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Power Outage Preparedness

Climate Change and COVID-19 are each causing changes in electricity demand and service availability. BC Hydro reported that climate change-caused storms that cause power outages have tripled since 2013. Wildfire numbers have also soared. 2020 brought Covid-19 and the drive to work from home. All of this has affected electrical delivery and increased the need for power outage preparedness.

By Ellen Koskinen-Dodgson

Ellen Koskinen-Dodgson is President and Managing Partner of TMC IT and Telecom Consulting Inc. She is an IT and Telecommunications Management Consultant, electrical engineer, author, speaker, media resource and Expert Witness.

More Outages

Climate change is blamed for the dramatic increase in the severity of storms and wildfires which cause power outages. Since 2013, when 300,000 British Columbia customers were affected annually, the number has grown to well over 1 million. This trend is true for all of Canada as well as the rest of the world. With predictions of progressively worse storms to come, these numbers will continue to increase.

Top Outage Causes

Trees – 33%

Bad weather – 21%

Equipment failure – 9%

Other (customer, vandals…) – 9%

Scheduled Maintenance – 5% Motor Vehicle Accidents – 5% Birds and Animals – 5%

Demand Changes

Added to the increasing frequency of outages, demand for electricity has also changed. First, the “addiction” to personal electronics has caused a dramatic shift in electricity consumption. We use our personal electronics for hours every day, then charge them at home. With COVID, a great many people are working from home so the suburbs now have a high demand for electricity. A power outage at your home location now has business implications.

Preparedness Planning

Regardless of how you decide to mitigate the risk of power outages for staff working from home, this is a new situation that needs to be addressed in your business continuity plan. When staff are working from the office, UPS and generator power backup make sense. When they work from home, the costs are usually not justified so a different approach is required.

I recommend that you answer the following questions and include the results in your BCP:

  1. Who are the people who are working from home, either full time or part time?
  2. Which of these people should have a mitigation plan for a local power outage? That is, who should be on-line at certain times or at all times?
  3. Do these people fall into two or more categories with different mitigation requirements for each? For example, office phone extension? cell-phone? Laptop VPN? Video connectivity?

Possible mitigation plans include:

When you’ve updated your BCP, remember to test it to confirm that it makes sense.

If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at .

This article was published in the March 2021 edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:8 Issue:2

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