Winter is Coming… Here’s How to Shore Up Infrastructure and Prepare for Climate Change Chaos

Storm risk is real. After a summer of thunderstorms, high winds, and devastating tropical storms around the United States, winter weather poses a real and immediate threat to utility companies and the customers they serve. Getting ahead of ice and heavy snow means minimizing outages and reducing their duration. Powered by data, you can get your customers back up and running faster, with fewer interruptions and greater reliability.

In a climate as unpredictable as it’s been in 2022, how can you make informed, insights-driven decisions during winter 2023? With Storm Risk Analytics.

 

What is Storm Risk Analytics?

Storm Risk Analytics provides real-time risk intelligence and predictive data that empowers the utility industry to make informed decisions based on the weather that is coming — and where and when that weather will hit. This is the intelligence that aligns your preparations with your incident command response escalation levels. Even more impactfully, it reduces the longevity of any outages that do occur. Storm Risk Analytics enables companies like yours to know where the vulnerabilities are before dangerous weather strikes. Further, it gets the right people and the right equipment to the right places to restore service faster.

Storm Impact Analytics is the data-driven solution that protects you from over-deploying resources to locations less likely to be affected by outages and under-anticipating the impact in areas hit hardest.

 

How data empowers utility providers

The right data enables corporations to identify potential times and locations where business continuity disruptions are likely to occur. This information helps corporations develop actionable contingency plans, minimize business impacts, and optimize safety and financial performance.

Further, usable data like regionally-optimized customer impact and weather risk models, automated forecast updates, and self-serve event creation to integrate expert knowledge and apply best practices to weather risks all bolster use cases across stakeholders, including management and regulators.

Use cases include pushing for investment in hardening infrastructure. To protect operations and deliver on promises to customers, utilities must shore up infrastructure. Given the requisite time and cost commitment of such projects, the more precise, relevant, and reliable the information, the better for getting those projects funded and mobilized.

Storm Risk Analytics brings the right intelligence to infrastructure decision-making from location to type to timing. Now is the time to start making the decisions that shore up infrastructure and prevent costly and dangerous surprises this winter.

 

Preparation as a competitive advantage

Climate change and unprecedented weather that worsens year over year make the ability to predict and respond to incoming weather events a key competitive advantage for electric and telecommunications utilities across the country and around the world.

Utilities are struggling with the ways climate change is causing increasingly severe events in both summer and winter, often bringing unfamiliar conditions or new extremes. This makes Storm Risk Analytics valuable as it provides a standard and consistent approach to decision-making and benchmarks the impacts of any weather event, helping utilities know how to best prepare and respond.

The importance of preparation for utility companies cannot be understated. And the more granular the information, the better prepared an operation is to develop proactive responses.

 

Targeted weather prediction smooths path with regulators and shareholders

The ability to tailor Storm Risk Analytics to an individual utility’s operating region not only drives more targeted decisions but also provides a record of truth to justify pre-event decision-making with its shareholders and regulators.

And because it is a comprehensive resource, it eliminates the need to dig into historic event logs or examine multiple — and sometimes conflicting — forecasts from different vendors to make a judgment call on storm declaration and incident command response levels. Storm Risk Analytics provides all the information needed to make accurate, confident decisions, so utilities can move quickly and proactively, protecting customers and staff, reducing service disruptions, and mitigating disruption impact. This also saves customers, stakeholders, and the organization time and money.

 

 

Machine learning guides incident command response

Making all that possible starts with identifying and mitigating risk. Using Storm Risk Analytics to identify risk provides actionable guidance on the incident command escalation level needed for every operations center. It gives you the option to reallocate and source additional restoration crews and materials as needed, ahead of the event — to the right place, at the right time.

 

 

Weather conditions that continue to defy expectations leave electric utilities trying to plan for weather impacts by comparing forecasted wind speeds with those observed in past events to estimate the resources required for response. To be effective — and to prevent sending too many resources where they are not needed, and not enough where they are — command escalation levels need to be set by robust, dynamic data. Storm Risk Analytics uses machine learning to deliver enhanced outage event predictions. Those event predictions harness the power of more than seven years of historic outage and weather data for service regions to provide clear guidance on the location and severity of expected system impacts.

This leads to shorter duration outages and improved SAIDI scores. Additionally, it yields cost savings in utilization of contracted restoration crews, elimination of regulatory performance penalties, and safe, satisfied customers.

 

Behind the scenes with Storm Risk Analytics

A first-of-its-kind solution, Storm Risk Analytics empowers electric utilities, and other weather-sensitive businesses and organizations, to make confident, data-driven incident command and storm event preparations — without the cost and inefficiencies of providing sensitive corporate data and customizing models.

The application mobilizes more than seven years of electric customers impacted data, coupled with innovative weather and machine learning models that accurately predict weather and its impact on operations up to seven days in the future. Storm Risk Analytics readies operations for upcoming weather events with information about storm event time windows, severity, and expected impact on specific locations.

Automated notification and communication enable you to do more with your data — and your data to do more for you, your customers, and your stakeholders. These alerts quickly inform you of weather risks within those seven-day time horizons, and storm event creation emails give you the ability to communicate forecasted risks across your organization clearly and efficiently.

 

More than a business case

We have made the business case for infrastructure hardening and response initiative execution powered by Storm Risk Analytics. This is important. Just as climate change threatens our grid stability and predictability, economic forces affect how we make micro and macro decisions that impact our businesses, our customers, and our families. Knowing there is a solution that makes it easier to make safe, smart, impactful investments based on informed decisions, and being able to allocate resources appropriately for the good of our organizations and the customers we serve, is more significant than any of the individual features of the Storm Risk Analytics solution.

Learn more about how you can mitigate risk, serve your customers, and get more from your technology and resource investments with Storm Risk Analytics.