Energy and utility companies can feel powerless in the face of power outages. In addition to feeling the brunt of customer complaints and an onslaught of inquiries, they also face significant impact to operations, including disruption to critical services and the cascading effects of interruptions to essential systems like pumps for water distribution and wastewater treatment.
The costs are real and relentless. In fact, The Uptime Institute estimates that more than two-thirds of outages cost more than $100,000.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that advancements in technology have made it easier than ever for those in the energy and utility industry to manage power outages with infrastructure monitoring tools, including power outage monitoring software.
Read on. Then power up.
According to monitoring powerhouse Splunk, utility and energy infrastructure monitoring includes the observation, identification, categorization, and analysis of events that affect infrastructure based on performance, uptime, network functionality, capacity, and more.
Outage monitoring tools are especially important for energy and utility companies, as they create resilience via disruption mitigation and avoidance via outage detection, analysis, crew management, and predictive analytics to efficiently respond to power outages across grids.
Features of top systems include:
This tool connects to sensors, PLCs, and edge devices to provide real-time data from power plants, substations, and grid assets, with native control room SCADA and DCS systems integration, for seamless data flow and a centralized view of infrastructure performance.
With the Optimate Integrator for PI System to Splunk, users can run Splunk searches and run PI expressions to leverage Splunk reporting, alerting, dashboarding, and ML.
Ability to predict wear on components to extend asset lifespans.
The PI System excels at collecting and managing real-time data from sensors and grid equipment with a unified view of grid performance. During outages, PI’s data helps operators find the exact location and cause to speed restoration. It analyzes historical trends and suggests infrastructure upgrades.
The Tennessee Valley Authority uses OSIsoft PI System to monitor hydroelectric plant, nuclear facility, and transmission network performance. Because data is centralized in real-time across energy assets, the TVA is able detect anomalies before they lead to failures. Case in point: the TVA was able to reroute power and prevent widespread blackouts during a winter storm.
This comprehensive IoT-enabled platform provides real-time monitoring, automation, and control for power distribution.
None at this time.
Early fault detection and automatic rerouting of power to minimize service disruption.
EcoStruxure’s self-healing grid technology automates grid reconfiguration, isolating the affected area and rerouting power to unaffected sections to minimize service disruption. Remote SCADA access and distributed automation principles empowers operators to act independently, while ensuring continued operation even if cloud connectivity is lost.
Enel, one of the largest electric utilities in Europe, has garnered a 30% improvement in service reliability and faster restoration times, thanks to EcoStruxure’s automated fault detection and grid reconfiguration.
Powered by AI and IoT, Maximo maximizes utility asset management to help utilities predict equipment failures, schedule preventive maintenance, and reduce unplanned outages.
The SMS Spunk App for Maximo allows Splunk to ingest and analyze Maximo business object data and automate Maximo work orders based on industrial equipment sensor readings.
Empowers proactive maintenance to reduce downtime and improve overall grid reliability.
Maximo automates and coordinates response efforts, including automated parts and crew scheduling, prioritizing based on asset criticality and customer impact.
IBM Maximo serves National Grid UK, helping the utility manage and maintain its power distribution assets. Maximo’s IoT-driven maintenance planning has reduced equipment failures by 20%, due in part to the mobile app’s ability to provide field technicians with real-time asset data and repair logs.
If this name is familiar, there’s a reason. Splunk is widely used by utilities to track grid performance, monitor critical assets, and detect anomalies. By connecting to utility infrastructure through APIs, direct data ingestion from SCADA systems, IoT sensors, and machine logs, as well as integrating with existing grid management software, GIS, and security platforms, Splunk provides real-time insights that help utilities prevent failures and optimize infrastructure.
Integrates historical data to identify recurring fault patterns.
Splunk correlates real-time events across substations, transformers, and line sensors to identify outage points, using dashboards and GIS maps to show affected areas and employing ML to classify outages. Splunk also automates alerts to crews and triggers incident workflows.
Southern California Edison uses Splunk’s ML to help the utility predict failures and detect abnormalities in real time. This has enabled SCE to lower the risk of equipment-related ignitions and unplanned outages.
Arcus Data is trusted worldwide for enterprise-class managed services and analytics. Arcus offers special expertise to the utility and energy industry with predictive analytics and infrastructure monitoring and outage management.
As an award-winning, Elite Tier Splunk Partner, Arcus leverages hundreds of Splunk use cases, including deployments, cloud migrations, scalability, and automations to help utilities and energy companies improve performance and help Splunk…splunk better.
Arcus forecasts failures and enhances grid reliability while integrating with existing infrastructure to offer deep insights into equipment performance and operational risk–all without having to build or manage your own infrastructure.
The Arcus outage management system consolidates data sources, monitoring, and alerting to increase visibility into key outage-related datasets, thus improving outage response, enabling utilities and energy companies to achieve significant gains in SLAs, and optimizing better internal and external communication. Along with flexible reporting and alerts, Arcus helps those in the energy and utility sector proactively resolve outages and stay ahead of compliance regulations.
Arcus partnered with a large United States utility company, using machine learning models to analyze data from weather patterns, equipment performance, and historical outages to proactively address weak points in infrastructure, improve grid reliability, and forecast transformer failures three months in advance. This enabled the utility to reduce downtime by 25%.
Arcus is committed to helping those in the utility and energy sector power insights, efficiency, compliance, and infrastructure and outage management and prevention. Arcus provides products and services that improve operational technology, cybersecurity, analytics, monitoring, and the leverage of metadata, and is committed to providing exceptional value to customers.
This dedication is evidenced by Arcus’ Data Hackathon, an off-site designed to help energy and utility companies solve real-world problems, as well as the SEUWG (Splunk Energy & Utilities Working Group), a forum for an exchange of ideas, content, and assistance.
You can join the LinkedIn Group here and receive access to the exclusive SEUWG portal.
When you’re ready to see how Arcus can help you manage and prevent outages, reach out to us here.