Glossary
Power Dispatcher Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential power dispatcher terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key power dispatcher vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in power dispatcher training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Entity balancing supply and demand.
- Clearance
- Permission for crews to work on de-energized equipment.
- Contingency
- A possible outage event.
- EMS
- Energy management system.
- Feeder
- A distribution circuit.
- Frequency
- Grid cycles per second.
- Load
- Power demand.
- Load shed
- Cutting load to protect the grid.
- Lockout
- A circuit breaker that opened and stayed open.
- N-1
- Planning for one element failing.
- NERC
- North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
- Outage management system
- Tracks outages and crews.
- Recloser
- A device that tries to restore power automatically.
- SCADA
- Supervisory control and data acquisition.
- Switching order
- Step-by-step switching instructions.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Power Dispatcher practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Power Dispatcher training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.