Advanced Metering Infrastructure and Outage Management
- Reducing OK on arrivals
- Know faster when there is an outage
- Identify nested outages easier
- Reduce unrequested callbacks
Reduce OK on arrivals: Customers call to report their power is out. In the 20th century technology, utilities had to send a crew to the customer's site to confirm an outage. If power reached all the way to the meter and the crew finds the power delivery is OK upon their arrival, the crew was dispatched needlessly. Assigning crews to these jobs is a loss of efficiency. Today, a simple ping after a customer call confirms whether the meter is live and receiving power at the home. When the ping is successful, calling customers can be informed the problem is in the premises and not the delivery of the power. The customer can be advised to check inside or that dispatching a crew risks a charge if no problem is found.
Know faster when there is an outage: The sooner an outage is known, the faster it can be restored. When a smart meter goes off line, it sends a "Last Gasp" message that informs of a potential outage. When this happens, it isn't necessary to wait for a customer's call. The Last Gasp is an early warning that there may be a problem. Once the Last Gasp is received, further pinging verifies the outage. With Last Gasps and pings, action to restore power can happen immediately.
Identify nested outages easier: When repairs happen, it is not known if everyone affected by on outage has power back. A 2nd nested outage may still be underneath the original restoration. Power Up messages from the meters combined with pings are used to confirm that a customer has power restored. When meters fail to respond to the pings, the nested outage is found. The crew can continue on to assess and restore the remaining outage before being released to go somewhere else.
Reduce unrequested callbacks: Making callbacks is a time consuming and expensive way to confirm restorations. In some cases, callbacks are performed by customer request. These callbacks must still be made. However, if there was no request from the customer to get a callback, it is quicker and less expensive to use pings to confirm a restoration. Pinging does not require a customer to be home to respond. Pinging is quick to send the message out and receive the message back. Pinging does not fill the IVR lines with traffic, like callbacks could.
Have you encountered other benefits to AMI use? What are your best practices?
