Reliability in Action: Littleton’s Hendrix ACS Success Story

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

As a professional involved in electricity delivery, the T&D World Podcast and tdworld.com is your definitive source for breaking news, industry updates, and more. We've got you covered from transmission to distribution and everything that affects the power grid. And now, on to today's episode.

Nikki Chandler (0:20)

Welcome to the T&D World Live Podcast. I'm Nikki Chandler, Editorial Director at T&D World here.

And today, we're talking about electric system reliability and some of the practical challenges utilities face when they're trying to reduce outages and strengthen their overhead distribution systems, particularly in areas where trees, weather, and other challenging conditions can make that reliability a bit more difficult. Our conversation today is sponsored by Marmon Utility, and I'm joined by Ted Gardner, Applications Engineer with Marmon Utility, and David Ketchner, Assistant General Manager at Littleton Electric Light & Water Department in Littleton, Massachusetts. We're going to talk a little bit about Littleton's experience with Hendrix Aerial Cable Systems, what led the utility to consider this approach and what they've learned along the way. But before we get into that, Ted and David, I'd like to have you both tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you do there. So Ted, I'm going to start off with you, if you don't mind introducing yourself.

Ted Gardner (1:29)

Okay. Thank you. Again, my name is Ted Gardner. I'm an application engineer for Marmon Utility.

I primarily work with our overhead solutions group, which encompasses aerial spacer cable, our tree wire products, as well as our molded products. I've been with Hendrix a little over 15 years. Started out on the sales side and have moved over into the engineering space, really kind of supporting our field sales folks from a technical perspective, and also doing a little project management work along the way.

Nikki Chandler (2:05)

Okay. Thank you so much. David, tell us a little bit about yourself.

David Ketchen (2:09)

Yeah. Thanks, Nikki. Yeah. Again, David Ketchen. I'm the assistant general manager at the Littleton Electric Light & Water Departments. I've been here for just about 11 years now.

Now, I sort of oversee operations on both the electric and the water and wastewater utilities. And I ended up starting with the utility, like I said, about 11 years ago as an electrical engineer. So I really came up on the electric side and was involved in a lot of the design and daily operation decisions going into running an electric utility. And now being on the management side, I see it from a different different standpoint now, just really focusing on reliability and making sure things that we do to the system are feasible.

Nikki Chandler (2:59)

A great background for that.

So, yeah, David, I want to start with you first and kind of want to set the stage for this initiative that Littleton went through. Take us back to the beginning. What was happening on your system that made reliability such a priority?

David Ketchen (3:16)

Yeah, so we were not lucky, but we made some good decisions after a bad exposure in our system. So back in December 2008, there was a really bad ice storm that had impact to the Northeast that had disrupted power to hundreds of thousands of people across New England and New York, and we were one of the heavier areas impacted by this ice. So this rain storm came in, we got about four inches of rain in 24 hours. And then there was this flash freezing process that started to happen directly after that. And it comes with an inch of ice on trees and wires and everything that comes with that. And so trees were falling, wires were sagging, and a lot of our system at the time was comprised of an open wire construction, which was just mostly uncovered wire kind of spread out across cross arms throughout our system. It really came into play. So at our department, we actually serve two towns. So we're a small to medium public power utility. We were founded just over 100 years ago. We serve about 8,000 customers in the towns of Littleton and Boxborough. In the town of Littleton before this event, over the course of 20 to 30 years, we had been installing Hendrick Spacer cable slowly but surely in our system in that area.

We had not really made it a priority to continue that effort into Boxborough and throughout the parts of Littleton that hadn't been touched. That really came into play during this storm because we had sections of Littleton and Boxborough that were hit by the same impactful ice and tree damage and everything like that. The customers in Littleton were on within a day and the customers in Boxborough were without power for five to six days.