Smart meters provide immense value to utility companies – especially during hurricane season! Specifically when combined with an Outage Management System (OMS), utility companies and the communities they serve will enjoy three major benefits:

  1. Increased Accuracy 

In many single outage instances, when customers call in to report “no light,” it turns out that the outage is happening at the individual meter level, not on the utility companies end. In instances of multiple outages, typically from storms, it becomes more difficult to rely on customer phone calls and doing so would result in a slow restoration time. With Smart Meters and OMS, utility companies have the advantage of using predictive analytics to make quicker, more accurate decisions when dispatching crews.

  1. Decreased Costs

When crews are dispatched accurately and less frequently, a cost-savings occurs. Enhanced knowledge of the power grid a utility company is servicing leads to a decrease in guess and check work. In communities without smart meters, crews are quite often dispatched to locations where power has already been restored.

  1. Restoration Verification

Aside from pinpointing locations where power is down, it’s just as important to verify that power has been restored – especially in the case of a destructive storm. The ability to do so from a far, by tapping into smart meter software, increases customer satisfaction, decreases the need to dispatch vehicles to various sites and makes for a more efficient restoration process overall.

Smart meters, without a doubt, help to revolutionize the way utility companies handle outages (and minimize outages) in the communities they serve. For more on power monitoring solutions and smart grids for commercial use, visit us at www.electroind.com.