It is not news to anyone how record-breaking storms, Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma, caused torrential damage to the southeastern United States. Most estimates for Hurricane Harvey set the nation’s economy back by $100 billion or as high as $190 billion predicted by Dr. Joel Myers of AccuWeather. Each hurricane’s warpath leaves a trail of infrastructural debris, but the impact extends well beyond the economics. Families lost loved ones, homes leveled to nothing, and small businesses left without a market to serve. The quicker these local economies can get back to working order, the lesser the effects will linger on a national and global level as well. Communication networks need to be reinstated to realize this success.
Last year, Hurricane Matthew was dubbed a “1,000 year storm” given the amount of rainfall that accumulated into the lowlands of Baton Rouge. This year Harvey set the new record at 51.88 inches. Hurricane Irma saw over 6 million evacuees flee north to avoid the most severe damage at landfall in Florida. On the contrary, metropolitan Houston was not adequately prepared to perform such a large-scale movement in so little time. 32,000 people were initially displaced from their homes but most likely increased in the aftermath of the flooding.Hurricane Season has extended further than normal into the calendar year. The National Hurricane Center issued Tropical Storm Warnings and Watches for Hurricane Maria this weekend, which made landfall on coastal North Carolina Wednesday morning. Maria already laid devastation to Puerto Rico earler this week leaving millions of people without power and forcing officials to warn residents in person of the potential collapse of The Guajataca Dam. Natural disasters are bound to happen in varying forms across our country throughout the year. The real question is how do we respond amidst the crisis?
Network Recovery Optimization
As these recent storms have made painfully obvious, communications networks are essential for preparing for, managing through, and recovering from major weather events. To improve the collective response to these types of disasters communications networks need to be optimized. In many instances, the physical destruction of these sites is unavoidable. However, even for sites that escape catastrophic damage there is a high likelihood they will be useless in the face of widespread power outages.
The Federal Communications Commission reported over 7.5 million people were without cable and wireline services at its highest point during Hurricane Irma. About one week later on September 18th this figure had dropped significantly to around 1 million. Restoring communications to so many people so quickly most likely indicates that the majority of those 6.5 million people whose service was restored were initially disrupted by power outages within the network. Even more problematic, Hurricane Maria has left all of Puerto Rice offline with long timeline for grid recovery. This is a tremendous number of people who were left to rely with mobile service as their only option for connectivity. In the future, the severity of these outages can be limited.
Ubiquitous at broadband and mobile telecom sites are some combination of Valve Regulated Lead Acid (VRLA) backup batteries and generators to provide people connectivity during outages. Large, central office locations are equipped to handle up to an entire day’s worth of backup power. More remote cabinet and huts serving fewer subscribers may have approximately 8 hours of backup. When the batteries or generators at these sites are depleted, the network does down. Downtime is often unavoidable, but every hour or minute of time can severely hamper recovery operations, so minimizing network outages is extremely important. To do so, network operators need better visibility into their backup power assets to decide which sites need help when, where, and for how long.
Servato helps telcos, electrical cooperatives, municipalities, and other companies that rely on these Valve Regulated Lead Acid (VRLA) batteries by streamlining customer assistance during outages. The Platform-as-a-Service feeds battery health data points into an analytics platform to empower clients to better serve their end customers.
Figure 1: Here is an example of one of our customer’s view of our patented, Battery Fuel Gauge. The insight derived from a feature such as this can make or break getting customers back online in time to avoid further strife.
The Servato support team extends customer triage capabilities beyond human-machine interaction to human-human consultation. Battery experts are available for advice at all times, and during a potentially catastrophic outage like a hurricane the support team follows set protocol to communicate important information to customers and sort through the data accumulated in the platform. Without the visibility into backup power assets offered by Servato's platform, customers can spend weeks trying to understand how a site's batteries fard during an outage.
Moving Forward
Experienced telecommunications professionals know that when the power comes back on, they are not out of the woods, and as communications sites reboot, there is not much margin for error. The now restored grid pumps electricity back to power the necessary equipment to allow for data transmission. However, VRLA batteries are selfish. They attempt to collect as much charge as they can, prolonging the timeline it takes to get customers back online. Sites that are managed with patented Sentinel hardware units prevent breakers from automatically tripping, effectively making the batteries wait their turn.
Figure 2: Here is an example of a customer that experienced a larger scale outage. The sites that were fitted with Servato technology enabled them to efficiently use resources by bringing in extra generators at critical sites. Sites without Servato technology took months to triage what actually happened at those sites.
A constant risk during extended outages is reverse polarity. These degraded batteries try to accept charge but are at the point of no return. The result: a useless battery that should be replaced immediately. Servato mitigates these occurrences through response time reduction. In the aftermath, Servato then intelligently replinishes the now discharged batteries by allowing power to be drawn one string at a time, effectivley preventing any more immediate outages at that site. Our appliance actually controls the charge of these batteries which enables our team to provide our customers a plethora of other benefits such as extending battery life. As our customers work tirelessly to reconnect people back to the outside world, Servato is behind the scenes, also working for you. If you are interested in learning more about what we do and how we do it, find out here.
Victims of Hurricane Harvey, Irma, and Maria will be putting the pieces back together for months or potentially even years. Just ask the folks here in New Orleans where Servato Headquarters are: it is a process. We can all do more to alleviate the burdens these people are facing and will encounter on the road ahead. Servato fills a niche segment of this by committing to help communication networks provide outstanding service no matter what Mother Nature dishes out.
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About Servato
Headquartered in New Orleans, La., Servato is a leading provider of active battery management solutions to telecom, power, transportation, and solar companies. Servato’s solutions allow leading companies and infrastructure operators to reduce CapEx and OpEx by extending battery life, reducing maintenance costs and streamlining operations. Utilizing highly accurate data, proprietary algorithms, adaptive charging and cloud-based visualization software, Servato provides unprecedented insight and control over distributed DC power assets in industrial settings. To learn more, please visit: www.servatocorp.com
