Storms can cause widespread outages by damaging exposed overhead medium voltage (MV) distribution lines. Accurate prediction of their impact on the grid is crucial to pre-mobilise repair crews and equipment and ensure the most effective response. The Windy Smart Grid tool developed by Enedis applies a probabilistic model calibrated over historical weather and incident data to predict the outage probability of each MV feeder during a storm and activate an alarm in anticipation of a high number of outages.
Windy Smart Grid entered into full operation in 2023 in all regional distribution control centres of Enedis and helped them prepare for several storms, saving several hours in service restoration. Following the success of the innovation, Enedis is currently evaluating a similar approach to forecast grid damage caused by high-temperature events.
