Sharing real-time utility outage information

During natural and man-made emergencies, a major problem that emergency managers have to face is that, as Scott Sternfeld emphasized at the December Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Energy Summit at EPRI in Charlotte, there is no shared public regional, state or national outage map in the U.S.  Emergency management personnel have to go to each utility one by one. Utilities may not have an online outage map, which means calling them.  The Outage Data Initiative is designed to change that by enabling utilities to share outage information in real time.  At Distributech 2019 Zac Canders of DataCapable and Mike Webber of PSEG, the largest power utility in New Jersey announced that PSEG would be using this approach to share outage information gleaned from social media with Comcast, a large communications company.

DataCapable has been mining social media and generating map visualizations using a GIS for some time.  By combing social media channels for specific terms that would signal an outage, DataCapable can notify utility staff including the location of the tweets.  The data can be immediately forwarded to a utility and presented on a mapping dashboard, showing the time and location of the each tweet found.  Experience has shown that with this method utilities can detect outages faster that by relying on traditional methods.  In 2018 DataCapable detected over 181,000 conversations relating to outages on Twitter alone.  Data Capable has provided this service to utility customers such as Seattle City Light and also offers a service that shows outages worldwide. 

Now there is an initiative underway to make it possible to share outage information.  Called the Outage Data Initiative and initiated by the White House several years ago, it is designed to use an XML-based exchange standards to enable outage information gleaned from various sources including social media to be shared.  It is a voluntary open standard for sharing power outage and restoration information. I puts public data, such as that gleaned from social media, in structured easy-to-use and machine readable format.

it is being used by Seattle City Light and four other utilities in the Puget Sound area.  At Distributech 2019 Zac Canders of DataCapable and Mike Webber of PSEG, the largest power utility in New Jersey announced that PSEG would be using this approach to share outage information with Comcast, a large communications company.

The big benefit is that is provides a cost-efficient foundation for utilities, emergency responders, and other first responders to maintain a real-time common operating picture of utility outages and restoration during a disaster.

DataCapable has been mining social media and generating map visualizations using a GIS for some time.  By combing social media channels for specific terms that would signal an outage, DataCapable can notify utility staff including the location of the tweets.  The data can be immediately forwarded to a utility and presented on a mapping dashboard, showing the time and location of the each tweet found.  Experience has shown that with this method utilities can detect outages faster that by relying on traditional methods.  In 2018 DataCapable detected over 181,000 conversations relating to outages on Twitter alone.  Data Capable has provided this service to utility customers such as Seattle City Light and also offers a service that shows outages worldwide. 

Now there is an initiative underway to make it possible to share outage information.  Called the Outage Data Initiative and initiated by the White House several years ago, it is designed to use an XML-based exchange standards to enable outage information gleaned from various sources including social media to be shared.  It is a voluntary open standard for sharing power outage and restoration information. I puts public data, such as that gleaned from social media, in structured easy-to-use and machine readable format.

it is being used by Seattle City Light and four other utilities in the Puget Sound area.  At Distributech 2019 Zac Canders of DataCapable and Mike Webber of PSEG, the largest power utility in New Jersey announced that PSEG would be using this approach to share outage information with Comcast, a large communications company.

The big benefit is that is provides a cost-efficient foundation for utilities, emergency responders, and other first responders to maintain a real-time common operating picture of utility outages and restoration during a disaster.