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Real-Time Power Outage Notification

To a great extent, electric utilities today still rely on their customers to notify their Customer Service group, when they experience an electrical outage. Many companies have installed elaborate outage management systems that utilize these geo-based phone notifications from their customers to seed outage gathering algorithms. While fairly effective, these systems still rely on the surprisingly unsophisticated and somewhat unreliable manual customer call-in process. The final step in this overall process improvement is obviously to reduce the reliance on customer notification and instead utilize the utilities’ own automation systems to provide outage notification.

PowerOneData’s AMS-9000 Advanced Metering System enables this critical final step by supplying point-by-point power notification and restoration information on a near-real-time basis. This stands in stark contrast with many competitor offerings that are either incapable of outage detection or the more involved outage notification.

PowerOneData’s AMS-9000 system detects time stamps and reports the loss of system voltage at individual metering endpoints through its powerful two-way communications capability. Notification occurs typically within minutes and time-stamped records of all such events, greatly enhances utility reliability indices.

As AMS-9000 meters experience loss of line voltage, and following a pre-defined duration, they notify their cluster’s Hub meter of the situation. The Hub immediately attempts a check of each currently assigned Client meter and develops a list of responding meters. A session is concurrently established with the Host-Suite to pass this information to any head-end outage application.