The Importance of Grid Reliability

While we enjoyed balmy weather at DistribuTECH 2019 in New Orleans this week, the recent polar vortex much of the country experienced last week increased the visibility into the importance of grid reliability and how outage detection can help quickly restore customers’ power and improve safety by keeping their homes warm during frigid temperatures.

On Jan. 9, Itron announced our new Outage Analysis service. Provided as a fully managed service, the new offering provides utilities with an outage detection and notification outcome through performance-based contracts that require no upfront expense or startup fees. Using the award-winning managed services solution that Itron installed for Otter Tail Power Company as a model for the solution, this new outcomes offering will give utilities increased outage visibility into select endpoints and the ability to view voltage and reliability data. As a result, utilities can leverage insights more efficiently to inform consumers of outages and deploy assets to improve outage management efficiency.

Itron’s Outage Analysis provides near real-time outage intelligence in a high-availability and scalable, fully managed service experience, running on the cloud-based Microsoft Azure platform. Outage Analysis provides a pathway for utilities that may not be ready or have the capital to implement a full OMS or AMI system, yet need to deliver improved reliability and cost-savings outcomes to their stakeholders.

Hopefully you were able to stop by booth #10115 to learn more about our Outage Analysis offering. If not, be sure to check us out on Itron.com.