Itron, a provider of smart metering solutions for energy and water industry, announced partnership with Otter Tail Power Company, an investor-owned utility that provides electricity to customers in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, to improvise its electric grid.
The utility will utilize Itron Total Outcomes, a complete managed services offering using Itron technology and analytics to deliver needed outcomes.
The smart metering solution will help Otter Tail Power Company deliver greater awareness of service interruptions across its territory to improve reliability.
Itron will manage reliability analytics on behalf of the utility, using information from Itron’s OpenWay smart grid solution with cellular communications. Itron will then notify operators when interruptions occur as well as pinpoint the circuits, phases and number of customers involved. This will empower the utility to proactively improve overall reliability, outage response and customer satisfaction.
Otter Tail Power Company will also perform historic outage analysis and measure restoration performance. This enables operators to identify poorly performing feeders and prioritize budget allocation for infrastructure improvements and maintenance.
“Otter Tail Power Company was looking to replace our aging interruption monitoring system with an Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI)-based offering that provides both historic and real-time outage analytics and voltage monitoring capabilities on a single platform,” said Rod Jensen, P.E., reliability engineer at Otter Tail Power Company.
With Itron, the utility will get advantage of the technology and a team of experts to quickly get the system up and running and provide results, Jensen added. “With Itron’s help, we will be able to improve reliability while determining where to place resources for vegetation management and infrastructure improvements.”
“Itron Total Outcomes for reliability provides functionality similar to a SCADA implementation, but at a fraction of startup and operational costs. The managed services approach frees up Otter Tail Power Company’s resources to focus on pressing operational activities rather than implementing and managing IT environments and AMI systems,” said Bruce Douglas, senior vice president and general manager of software and services at Itron.
Rajani Baburajan