, Chinese, French,” he said. “And you can see a list of places by distance from where you are. So it will tell you the French restaurant is 22 miles away.”
But unlike any other GPS system, ComEd’s units are loaded with more than 668,000 points of interest from the company’s electrical network.
Cooke extracted the longitude and latitude coordinates of ComEd electrical equipment from another program, converted to a format that is understandable to the GPS devices and imported it.
“Now you can see wires, roads and whether the system is in the backyard or near the road,” Cooke said.
“I have entered the latitude and longitude data for our equipment, and now enter whatever I’m looking for into the Garmin as a point and drive to it.”
Of course, the GPS helps him get there.
“It has an auto-routing feature, so it calculates how to best drive to any of the points,” he said. “You can ask for the shortest-distance route or the fastest route.”
Whether the equipment is in the front yard or in the middle of a corn field, the ComEd reliability engineers know exactly how to get to it.
“When they’re driving by on the road, the Garmin device will actually tell them how many feet it is from them,” Cooke said.
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