Circuit Resiliency Program

CHA has teamed up with sustainability company Avangrid for a $2.5 billion, 10-year initiative to address severe storms' impact on infrastructure throughout Avangrid's service territories. Starting in Northern Maine, CHA targeted the state's most problematic circuits. Our team concentrated on understanding current topology, outage triggers, future distribution plans, load balancing, and asset conditions. This data helped form a reliability and expenditure improvement plan leading to initiatives for similar work for three large circuits in New York.

Grid resiliency is a top priority for large utilities so we’ve grown our skilled workforce to meet engineering demands as the program expands, shaping program standards and processes and adding territories of other large utilities. This effort includes conducting field surveys to collect photographs, asset information, and field notes collected in GIS software to be used by designers to develop CAD drawings of the field plans to improve circuit reliability. CHA’s ongoing efforts include assessing assigned circuits to identify existing issues and conditions, merging distribution planning efforts with hardening recommendations, and optimizing designs for long-term improvements within budget.