Detect & Verify Outages

Challenge

Delivering a constant, reliable supply of electricity to customers is the top priority. When the power goes out, it’s important to locate the source of the outage as quickly as possible and dispatch field service crews to restore service. For residential customers, an outage could be a minor inconvenience or a life-threatening situation for a home care patient. For C&I customers, an outage could mean lost business, lost inventory and lost productivity. For the utility, an outage can result in lost revenue and punitive measures under performance-based rate-making packages and public relations problems. Utilities that can reduce the frequency of outages, as well as improve response and restore times for outages that do occur, can benefit from the increased customer service satisfaction that gets rewarded by regulators.

Solution

Itron's Fixed Network collection technologies provide immediate outage detection, outage location information and restoration notification so that utilities can more effectively manage their outage response. The interval meter data collected by a fixed network can also be used with Itron’s suite of distribution system optimization and design tools to improve system reliability and reduce the overall number of outages.

Benefits

Detects outages automatically

Provides location information for smarter dispatching

Decreases outage response times

Improves customer service response during outages

Increases customer satisfaction

Decreased revenue losses