VIDEO: Protecting Georgia’s power grid from widespread outages – Georgia Transmission
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VIDEO: Protecting Georgia’s power grid from widespread outages

With the flip of a switch, the lights come on in homes across Georgia. But what goes on behind the scenes to keep the lights on every day?

At Georgia Transmission, the System Control and Protection Team is critical to answering that question. While their work isn’t as visible to the community as building transmission lines or maintaining electric substations, their efforts keep the system humming reliably.

Working closely with the state’s electric membership cooperatives (EMCs), these skilled professionals monitor the power grid through daily analysis, testing, reporting and communication with all departments. This work behind the scenes helps prevent outages from occurring, allows for rapid response when outages do occur, and provides data on how best to correct issues in the future.

One way the system protection team accomplishes high reliability ratings and low outage times is by relying on automatic restoration capabilities. In times of equipment failure, these technologies operate without needing a human to start and get power flowing again through grid re-routing and redundancies. This significantly decreases widespread power outages and restoration times. In some cases, these automatic processes prevent maintenance technicians and linemen from having to navigate dangerous environments.

These tools, standards and learnings from experience lead to a well-designed power system that ultimately minimizes damages to the power grid. Beyond outage prevention, this reduces rebuilding and repair costs, and helps keep Georgia’s energy costs lower than the national average. These cost-efficiencies and savings are passed on to our EMCs enabling them to maintain the lowest cost of service for homes, schools, hospitals and businesses.

Reliable, affordable power is the name of the game at Georgia Transmission. And with the help of engineers in our system control and protection department, we’re able to provide dependable and efficient power quality to our local EMCs in communities across the state.