A BUYING GUIDE FOR UTILITIES
Conquering Today’s Power Utility Challenges with Weather Services & Alert Solutions
At AEM, our goal is to empower organizations to survive – and thrive – in the face of escalating environmental risks. When it comes to energy utilities, that means helping the industry maximize operational continuity and safety, even as changing weather patterns make providing continuous service in a satisfying, profitable manner more difficult than ever.
We’re extremely proud to have established a reputation as a go-to advisor and support system for future-facing energy providers who realize profits and reputation will be made or lost in the near future based on daily decisions around the weather.
This guide is designed to illustrate how we help electric utilities increase weather readiness by aligning solutions from our portfolio of brands with growing daily challenges.
Challenge 1
Weather Forecasting & Intelligence
Understanding the challenge:
DEMAND GENERATION & SERVICE DELIVERY
Weather has evolved into the day-to-day challenge for many utilities across the U.S. and the world. In many places, the old demand generation and outage prediction models are broken by evolving weather patterns and no longer provide the best possible business intelligence. Better forecasting and modeling based on a wider historic data set is required to protect profits and customer satisfaction.
SEVERE WEATHER EVENT RESILIENCE
Major weather events like thunderstorms, winter storms, tropical storms, and floods can disrupt service delivery, threaten infrastructure, and endanger field service workers. A provider’s ability to accurately predict the impact of a major weather event and provide relevant intelligence to support a swift and effective recovery is increasingly important as extreme weather events become more common.
What a solution looks like:
- Your meteorologists and ops team get historic data for modeling.
- Your generation team optimizes supply to anticipate demand.
- You contact your meteorologist on demand as needed.
- Your services professional helps you plan for major weather events.
- You keep the public & employees safer while maximizing continuity.
How AEM does it:
AEM’s Meteorological Services Team provides 24/7 support to public and private customers across the U.S. and the world. Click the images below to see how.
The ease of working with AEM was very attractive to us… Getting our network up and operational was a very quick process... The way that AEM is working to add additional technologies to their camera network and always looking to bring more things to the table is key for us.
Pam Feuerstein,
COO | CORE Electric Cooperative
Challenge 2
Field Crew Coordination
Understanding the challenge:
TRANSLATING DATA INTO ACTION
With the right weather intelligence and forecasting solution in place, you’ll know what weather is headed your way, but that information is useless if you can’t get it to the people for whom it is most relevant. In order to maximize field service crews’ impact, response time, and ability to support customers, utilities need a strategy to get weather alerts in employees’ hands at the right moment.
CREATING RELIABLE, REPEATABLE, CLEAR PROTOCOLS
Again, even the best data has minimal impact when people don’t know what to do with it. For weather-responsive management to work, alerts on incoming conditions need to reach employees in a clear, highly digestible way tied to protocols and operating procedures from your safety plan. The less people need to think, the faster they can get to safety as needed and resume work when possible.
What a solution looks like:
- You establish alerting limits for lightning proximity, wind speed, etc.
- On-site and network-based monitoring and forecasts track incoming weather.
- Employees get weather alerts via text message at the right moment.
- Visible strobes and audible horns make alerts unmissable.
- Employees get an "all clear" message when it's safe to work.
How AEM does it:
AEM’s weather maps and software transform real-time data into a clear, actionable narrative that makes safety and operational continuity as simple as establishing limits and letting weather tech do the communication for you. Click the images below to see how.
Challenge 3
Infrastructure Protection
Understanding the challenge:
THE GRID IS UNDER ATTACK FROM THE WEATHER
Any utility infrastructure created more than five years ago is not designed for today’s (or especially tomorrow’s) weather and climate realities. Wind speeds and temperatures are higher. Winter storms are icier and longer in many places. In order to protect equipment and keep the grid running in an efficient manner, providers will need to think more than ever about weather resilience.
INCREASING WEATHER IMPACT AWARENESS
To guard grid infrastructure as effectively as possible, all utilities need to increase their understanding of how the weather at ground level actually translates into strain on generation, transmission, and delivery equipment and, subsequently, outages. That means tracking interplay between weather and key equipment to continuously improve awareness of the service area and enable better maintenance.
What a solution looks like...
Access the complete Utilities buying guide.
Learn how AEM can transform your utilities operations.
Schedule your Free Consultation