Utility Honored for Technology Innovation to Predict and Prevent Power Outages

Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) has been awarded the prestigious AEIC Achievement Award from the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies (AEIC) for a technology breakthrough in anticipating intermittent power failures and, in turn, improving the company’s ability to take preventative action.

FPL’s “The Powerful Predictors” team received the esteemed award for developing a complex algorithm to detect distinct patterns in residential smart meters, allowing it to predict individual customer outages days in advance and avoid power loss.

“At FPL, we are always working on new and innovative ways to provide our customers with the best possible service and power grid reliability,” said Manny Miranda, senior vice president of power delivery for FPL. “Because of our smart meter technology and a very talented team, we have developed a system that allows us to foresee where outages are most likely to occur up to three days in advance, and then pre-emptively make repairs before an outage takes place, ultimately benefiting our customers.”

FPL’s proactive ticket notification system uses smart grid data to predict when a customer is about to experience an outage, enabling crews to deploy to an affected area. In many cases, this allows crews to resolve the issue before a customer is even aware he or she had a problem. In 2016, through the prediction and repair of intermittent power outages, FPL avoided more than 5,000 single customer outages. For customers who did experience power loss, the award-winning technology decreased the average interruption time by approximately 40 minutes, and achieved 70 percent cost savings because of reduced travel time and increased repair efficiency for crews.

“FPL’s 4.9 million smart meters are an important piece of our strategy for a more efficient energy grid,” said Dave Herlong, director of smart grid & innovation for FPL. “They help us identify outages and diagnose their cause, as well as restore power much faster. Smart meters also provide customers with important information about their energy use, which can be used to save money on monthly bills.”