Highland + TRUGrid™ Analytics

Proactive reliability in a community built on high standards

The City of Highland, Illinois deployed Tantalus TRUGrid™ Reliability and TRUGrid™ Transformer to gain near-real-time visibility into its distribution grid. With that visibility, the utility directed maintenance resources where the data said they mattered most, detected developing equipment hazards before they caused failures, and replaced manual reliability estimates with exact, automated tracking.

Background

The City of Highland, Illinois is nearly self-sufficient by design. With its own water treatment, water reclamation, and partial power generation infrastructure, the community has built its identity around independence and high performance. Residents hold the utility to an equally high standard: reliable service delivered at the best possible value, consistently and continuously.

It is a standard that Dan Cook, Highland’s Director of Light and Power, has spent nearly two decades working to meet. Deliberate, well-grounded investments over that period have cut the utility’s outage frequency roughly in half. The decision to adopt TRUGrid Analytics follows that same track record; a calculated investment in better tools to continue delivering the reliability and service the community has always expected and has always received.

The Challenge

The shift to AMI resolved one operational problem while quietly creating another. Without technicians visiting meters in the field, the incidental visual inspections that had historically caught corroded meter bases, fraying wires, and leaking transformers happened far less often. Equipment conditions that a meter reader might once have spotted on a routine visit could now go undetected until it was far too late.

The utility needed a different kind of grid visibility; near-real-time awareness of what the grid itself was experiencing. The grid could feel issues like where power quality was degrading, which assets were experiencing increasing stress, and where the earliest indicators of equipment failure were. If only the grid could speak to its operators. Without that visibility, a limited maintenance budget could only be spread so thin, reliability figures depended on linemen’s estimates, and the problems developing quietly across the system stayed quiet, until they didn’t.

The Solution

Cook pursued grant funding for the TRUGrid Automation platform. When that grant was not awarded, Cook brought the investment proposal directly to the city council, putting his nearly two-decade track record on the line to secure it. The case was straightforward: grid visibility would reveal where maintenance was most urgently needed, reduce the blinks and outages residents noticed, and replace estimated reliability reporting with precise, measured figures. TRUGrid Reliability draws on power quality data from across the distribution system to surface early indicators of failing assets.

By monitoring blink patterns and power quality signals, the platform reveals where equipment is beginning to show signs of stress, enabling crews to investigate and intervene before those assets fail. Using this information alongside their own operational knowledge of the system, the utility identified which circuits and corridors needed the most attention and concentrated tree-trimming and other maintenance resources in the areas generating the most active disturbances.

The platform also automates reliability tracking at the meter level, recording outage start and end times and customer impact counts, without relying on field estimates, and exports that data to meet compliance reporting requirements for a state-level grid resiliency grant program.

The Results: Reactive to Proactive

With TRUGrid Reliability and TRUGrid Transformer in operation, the utility moved from a reactive maintenance posture to a proactive one across several dimensions simultaneously.

The most immediate demonstration of the platform’s value came through TRUGrid Reliability’s detection of anomalous power quality signals in the system. When crews went to investigate the blink patterns flagged by the analytics, they discovered meter bases at two separate locations had corroded to the point of shorting out and generating heat. Left unaddressed, conditions like these create escalating risk: sustained corrosion and electrical shorts in a meter base produce persistent heat buildup and sparking, with electrical fire among the most serious potential outcomes. By detecting those symptoms in the data and following them to their source in the field, the utility made targeted repairs at both locations before either reached a point of failure.

Looking Forward: New Sight, New Insights

The utility now has the ability to identify hazardous conditions at multiple specific points across the grid and resolve them before any one of those points fails. It’s a fundamental shift in how to manage equipment risk.

Tree trimming, historically one of the most effective reliability tools available to a distribution utility, is now guided by the data, along with the ongoing maintenance of other grid assets. Rather than spreading a limited budget based on experience alone, the utility identifies the circuits generating the most power quality anomalies and concentrates crews in the highest-impact areas ahead of the next weather event rather than responding after it.

Reliability tracking has undergone a parallel transformation. Where reliability metrics, SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI, were previously compiled from hand-estimated field reports, TRUGrid now records outage timing and customer impact automatically at the meter level. The numbers are no longer approximations. That precision supports internal benchmarking and prepares the utility to document reliability performance for state funding.